RAUSCH ARCHIVES
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Whole church needs to rethink care of creation
By Fr. John S. Rausch
June 25, 2010
     The pictures of oil encrusted seagulls and cranes from the Gulf of Mexico glimpse only the surface of the death and destruction beneath the sea from the Deepwater Horizon/BP oil spill. Marine biologists fear for shrimp, oysters, crabs and untold varieties of fish endangered by the oil assault on the fragile ecosystem. The wetlands of Louisiana, a critical spawning ground for many species, present the next worry.
    Our addiction to oil keeps 7,000 oil platforms with 35,000 wells in the Gulf pumping crude to fuel our lifestyle of mobility and convenience. Yet, federal statistics reveal 172 spills of more than 2,100 gallons in the Gulf over the last decade. The effects of the Exxon Valdez spill still linger in the coastal habitat two decades later along the Alaskan shoreline.
    Our petroleum economy with its drilling, shipping, refining and burning oil is killing the planet locally with poisoned water and air and globally with accelerated climate change.
    While secular publications raise the issues of economic impact and legal liability, people of faith are reflecting on phrases like “common good,” “solidarity” and “care of creation.” The National Catholic Rural Life Conference (NCRLC) issued a statement encouraging people of faith to “ask for the wisdom to live in harmony with God’s plan and the courage to serve as stewards of God’s creation.”
    The statement implies our ordinary economic ways disregard God’s plan, especially when rural residents and the environment pay the price. (Disclosure: as a board member, I contributed to the statement.)
    Carelessly we ignored essential moral principles and consequently invited disaster.     All workers have a right to a safe workplace, yet we complacently allow workers to risk their lives to supply our energy from oil rigs and coal mines.
    Eleven men died in the Gulf rig explosion when only two weeks before 29 miners died in West Virginia’s Upper Big Branch Mine.
    The global economy demands productivity and profits, producing a corporate culture that occasions short-cuts and negligence. Regulations go unenforced and workers give their lives for a paycheck.
    Bishop Michael Bransfield of the Wheeling-Charleston diocese in his pastoral letter, “On My Holy Mountain,” asks: “Why is it safer to travel in space than to work in a West Virginia mine?”
    Extractive industries, now virtually controlled by giant corporations, operate for the enrichment of their stockholders. With a “least cost” incentive, frequently their methods reduce the rural area to a sacrificial resource colony.
    In the Gulf those whose livelihoods revolve around fishing or tourism just got sacrificed. In Appalachia community people whose lives and well-being depend on their well water and forests just lost to mountaintop removal.
    Care of creation comes directly from the Book of Genesis when God put humanity in the garden “to care and cultivate it” (Gen. 2:15). God’s garden, i.e. creation, needs attention because it possesses inherit worth. God found it “very good” (Gen. 1:31), and not just “useful.”
    The NCRLC statement recommends “we reflect about our own lifestyles that make undue demands on nature.” The U.S. with 4.5 percent of the world’s population uses 33 percent of all electricity generated each year and consumes 42 percent of gasoline refined. How many vacant parking lots are illumined all night, and how many computers are on “sleep mode” all weekend?
    “In these days of anxiety, we encourage people of faith to assemble for prayer and sharing,” says the NCRLC statement. The Gulf folks need one another’s support, but the whole church needs to ratchet up care of creation to a higher ranking in the Gospel of Life.
(Father John Rausch is a Glenmary priest who writes, teaches and organizes in Appalachia.)

‘It’s your money’
By Fr. John S. Rausch
May 14, 2010
     On Feb. 18, Joe Stack crashed his single-engine airplane into the IRS offices in Austin, Texas. He had struggled for years through several businesses as an independent software engineer, but after 9/11 his anger grew sulphuric as tax dollars went to government bailouts.
    From his last web posting, regarded as his suicide note, he raised issues over debt, taxes and his long-running feud with the IRS. His note read: “... as usual they (the government) left me to rot and die while they bailed out their rich, incompetent cronies with my money (emphasis added)!” The crash of his Piper Dakota killed Stack and an IRS manager while injuring 13 others.
    Joe Stack appeared frustrated because he could not control money. He was angry with the government, because it could take his money through taxes, but he was infuriated with corporations and the Catholic Church because they could keep their money through tax breaks.
    Beyond anger, however, Stack demonstrated a narrow understanding of earning money and a limited appreciation for the common good.
    In 1980 Ronald Reagan first posed the campaign question, “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” The question shifted the emphasis from the common good with concerns over better schools, less crime and public services to individuals’ buying power.
    Today on the campaign trail many politicians frequently rail against increasing taxes with, “It’s your money, not the government’s.” Ideas like this matter profoundly because they set up a dichotomy between individuals and the government rather than promoting a community of “We the people.”
    Warren Buffett, one of the wealthiest men in America, reflects an honest humility about his wealth when he says, “Society is responsible for a very significant percentage of what I’ve earned.”
    He stresses his ability to earn money directly benefits from the vast depth of knowledge and technology accumulated in the United States compared to other people in the world or previous generations of Americans.
    A child born in America, for example, receives a gratuitous head start compared to a child born in Haiti. Educational opportunities, health care, even sanitation represent gifts to the newborn, unearned by the child, but accumulated over generations for the common good.
    With these elementary gifts society pays an unearned “social wage” to every citizen in the country.
    Productivity gains over the years within a society also contribute considerably to a person’s earnings. Knowledge and technology built over the decades enhance the production capacity of each worker. A person today working the same number of hours as a person in 1870 will produce about 15 times as much economic output because of this “productivity bonus.”
    “It’s your money” makes a pithy bumper sticker, but economist William Baumol calculates “nearly 90 percent ... of current GDP (gross domestic product) was contributed by innovation carried out since 1870.”
    Buffett believes we in the U.S. overtax the poor and undertax the rich. He himself pays a lower percentage of income in payroll taxes than his receptionist. Yet, currently the top 1 percent of U.S. households earns more than the bottom 120 million Americans combined!
    The question remains: since so much of our earnings are attributable to what we inherit from our collective history, don’t solidarity and the common good demand a fairer distribution of wealth?
    The Gospel contrasts the ease of a camel passing through the eye of a needle with someone rich trying to enter the kingdom of God (Mt 19:24, and parallels). Perhaps the rich believe they earned it, it’s their money and they have only slight responsibility for the common good.
(Father John Rausch is a Glenmary priest who writes, teaches and organizes in Appalachia.)

Dialogue sets up way out of polarization
By Fr. John S. Rausch
April 16, 2010
     Wages stagnate. Unemployment hovers near 10 percent. Jobs trickle overseas. Wall Street gets bailed out. CEOs divide billions. Folks feel anger. The result: Tea Parties.
    Based on the Boston Tea Party, an historic icon of resistance to an imposed British tax, the Tea Party Movement in the United States claims over a thousand local chapters nationwide loosely affiliated to curb federal spending and shrink the size of government.
    Their vow to “take back America” involves an assortment of bottom line pocketbook issues that include checking federal spending, eliminating many federal agencies, defanging federal regulations, halting the tide of job-taking immigrants and letting free markets be ever freer.
    Some more ideological advocates want to abolish the income tax, dissolve the Federal Reserve and return to the gold standard. For Tea Party advocates taking back America involves pushing certain economic policies, and not necessarily restoring a stronger moral order.
    From the Southern Poverty Law Center comes a disturbing report, “Rage on the Right: The Year in Hate and Extremism.” The report says patriot groups espousing anti-government conspiracy theories have increased from 149 to 512 in the last year, and militia groups, the paramilitary arm of the Patriot Movement, grew from 42 to 127.
    These groups are fueled by the changing demographics of the country, the soaring debt, the troubled economy and charges President Obama promotes socialism or fascism. These economic, social and political issues offer great appeal to the Tea Party people.
    However, the report expressly states: “The ‘tea parties’ and similar groups that have sprung up in recent months cannot fairly be considered extremist groups, but they are shot through with rich veins of radical ideas, conspiracy theories and racism.”
    It is precisely extreme anger, paranoia and weapons that can combine for lethal results. In 1995 Timothy McVeigh’s frustration with the government and the fervency of the patriot movement led him to bomb the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City killing 168 people.
    The makeup of the Tea Party Movement for the most part appears mainstream. A recent poll sponsored by the National Review Institute found Tea Party participants to be 62 percent Republican, 25 percent Democrat and 10 percent independent.
Socio-economic indicators show 52 percent have college and graduate degrees, 57 percent are over 55 years old and 40 percent have incomes over $60,000. Religious affiliations show 60 percent Protestant, 28 percent Catholic and 2 percent Jewish with 69 percent attending religious services regularly.
    People of faith offer a significant perspective in addressing the anger and frustration with government and social conditions. Rather than throwing the tea overboard, we can brew it to form community. The way out of polarization is dialogue.
    The anger industry thrives by selling outrage. Personalities on cable TV, talk radio and Internet bloggers grow rich fanning fears and pandering to viewers with predisposed ideological viewpoints. Incivility nearly morphs to a contact sport with interrupting, talking-over and name calling. Avoiding dysfunctional anger means hitting the “off” button.
    Dialogue depends on responsible reading and viewing, not on a single news source diet. Religious teachings can move the conversation beyond the narrow economic measures of value – “Is it efficient? Is it profitable?” – that so dominate today’s American politics.
    The social teachings of the church can reintroduce moral considerations beyond individual self-interest: “Is this good? Will society benefit from this?”
    The anger of the Tea Party Movement and the paranoia of the Patriot Movement signal the alienation among us. The challenge remains to build a table big enough so all can talk and feel they belong.
(Father John Rausch is a Glenmary priest who writes, teaches and organizes in Appalachia.)

Turn jobs into good work
By Fr. John S. Rausch
March 5, 2010
     Don Peck, writing in The Atlantic (March 2010) paints a dismal picture about the future of employment in America. The national economy lost 10 million jobs since the beginning of this recession and many of those jobs will return only slowly.
     With population growth and new people entering the job market, Peck says our economy needs to add 1.5 million new jobs a year, roughly 125,000 per month, to avoid slipping back further.
     To grow from 10 percent unemployment to the 5 percent level we experienced before the recession would require creating 600,000 jobs per month, double the strong job creation rate of the mid-to-late 1990s, and even that would take about two years!
     Employment is shifting. The construction and finance industries, absent the housing bubble, will probably not regain their former share of the economy, and employment in the auto industry will offer fewer opportunities. Manufacturing jobs are continuing to move offshore, but now they are joined by outsourcing many white collar jobs.
     Economists see one bright spot about unemployment coming through innovation as some laid-off workers become entrepreneurs. A current Labor Department report identifies 10 occupations that will add the most jobs by 2016, and hence offer the most creative business opportunities.
     These occupations include: orderlies and nursing-home aides, personal and home-care aides, registered nurses, retail salespersons, customer service representatives, food preparation and serving workers, general office clerks, accounting clerks, janitors and postsecondary teachers.
     Notice these types of service jobs cannot move offshore. However, aside from RNs and postsecondary teachers, most of these jobs currently pay too little to meet a small family's basic needs unless they are unionized.
     While market resiliency will continue to produce more business opportunities, this will happen by requiring different skills. Many unemployed workers will need retraining, which means starting over in terms of seniority and earning level. Upward mobility for many seems stalled and high earnings for now appear more elusive.
     For people of faith high unemployment triggers a serious pastoral concern for workers and their families. The unemployed face genuine spiritual, psychological and social problems besides their economic ones.
     Research shows the unemployed suffer more alcoholism and drug abuse, more spouse and child abuse, more cardiovascular problems and hypertension, and the children of the unemployed are sick more often and longer. Through compassion we must first minister to those with self-images shattered by job loss and design programs that affirm them as worthy and contributing members of society.
     Unemployment also offers an opportunity to rethink our expectations about success and work. Many unemployed report they have become less materialistic and more financially responsible.
     Their emphasis for success has shifted from easy riches and frivolous purchases to family and relationships. Some avoid undue stress by revisioning their work life from aggressively “making money” to humbly “earning a livelihood.”
     With time on their hands many unemployed volunteer more and have discovered satisfaction in helping others through community projects. Herein might lie an important discovery from our national crisis.
     Since the depth of the Great Recession came largely from the get-rich housing bubble and hocus-pocus financial transactions, business investment needs to shift more to innovation that strengthens community. Investment that preserves creation like retrofitting houses and developing green energy keeps employment local while giving workers a sense of purpose.
     Designing programs that support people like universal health care and continuing education build a safety net and offer a ladder up. This crisis ultimately offers a unique opportunity to change the uncritical cry for jobs to a demand for good work with a social purpose.
(Father John Rausch is a Glenmary priest who writes, teaches and organizes in Appalachia.)

Walking with poor can mean martyrdom
By Fr. John S. Rausch
January 22, 2010
     Last November I made a pilgrimage sponsored by CRISPAZ, a faith-based organization promoting peace in El Salvador, to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the six Jesuits martyred in San Salvador.
    The Jesuits taught at the University of Central America (UCA) during the Salvadoran civil war (1981-1992) and several of them actively promoted dialogue between the warring parties.
    Faithful to the Jesuit charism articulated after Vatican II, “witnessing to faith and promoting social justice,” UCA designed its curriculum around three principles: to study the social, economic and political reality of the impoverished country, to engage practically with the suffering world it sought to understand, and to take a principled stand on the crucial moral issues of the day including terror and torture.
    A military death squad labeled the Jesuits the brains behind the rebels. On the night they were martyred the soldiers intentionally blew out their brains, shot up their books and set fire to the premises. To eliminate any witnesses, their housekeeper and her daughter were also murdered.
    In a ceremony on Nov. 16, the day marking the 20th anniversary of the massacre, Salvadoran President Mauricio Funes bestowed posthumously the Order of Jose Matias Delgado, the country’s highest civilian honor, on the six Jesuits: Ignacio Ellacuria, Segundo Montes, Ignacio Martin-Baro, Amando Lopez, Juan Ramon Moreno and Joaquin Lopez.
    In his speech President Funes referred to them as “always on the side of human rights, democracy, or the tireless search for justice.” He added the recognition signified for him “the drawing back of a thick veil of darkness and lies to let in the light of justice and truth.”     The tribute represented the first time after years of denial the government publicly acknowledged the principles motivating the Jesuit martyrs.
    During the repressive years, those with access to the international media like the Jesuits and peace pilgrims from North America frequently used their eyes and ears to shield the vulnerable from political atrocities. CRISPAZ played its own critical role.
    In promoting peace in El Salvador, CRISPAZ saw its mission in the words of Archbishop Oscar Romero: “to accompany the people in their struggle for a new society.”
    During its 25 year history CRISPAZ sponsored over 300 delegations representing 4,000 Americans and placed over 150 long term volunteers in service projects throughout the Salvadoran countryside.
    Our delegation saw the place where in 1980 the four North American church women were driven two miles off the main road by soldiers. Maryknoll Sisters Ida Ford and Maura Clarke, Ursuline Sister Dorothy Kazel and lay missioner Jean Donavan served among the poor educating children, dispensing medicines and teaching skills for self-empowerment. They were raped and murdered.
    Archbishop Romero, identifying with the poor, broke with the ruling elite and spoke against the violence of the military. Our delegation visited the chapel at the cancer hospital where Archbishop Romero was martyred while celebrating Mass. I saw his blood-stained chasuble and his clergy shirt bloodied on the left side.
    He preached his last sermon moments before his death on John 12:24 –“Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies....” BAMM! One shot to the heart. One martyr.
Investigations revealed a majority of the Salvadoran military officers involved in these murders graduated from the School of the Americas where they learned the techniques of counter-insurgency from U.S. instructors.
    The word “martyr” comes from Greek meaning “witness.” The history of El Salvador reminds us that witnessing to the truth and the God of truth can mean martyrdom by accompanying the oppressed and walking with the poor.
(Father John Rausch is a Glenmary priest who writes, teaches and organizes in Appalachia.)

Health debate needs deep contemplation
By Fr. John S. Rausch
December 11, 2009
    In the basement of St. Francis Catholic Church in Logan, W.V., fitness enthusiasts bounce up and down, swing side to side and do curls with dumbbells five nights a week.
    At the improvised fitness studio one parishioner lost 40 pounds. Conversely, a 76-year-old cancer survivor who needed to increase her appetite, gained four pounds in less than two months.
    The inspiration for the fitness studio came from a pastoral letter, “A Church That Heals” (available: 304-233-0880), promulgated in 2006 by Bishop Michael Bransfield of the Wheeling-Charleston diocese. He encourages a healthy lifestyle for the good of society and the spirituality of the individual.
    By broadening the understanding of health and linking it to faith, his pastoral offers some refreshing perspectives about personal responsibility and public accountability for the current health care debate.
    We Americans enjoy the most technologically advanced health care in the world, but we experience income-tiered access to it. Health status frequently is related to education, income and employment.
    We have higher costs for health care compared to other industrialized societies, but we receive lower results.
    One sixth of our gross domestic product is spent on health care, yet about 46 million Americans still lack health insurance which discourages them from getting preventive medical check-ups. However, other important variables in the health care equation pay too little attention to both personal behaviors and commercial practices that impact our health.
    Health experts find, aside from accidents and violence, that genetics account for 20 percent of premature mortality, while the environment accounts for 20 percent and medical care for 10 percent.
    The remaining 50 percent of premature mortality is due to lifestyle choices.
Excessive tobacco use, inactivity and a steady diet of fatty fast foods without the proper balance of fruits and vegetables lead to serious nutritional and health consequences. The results bring high blood pressure, obesity, high cholesterol and Type II diabetes, all of which raise the risk of early death.
    However, besides personal responsibility and lifestyle choices, the social and physical environment also impact our health. The food industry promotes processed foods high in fat, salt and sugar.
    The movie, “Food, Inc.,” claims 90 percent of processed foods sold in supermarkets contain either corn or soy products adding to the sugar content of food and ultimately contributing to society’s obesity problem. The Center for Disease Control estimates one-third of American children born after 2000 will develop diabetes as a result of poor diet and lack of exercise.
    For rural residents and intercity dwellers other social factors can affect their health. Lack of adequate transportation to health facilities, distribution of health care providers, distance to supermarkets with healthier foods plus unemployment or underemployment all influence health care choices.
    In addition the physical environment makes its impact. The American Lung Association claims 46 percent of the U.S. population lives in areas that have unhealthful levels of either ozone or particle pollution. Unfortunately, coal-fired electrical plants as currently operated contribute the fine particle pollution that cause more than 20,000 premature deaths per year, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
    The World Health Organization defines health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.”
    Working for a nutritious food system, adequate social services, a healthy environment and a stable economic base for families becomes an act of health justice. Moreover, adding contemplation and reflection about our bodies with its gift of health from God deepens our spirituality and adds a missing dimension to health care.
(Father John Rausch is a Glenmary priest who writes, teaches and organizes in Appalachia.)

Let’s build `more human world for all’
By Fr. John S. Rausch
October 16, 2009
     Because false personal and economic choices led to the global financial crisis, Benedict XVI’s recent encyclical, “Caritas in Veritate,” (“Charity in Truth”), addresses the fundamental principles regarding the authentic development of people.
    The encyclical primarily focuses on solidarity with the billions of people struggling for a dignified life in developing countries, but the same principles apply to those areas of poverty and oppression in the midst of the fully industrialized nations.
    The U.S. “Fourth World,” a term referring to those excluded from the mainstream, consists of certain minorities and disadvantaged people in our inner cities, Native American reservations and rural areas like the Delta, the Rio Grande and Appalachia.
    The dense 28,000 word encyclical demands close examination, but a few points beg consideration regarding the development of people within the pockets of poverty in our own country. “The environment is God’s gift to everyone, and in our use of it we have a responsibility toward the poor, toward future generations and toward humanity as a whole” (par. #48).
    Yet, in Fourth World U.S.A. we find toxic waste dumps located in poor rural areas and abandoned hazardous manufacturing sites in inner cities. In Appalachia, mountaintop removal assaults the mountains, pollutes the water and destroys the ecosystem. People in these areas stand powerless when economic forces put profits before people.
    Benedict XVI reminds us authentic development does not allow a total technical dominion over nature because “the natural environment is more than raw material to be manipulated at our pleasure” but rather, contains an inbuilt order, or “grammar,” that prescribes the “criteria for its wise use” (par. #48). He elevates this relationship by referring to the “covenant between human beings and the environment” (par. #50).
    The answer to the economic arguments that strip-mined coal means cheap energy, or toxic waste dumps are the price of progress lies with lifestyles. He advocates new lifestyles, quoting John Paul II, “in which the quest for truth, beauty, goodness and communion with others” should be the basis for consumer choices and investment (par. #51).
    He means we cannot sacrifice the poor, the environment or future generations for current frivolous consumption. In Fourth World U.S.A. jobs remain scarce. The global economy has sucked the light manufacturing and fabrication jobs overseas leaving little opportunity for a stable local economy.
    Benedict XVI writes “the so-called outsourcing of production can weaken the company’s sense of responsibility toward the stakeholders – namely the workers, the suppliers, the consumers, the natural environment and broader society – in favor of the shareholders” (par. #40).
    While affirming the useful role of profit, he says, “Once profit becomes the exclusive goal...without the common good as its ultimate end, it risks destroying wealth and creating poverty” (par. #21).
    His counsel highlights the two principles of solidarity and subsidiarity. Since “the human race is a single family”, i.e. the basis of solidarity (par. #53), subsidiarity, i.e. the assistance to individuals or groups “unable to accomplish something on their own,” must inform the governance of globalization (par. #57).
    In other words, corporations have a responsibility to local communities and communities have a right to participate in the coordination of economic plans. The church’s vision of economics serves all people and not just the better off. From its earliest social encyclicals it taught “that the civil order . . . needed intervention from the state for purposes of redistribution” (par. #39).
    Currently, health care reform, comprehensive immigration reform and labor reform all reflect aspects of solidarity promoting authentic human development. These considerations represent moral choices wrapped in economics intended “to build a more human world for all” (par. #39).
(Father John Rausch is a Glenmary priest who writes, teaches and organizes in Appalachia.)

Document promotes respect for hospital workers
By Fr. John S. Rausch
September 25, 2009
     Long union organizing campaigns frequently morph into passionate fights that leave anger and resentment with both management and workers. In December 2007, a Catholic hospital, Community Health Partners Regional Medical Center in Lorain, Ohio, and the Service Employees International Union pulled off a uniquely fair election for union representation.
    The formula: the hospital and union agreed before hand to a respectful, non-confrontational and expedited process. Hospital management agreed not to conduct secret meetings with employees threatening recriminations against pro-union employees, and the union pledged not to vilify the hospital.
    Conclusion: three of the five proposed bargaining units rejected the union, but two voted to join. For the brief two-week campaign process, no grievances or unfair labor practices were filed.
    This labor-management experiment demonstrated a sterling example that informed the guidelines promoted by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) for creating a fair process to guarantee workers their right to organize in accordance with Catholic teachings.
    Released in June the document, entitled “Respecting the Just Rights of Workers: Guidance and Options for Catholic Health Care and Unions,” attempts to find common ground and a respectful alternative acceptable to hospitals and unions.
    “It is up to workers – not bishops, hospital managers, or union leaders – to decide how they will be represented in the workplace,” said Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who chaired a dialogue to draft the guidelines between the USCCB, the Catholic Health Association in the United States, the AFL-CIO, and the SEIU (Service Employees International Union).
    “Because Catholic health care is a ministry, not an industry, how it treats its workers and how organized labor treats Catholic health care ... should reflect Catholic teaching on work and workers, health care and the common good.”
    Basically, the Guidance and Options document discourages negative campaigning by either side preserving respect for each side’s organization and mission. It assures equal access to information from both sides and sets standards for truthfulness and balance in communications. It creates a pressure-free environment and allows workers to vote fairly and in a timely manner.
    Then, to ensure these principles, “local agreements” outline the rules at the beginning of the process and guarantee a pledge to honor the employees’ decision regardless of the outcome. Should the process get stuck, the guidelines call for a neutral party to resolve the disagreements.
    To many the elements of respect, fair and timely process, equal access to information and a ban on coercive behavior appear as common sense.
    Yet, a study by Kate Bronfenbrenner of Cornell University finds 92 percent of companies involved in organizing campaigns use mandatory meetings with employees, 78 percent require one-on-one sessions with supervisors and 75 percent hire “union avoidance” firms.
    In addition, even after workers vote in the union, 44 percent of companies never agree to a first contract, in effect nullifying the election by not cooperating.
    Since management holds the balance of power under current labor practices, in most instances labor needs a legal remedy like the Employee Free Choice Act to level the playing field. The Guidance and Options process assumes integrity and honesty on both sides. It requires people of faith respecting the church’s social teachings and building trust to overcome the past acrimonious history of labor relations. It hinges on civil dialogue.
Bishop William Murphy, a participant of the Guidance and Options working committee, said,     “This will require restraint and cooperation, new attitudes and behaviors by all those in our health care ministry–workers and managers, bishops and consumers.”
    Hospitals heal the sick, but by respecting workers as authentic partners in the health care process, they can also heal some social injustice towards workers.
(Father John Rausch is a Glenmary priest who writes, teaches and organizes in Appalachia.)

‘People of faith know money is servant, not master’
By Fr. John S. Rausch
July 24, 2009
     The Ponzi scheme of Bernard Madoff bilked investors out of $50 billion. Many of his victims thought so highly of his investment skills they pulled rank to become his clients. The man with the magic portfolio model reported 10-12 percent annual returns on capital invested through the highs and lows of Wall Street.
    The naive believed Madoff had a wealth-producing Ouija board; the street-smart suspected insider information. In the end, all lost their money whether earmarked for retirement or life’s comforts.
    I suspect most people invested with Madoff for security or happiness. Preoccupation with our economic lives in terms of finances and possessions causes us to salivate at sky-high returns while hungering for basement-low prices. The system makes us economic actors seeking more for less and haggling for the best deal from the marketplace.
    Yet, with all our fixation on wealth-status and acquisitions, few of us ask about the morality of the marketplace. How do our economic investments affect society and ultimately our own personal spirituality?
    Economist Bob Goudzwaard in Sojourners (June, 2009) discusses investments in writing about “A Paper God.” His point: global investors have enormously increased the amount of money invested in the highly speculative markets in the financial economy rather than in the “real” economy.
    Investing in the real economy promotes making, selling and buying goods and services, like shoes, groceries, storm windows and doctors’ visits. Conversely, the financial sector, i.e. the world of liquid assets, deals with the buying and selling of money-products in their own right, like trading in bonds and loans, or buying and selling foreign currencies or shares of stock.
    While a strong financial sector occupies an essential place in a healthy economy, over the past decade the volume of paper exchanged for paper has increased four times faster than the amount of paper exchanged for real commodities. This speculative bubble feeds on itself pushing the expectations for returns higher and higher.
    Two clear consequences affecting people flow from speculators’ quest for maximum short-term financial gains. Developing countries so dependent on loans and investments from abroad lower taxes on capital to attract and keep capital, and then cut spending on social programs like health care and education to meet their debt obligations. The world’s poorest go without, while investors amass fortunes.
    Second, financial behemoths such as hedge funds frequently using borrowed money gain control of companies in the real economy, then merge, sell out, split and restructure to increase short-term profits. Here workers lose jobs, while investors grow rich.
    For the global common good Goudzwaard counsels: “The growth in the financial economy must serve the growth of the real economy, not the other way around, and heavy restrictions must be placed on speculation.”
    On a personal level, people of faith recognize the seduction of wealth: “For the love of money is the root of all evils, and some people in their desire for it have strayed from the faith and have pierced themselves with many pains” (1 Tim. 6:10). Yet, each hour of each working day the news summary reports the Dow Jones Average, subliminally reminding listeners to think about their economic status – i.e. be preoccupied with money and wealth.
    People of faith know money is a servant, not a master. Spiritual growth depends on an attitude shift from simply pursuing the greatest rate of return to considering the social context of the investment. We don’t need Bernard Madoff’s wealth-producing Ouiji Board.     We need our wealth to build our security while working in the service of others.
(Father John Rausch is a Glenmary priest who writes, teaches and organizes in Appalachia.)

Electricity from coal isn’t cheap
By Fr. John S. Rausch
June 12, 2009
     When a dike broke at the Kingston Fossil Plant spilling a billion gallons of toxic fly-ash sludge into the waters and homes of eastern Tennessee, the future of coal got blacker. The most abundant fossil fuel in America looked “so yesterday.” From its digging to its burning to its cleaning up, the use of coal remains problematic as a major source of electricity.
     While nearly half of coal fly ash, a byproduct of coal combustion, is recycled through commercial use, the majority of it gets buried in landfills or stored in ponds. Six inches of rain in 10 days and 12 degree temperatures wreaked havoc in December 2008 on the earthen dam near Harriman, Tenn. A devastating fish kill in the Emory River and 12 flooded homes resulted from the spill.
     Before fears about spills, however, come worries about burning coal for electrical power. In the older coal-fired power plants fine airborne particles formed from soot, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and metals account for an estimated 24,000 premature deaths in the U.S. with an average of 14 life-years lost per person.
     Mercury spewed from these plants endangers 8 percent of American women of childbearing age with its unsafe levels, exposing 322,000 newborns to the risk of neurological problems.
     In the newer plants built since 1985 producing 12 percent of U.S. electricity, state of the art anti-pollution technology has significantly lessened emissions that cause acid rain, fine particulate pollution and mercury toxicity. Yet, even these modern plants do not capture their carbon dioxide, the most significant greenhouse gas.
     In 2006 the U.S. emitted 2.12 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, a quarter of the world’s emissions, and coal-fired power plants contributed 36 percent to that U.S. total. Worldwide coal supplies 40 percent of all electricity, but accounts for over 70 percent of the carbon dioxide emissions of the electrical sector.
     To counter the drooping image of coal, the industry launched a public relations campaign to make coal appear more environmentally friendly.
     “Clean Coal,” the industry’s new icon, represents an imprecise term describing ways to reduce the environmental impact of coal-based electricity. Most often the term refers to the process of carbon capture and sequestration, where carbon dioxide is pumped into underground caverns and stored.
     Critics charge carbon sequestration has not been demonstrated on a commercial scale at any coal-fired power plant, and the costs and lack of investment in the technology cast doubts about its economic viability even by 2020. All new proposed coal plants with the most advanced scrubbers will still release 100 percent of their carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
     America’s foremost climatologist, NASA scientist James Hansen, claims sustaining the level of civilization we have developed on our planet requires reducing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to below 350 ppm (parts per million). Currently the number stands at 387 ppm, explaining why, he feels, the Arctic has melted with rapid speed and why the pH of the oceans has changed dramatically within a decade.
     Public opinion has also shifted concerning climate change, occasioned in part by the intensity of Hurricane Katrina. An October 2007 poll by the Opinion Research Corporation showed 75 percent of Americans would support a five-year moratorium on new coal-fired power plants, if accompanied by increased investment in renewable power research.
     People of faith recognize the difference between environmental rhetoric, called “greenwashing,” and green technology. As stewards of creation, they pursue authentically safe, clean energy sources so people in Appalachian communities like Harriman don’t pay the price for cheap electricity from coal.
(Father John Rausch is a Glenmary priest who writes, teaches and organizes in Appalachia.)

Let’s give up locking up children
By Fr. John S. Rausch
April 17, 2009
     In 2007 the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sued the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) service on behalf of 26 immigrant children, ages 1 to 17, detained with their parents at the T. Don Hutto detention center in Taylor, Texas.
    The lawsuit contended the former medium security prison managed by the Corrections Corporation of America did not meet the minimum standards for housing minors in federal immigration custody.
    Although ICE released all 26 children before the settlement, the lawsuit alleged the children were kept in cells 11 or 12 hours a day and required to wear prison garb, plus were denied bathroom privacy and access to medical care.
    The children were detained with their parents because of a 2006 policy change by ICE. Before then, ICE followed a “catch and release” strategy that transported undocumented Mexicans back across the boarder while immigrants and asylum seekers from other countries were first processed, then released, to await their hearing.
    ICE detained only those with criminal records. Today it holds 30,000 people on any given day, approximately 300,000 in a year with an average detention stay of 37 days, but with many detained for months or even years before the conclusion of their hearing.
    The attitude toward immigrants shifted after 9/11 when undocumented workers or those who overstayed their visas were gradually defined as threats to national security. Responsibility for immigration enforcement passed from the Justice Department to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). In 2004 Congress authorized ICE to triple the number of detention beds for immigrants.
    “Detention centers” are so called because detainees are not being held on criminal charges, but for civil offenses. The 26 children detained at Hutto “in almost all cases, were awaiting determinations on their asylum claims,” according to the ACLU. They arrived in the U.S. without proper documents after having fled their home countries fearing persecution from their own governments.
    While some see immigrant detention furthering homeland security, undeniably it represents a boon to private corporations and local governments. Of the $15 billion-plus DHS budgets for immigration, at least $1.2 billion pays for immigrant detention.
    Prison corporations and local governments lobby for contracts to fill prison beds paying per diems from $70 to $95 for each immigrant imprisoned. The record profits earned by prison corporations and the revenue generated for rural counties reflect the new political economy of immigration that reduces people to commodities.
    Immigration officials defend family detention saying it guarantees immigrants and asylum seekers appearing for hearings and prevents them from fleeing the country. Separating the children from the parents would also introduce additional problems with foster care or locating relatives. The U.S. currently has three family detention centers with plans for three more.
    Yet, ICE initiated an alternative pilot program without incarceration in 2004 that produced a 94 percent appearance rate. The program involved people facing deportation getting intensive supervision and connecting to social service agencies. Agency specialists were assigned a limited caseload of detainees that they monitored by home visits and telephone calls. No detention, families intact. Cost: $14 per detainee per day.
    This approach reflects the 2003 joint statement, “Strangers No Longer,” of the Mexican and American Catholic bishops: “Those who flee wars and persecution should be protected by the global community. This requires, at a minimum, that migrants have a right to claim refugee status without incarceration and to have their claims fully considered by a competent authority” (#37). Given this alternative, people of faith can ask for a creative solution for the sake of the children.
(Father John Rausch is a Glenmary priest who writes, teaches and organizes in Appalachia.)

Examine poverty, don’t blame victims
By Fr. John S. Rausch
March 6, 2009
     When Ashley Judd spoke before a crowd of 800 demonstrators during the “I Love Mountains” rally in Frankfort, Ky., she projected an image of Appalachia different from the stereotypes normally seen on most newscasts.
    She referenced the beauty of the mountains that gave her a sense of place as she grew up in eastern Kentucky’s Floyd County, but labeled the destructive mining practice of mountaintop removal a scourge on the land.
    Calling for a green collar economy to replace the power of the coal industry, she gave voice to the continuing push-back by local people for more options and economic opportunity in the mountains.
    A few days before the rally on Feb. 13, ABC’s 20/20 aired “A Hidden America: Children of the Mountains.” That program highlighted the plight of four children in Appalachia who face a steep mountain climb for a dignified life.
    Drugs and alcohol played a significant role among the parents in three families living a hardscrabble existence, forcing the children seemingly to parent the adults. One fellow became the first high school graduate in his family, but slipped off the ladder leading out when he withdrew from college after only eight weeks.
    Another fellow, unintentionally fathering a child, scrapped his dream of a military career for a life underground in the coal mines.
    Stacked back to back these vignettes paint the portrait of Appalachia viewers expect. However, sometimes we use a magnifying glass to examine the poor, when we really need a picture window to view the whole economic system.
    The “culture of poverty” theory, so convenient and popular in the 1960s, emphasized fatalism as a way of life characterized by little rebellion or questioning. When the War on Poverty sputtered as it attempted to include local participation in programs to overcome this fatalism and alienation, a paradigm shift took place.
    Academics recognized that local folks were constrained by their political and economic powerlessness. County officials oversaw the federal poverty funds and many officials manipulated the programs to enhance their control. Local power structures in the mountains served the interests of absentee corporations that owned the timber and coal resources and controlled the land like a mineral colony.
    Studies show the deepest pockets of poverty are located in the richest coal mining counties in eastern Kentucky. The underground economy always thrives where there exist few alternatives. OxyContin that commands sometimes $120 a pill floods the hollows when unscrupulous doctors and pain clinics lack the necessary supervision in dispensing prescriptions. All over America the culture of medication has ballooned to the delight of the pharmaceutical industry.
    Jobs in the coalfields have diminished in the past few decades because of advanced technology and better equipment. With fewer jobs and coal severance taxes flowing out of the area, an inadequate tax base encourages talented teachers to leave.
    Additionally, mountaintop removal, the cheapest way of mining coal, threatens the quality of life by polluting the water and denuding the mountains. Meanwhile coal profits soar.
    Without this structural analysis, those of privilege can easily “blame the victim” for not moving or protesting or joining the system – in short, for being poor.
    Voices like Ashley Judd’s are calling forth an achievable future with green collar jobs. The change needed will demand the public policy that supports the environment, but with investment will come a key ingredient.
    Economic opportunity in harmony with creation amounts to hope, and hope represents the spiritual component to fight addiction and transform stale stereotypes.
(Father John Rausch is a Glenmary priest who writes, teaches and organizes in Appalachia.)

Check out labor’s possible comeback
By Fr. John S. Rausch
February 6, 2009
    Greed as the cause of the economic crisis? Agreed. Need for vigilance and better regulations? Right on. Recovery only through empowering labor? Check the record.
    “Historically, unionization basically created the middle class,” writes University of Texas economist, James Galbraith. He cites unions’ direct effect on wages and benefits for unionized workers (15-28 percent more than nonunion workers), the indirect effects on wages of nonunion workers through the “threat effect” (employers discouraging union organizing by paying comparable union wages), and the creation of social institutions that underpin the middle class, such as Social Security, Medicare and unemployment insurance.
    Here’s the argument for fuller economic recovery through empowering labor: when workers form unions, they can demand their share of productivity gains, which raises their wages allowing wage-driven consumption growth (unlike today’s consumer-borrowing consumption growth). Paying a living wage means building a more stable economy.
    The facts: since 2001 corporate profits have nearly doubled while real wages have flatlined. Productivity expanded by a vigorous 20 percent between 2000 and 2006, but real wages edged up only 2 percent.
    Workers were unable to capture their fair share of the new wealth created. Consequently, with workers’ diminished power and employers’ ability to outsource overseas and use temp and contract workers at home, those employees earning poverty wages now approach nearly a quarter of the workforce!
    In 2003 representatives from 45 unions proposed a strategy for leveling the playing field, which evolved into the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) now before Congress.
    EFCA effects three changes: 1) after a majority of workers sign union authorization cards, known as “card check,” they gain recognition for their union, 2) if the union and management cannot agree on a first contract, mediation followed by binding arbitration is required, and 3) the law increases penalties for employers who violate labor laws.
    Predictably, corporate America has vowed to fight EFCA. Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott summed up the business perspective: “We like driving the car, and we’re not going to give the steering wheel to anybody but us.”
    In paid ads, op-ed pieces, mailings and speeches, industry voices defend the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) secret-ballot elections and depict labor’s card check alternative as undemocratic. Some ads show thug-like union bosses forcing workers to sign their authorization cards. The message is misleading.
    Current labor law allows either a secret ballot or majority card-signing, but at the discretion of the employer. EFCA would simply reverse the power dynamic and give the choice of method to the workers, not the employers.
    Industry leaders fear the increasing desire for unionization among workers that has risen from 30 percent of nonunion workers in the mid-1980s to well over half today.
    Retail and drugstore chains, nonunion building contractors, and large firms like Wal-Mart and Tyson favor the NLRB election process because it allows delays and challenges, frequently mixed with illegal intimidation tactics, to help industry keep the union out.
    Catholic social teaching as expressed in the “Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church” (#305-309) explicitly sees unions connected with the right of free association to defend the vital interest of workers and “an indispensable element of social life.” Unions form part of the moral compass to watchdog companies so workers’ rights are respected.
    With the economy in shambles from greed, deregulation and disregard for workers, the ways of commerce need a reexamination. Workers must be part of the dialogue. The Employee Free Choice Act promises a balanced comeback for workers, assuring labor its rightful place at the table.
(Father John Rausch is a Glenmary priest who writes, teaches and organizes in Appalachia.)

U.S. needs to make difference
By Fr. John S. Rausch
January 9, 2009
    By affirming universal human rights, we embrace every person as our equal regardless of nationality, ethnicity or religion. Universal human rights means there are no “us” and “them,” no superior or inferior, no master race or subhuman one.
    The Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaimed everyone’s equal rights by its adoption on Dec. 10, 1948, but unfortunately 60 years later it remains more a vision and a work in progress than an accomplishment and reality.
    In 1941 President Franklin Roosevelt gave his Four Freedoms speech before Congress citing freedom of speech and expression, freedom of religion, freedom from want and freedom from fear.
    Seven years later those freedoms formed an intricate part of the preamble of the Universal Declaration recognizing contempt for human rights has “resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind.”
    The Catholic Church only hesitantly accepted modern human rights standards because it initially worried the emphasis on individualism might encourage religious relativism and undermine a commitment to the common good.
    As the principles of human rights and democracy became more properly understood, John XXIII burst forth in Pacem in Terris (1963) with support for the full range of human rights contained in the Universal Declaration.
    After John Courtney Murry, SJ, successfully argued religious freedom is rooted in the very dignity of the human person, the Second Vatican Council’s “Declaration on Religious Liberty” fully linked human rights with the core of Christian faith, thus transforming the church into a crucial advocate for human rights.
    A quick example: during the repressive years in Brazil with state censorship and wholesale abuses of civil rights, the Brazilian bishops in 1973 printed the entire text of the Universal Declaration on broadsheet adding quotations from Scripture and citations from Catholic and Protestant statements after each of the 30 articles. They posted it on church bulletin boards throughout the country as a protest against the harsh regime.
    From the outset, a split existed about the Universal Declaration between the West and industrial nations that emphasized political and civil liberties and the countries of the global South that stressed development issues highlighting economic and social rights.
    Roosevelt’s freedom from want finds expression in Article 23 addressing the right to adequate employment, remuneration and ability to join a union. Article 25 lists the social protections including the right to food, clothing, housing, medical care and necessary social services (cf. Pacem.in Terris, #11).
    Philosophically, the U.S. approaches these rights by supporting a healthy marketplace, not with large government intervention. Yet, currently a World Public Opinion poll showed three quarters of those surveyed (Democrats and Republicans) acknowledged government has a responsibility for meeting the economic and social rights of its own American citizens, notably the right to food, health care and education.
    The early articles of the Universal Declaration outline the political and civil rights of people – equality, no discrimination, right to life, no slavery. However, Article 5 reads: “No one should be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” Pause. Abu Ghraib. Guantanamo. Think memos and legal opinions that redefined torture and justified it.
    For 60 years the Universal Declaration failed its potential because rogue regimes have denied and hidden their abuses toward dissenters and minorities.
    The U.S. needs to make a difference. It can establish a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to examine our overzealous use of “robust interrogation” that included stress positions, sexual humiliation and waterboarding. Doing so would reestablish our moral leadership and affirm universal human rights for even our enemies.
(Father John Rausch is a Glenmary priest who writes, teaches and organizes in Appalachia.)

Most hesitate to face urgency of global warming
By Fr. John S. Rausch
November 28, 2008
By Fr. John Rausch
     In 1988 James Hansen, a NASA scientist, testified before Congress that burning fossil fuels – coal, gas and oil – was warming the earth. At first the statement was met with scepticism, and public relations people from industry began actively sowing doubts about it. Yet, warm year followed warm year, until 2007 marked a watershed moment.
     Last year the earth experienced a dramatic surge in methane, a heat-trapping gas, from the melting permafrost that was accelerating further thawing. That same year the Northwest Passage stayed open all September for the first time in history.
     Scientists now believe the earth has reached its “tipping point” for Arctic ice, which means the physical world on its own is taking command of the process that humans began. Some scientists predicted all Arctic summer ice would be gone by 2070, but now other scientists have revised the schedule for possibly 2012!
     Further, the science community recognizes the earth verges on crossing similar thresholds governing the reliability of monsoons, the acidification of the oceans, the availability of water from alpine glaciers and the actual level of the sea.
     For the past one thousand years the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere hovered around 275 ppm (parts per million), but with the Industrial Revolution and the accelerated burning of fossil fuels that number started to rise.
     Twenty years after testifying before Congress James Hansen with several coauthors published their latest findings saying to preserve a planet capable of sustaining civilization, the amount of carbon dioxide must “be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm.”
     Standing at 385 ppm, the level of carbon dioxide is growing by more than 2 ppm annually!
     John Paul II reminded us in early 1990: “Today the ecological crisis has assumed such proportions as to be the responsibility of everyone . . . I wish to repeat that the ecological crisis is a moral issue.”
     Even with the weighty evidence from the scientific community clearly demonstrating the reality of global warming and its dire consequences, politicians and ordinary people hesitate to face the urgency of the situation.
     Some cling to denial, but others trust in science and technology to find a “silver bullet” to alleviate humanity’s rightful concern. Yet disasters happen because sometimes science can neither prevent a threat nor detect it early enough.
     When the great tsunami hit Southeast Asia on Dec. 26, 2004, a quarter of a million people died. In its aftermath, survivors were amazed at how few dead animals lay among the debris. Stories surfaced that hours before the deadly “Harbor Wave” struck, animals were fleeing to higher ground, even some elephants breaking their chains to escape.
     While animals apparently sense the natural signs developed over thousands of years to help them survive, humans seem distracted by material things that keep them disconnected from the messages of nature.
     “An education in ecological responsibility is urgent,” writes John Paul II, “responsibility for oneself, for others, and for the earth . . .a true education in responsibility entails a genuine conversion in ways of thought and behavior.”
     Our economic system based on growth from burning fossil fuels is ruining our physical lives by destabilizing the climate and altering the sea level. We are burning not only the furniture, but the studs in the walls to fuel the furnace.
     For the good of future generations and the survival of many poor today, we must somehow change our life styles and public policies and reduce the carbon dioxide levels to below the threshold number of 350 ppm.
(Father John Rausch is a Glenmary priest who writes, teaches and organizes in Appalachia.)

We ask, `do you understand what you are buying?’
By Fr. John S. Rausch
October 24, 2008
      While Wall Street was bundling subprime mortgages into collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) to spread their risk and collect the lucrative fees, the Federation of Appalachian Housing Enterprises (FAHE) was investing in people one homeowner at a time.
     In its last fiscal year, FAHE, a regional non-profit of 45 housing organizations based in Berea, Ky., made 159 mortgages valued at $11.3 million to low-income families and those facing predatory lending.
     One of those loans involved a single mother lured by a “teaser” rate into switching from her fixed-rate mortgage to an adjustable-rate mortgage (ARM.) After 12 months when she wanted to switch back to her original fixed rate, she discovered a hidden prepayment penalty that would have added nearly $8,000 to her loan balance.
     Meanwhile, ARM’s interest hit 16 percent, increasing her monthly payment from $425 to $900.
     “We focus on the long term success of the borrower,” says Jim King, executive director of FAHE. “What we offer is predictable and fair, no gimmicks or games.”
     In September FAHE worked with this single parent to refinance her home with a fixed rate and a monthly payment she can afford.
     With its clientele the principal target of subprime mortgage lenders, FAHE demonstrates the ethical way of dealing with modest income folks to insure their dignity while developing their community. It counsels with clients and determines their level of affordability. Key is personal contact.
     “It’s face to face,” says King. “We ask the person, do you understand what you are buying.”
     Contrast this honesty with the intricacies of Wall Street. To expand the securities market, investment bankers encouraged unregulated mortgage brokers to write subprime mortgages, i.e. loans on residential real estate with a high risk of default.
     Some of the justification for the subprime market lay with the steadily increasing value of housing, but in the climate of lax regulation many investment bankers simply ignored or hid risks.
     The risky subprime mortgages were then bundled together as CDOs to look like a security, and with the approval of an “independent” rating agency, they were sold with an investment-grade rating.
     Investors around the world scooped them up eager to earn a higher return on these supposedly safe investments. Meanwhile, the risk of the CDOs and default insurance heightened and spread throughout the entire economy. Soon the amount of default exposure was almost impossible to calculate.
     While home mortgages represent the largest troubled asset triggering the current financial crisis, defaults on commercial mortgages, leveraged buyout loans, credit card-backed bonds, student loans and auto loans are also increasing. As bankers made riskier loans, they fabricated new ways of packaging them. Eventually, the subprime market collapsed and the house of credit crumbled.
     The fallout from the crisis will be long and palpable. Already $2 trillion has evaporated from pension funds indicating many older Americans will be working longer.
     The millennial dream of cutting poverty in half by 2015 appears a diminishing hope, while rising food and fuel prices are increasing poverty and hunger. More than 70 companies have ceased underwriting student loans, robbing an untold number of middle class kids a chance for a college education.
     The bankers and Wall Street cared only about their fees, and not about the likelihood of repayment.
     In contrast, the housing specialists at FAHE live the home ownership dream with their clients. People of faith recognize the FAHE folks, paid far less than Wall Street brokers, collect the psychic income of knowing they are contributing to the real economy, and don’t gamble with the lives of people.
(Father John Rausch is a Glenmary priest who writes, teaches and organizes in Appalachia.)

Why a food crisis today?
By Fr. John S. Rausch
September 19, 2008
      In the last year rice prices have more than doubled, wheat prices nearly doubled and corn prices rose by two-thirds.
     Commentators blame the weather, the increased demand for meat from the growing middle class in India and China and the unforeseen consequences of ethanol production.      All these factors bite into available food supplies, but they obscure the deeper roots of the problem.
     Indeed, severe drought in Australia and widespread floods throughout Africa have contributed to price spikes, and one-third of the U.S. corn crop this year will help fuel our cars as ethanol.
     However, food production has kept ahead of population growth. According to the U.N.’s 2008 forecast from the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), world cereal production will top 2.164 billion metric tons, an increase of 2.6 percent over last year’s global high.
     Since it takes an average 8 pounds of grain to produce one pound of meat, the greater meat diet of the growing middle class in foreign countries diverts grain from breads to feedlots. A third of grain and most of soy goes to livestock, plus over a third of the global fish catch becomes feed.
     In the U.S. alone, meat consumption averages 222 pounds per person per year, 78 pounds more than in 1950. Cutting back on meat consumption will stretch the food supply, but given the production figures, the food crisis is better labeled a “food-price” crisis.
     For decades neoliberal trade theory pushed Less Developed Countries (LDCs) to drop tariffs, quotas and other protections for local farmers to promote freer trade. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) used the debt crisis beginning in the 1970s to demand less protectionism to qualify for loans.
     The World Bank promoted similar conditions for its advice and aid. To repay the loans and stay qualified for future help, debtor nations needed cash crops to sell internationally, which meant switching from local food production to exporting luxury crops including flowers.
     Before neoliberal trading, LDCs grew enough food for themselves and more. In 1960 they grew a $7 billion surplus, but by 2001 they struggled with an $11 billion shortfall.
Governments under free trade restrictions could no longer offer small-scaled farmers low interest loans, technical assistance and subsidies for seeds and fertilizers, although 70 percent of those hungry in the world live in rural areas and depend on smallholder farms. Agriculture fell under free market principles.
     Meanwhile, rich countries continued subsidizing corporate factory-farms that needed huge quantities of fossil fuel to run mega-tractors, use petrochemical fertilizers and transport food around the world.
     In the U.S. 75 percent of commodity payments went to the largest 10 percent of farmers allowing them to dump cheap grains overseas which further drove small farmers off the land. NAFTA (North American Fair Trade Alliance), for example, pushed one million farmers out of production and turned Mexico into a net corn importer.
     With fewer local farmers and smaller nations reliant on grain from global corporations, food prices jumped when the price of crude climbed 80 percent in a year, hence causing the “food-price” crisis.
     Frances Moore Lappe, food expert and author of “Diet for a Small Planet,” claims the crisis is not a shortage of food, but a shortage of democracy. She argues, “Because no human being chooses hunger, hunger is proof that a person has been denied a voice in meeting survival needs.”
     People of faith recognize that when structures keep people hungry, they must change. A right to life means a right to food.
(Father John Rausch is a Glenmary priest who writes, teaches and organizes in Appalachia.)

Wealth inequality: Bad for your health
By Fr. John S. Rausch
August 8 , 2008
      John Paulson, by short-selling the subprime market, earned $3.7 billion last year. He was the highest paid individual in 2007, and he joined the top five hedge-fund managers who each made at least $1.5 billion. (Mind boggling considering that just one percent of a billion dollars is $10 million!) The top 25 hedge-fund managers earned an average $892 million in 2007, up from $532 million in 2006.
     Does earning an excessive income represent the American dream, or present a moral problem? With excessive income comes greater wealth inequality. What are the consequences for society and the individual? Can society be healthier by pursuing greater wealth equality for the common good?
     Historically, America has entered a new Gilded Age. The disparity between income and wealth of the superrich and those on the bottom has never been greater since before WWI. The richest one percent now holds far more wealth than the bottom 90 percent. Meanwhile average household debt has hit its highest level since 1933, and millions of families may lose their homes.
     The route to the new Gilded Age took three decades to travel: cutting taxes for the rich, undermining labor unions and deregulating safety rules for consumers and workers. Elected officials, caught in the tide of a freer marketplace, unabashedly pursued public spending and trade agreements that greatly benefitted the wealthy and global corporations.
     The implications of the wealth gap show themselves in social and political ways. The extremely wealthy live in their mansions away from the rest of us. They use private means to purchase services like health care and education, so they frequently see tax dollars that support social programs not directly benefitting themselves. This separateness leads to a less cohesive society, and the good of all, the common good, suffers.
     Politically, wealth concentration means political power concentrates in the hands of the wealthy. Those with means can lavishly support favorite candidates and hire lobbyists to promote their interests.
     Protecting property from theft means more police and security guards, more jails and prisons – diverting resources from more socially productive activities, like job training and family support services. Wealth inequality fuels social conflict and actually, with a seriously indebted middle class, slows economic growth.
     Finally, Ichiro Kawachi, a professor of social epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health, says a high level of economic inequality is bad for your health! An individual’s health is affected by her social world, and that world can shift dramatically when the distance between the rich and poor widens.
     With a secure income people have a sense of control of their lives. But, when people adopt a pattern of conspicuous consumption to imitate the lifestyles of the wealthy, they suffer consequences to their health from overwork, stress and absence from their loved ones.
     Kawachi believes strongly in the theory of relative deprivation: when you think you’re not doing as well as others, you start feeling bad. His studies show Scandinavian countries enjoy a better level of health than other Western European nations, though all have universal health coverage. His point: “The more egalitarian the country, the healthier its citizens tend to be.”
     When the Vatican updated the Seven Deadly Sins for our times, it included “Excessive Wealth,” perhaps because the top one percent of the world’s population owns a third of the world’s wealth.
     People of faith hear the demand of distributive justice. Rewriting the U.S. tax code and repairing the social safety net could prove beneficial for the good of society and the health of the people.
(Father John Rausch is a Glenmary priest who writes, teaches and organizes in Appalachia.)

More supply or less demand?
By Fr. John S. Rausch
July 11, 2008
      With the recent spike in gasoline prices, politicians and pundits have begun calling again for energy independence for America. Ethanol refiners continue lobbying Congress for massive subsidies, while electric utilities and coal producers promote clean coal and a nuclear renaissance.
     Oil executives complaining U.S. restrictions have hampered developing new sources of oil, advocate opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) to oil drilling.
“Energy independence” has morphed into code for “drill it all, dig it all and double it all.”      For the present, traditional forms of energy are needed to find the glide path into the terrain of alternative energy sources, yet in the future, the emphasis cannot rest solely on supply.
     People of faith recognize the market functions by supply and demand, and now, at least in the near term, some demands appear unsustainable and too costly for the common good.
     To produce enough ethanol to fill one tank of gas in an SUV takes 450 pounds of corn. To supply all U.S. gasoline through ethanol would require planting 71 percent of American farmland in fuel crops.
     In 1950 a single family car might be parked near a house averaging 1,100 square feet, but in 2005 probably several cars would stand in driveways of houses that doubled to 2,340 square feet with fewer occupants and lots more space to heat and cool.
     Currently, the U.S. with less than 5 percent of the world’s population uses one third of the world’s electricity produced annually. With drained wetlands, clear-cut forests and paved-over top soil the capacity of the planet to carry life is rapidly being exhausted by human habits and lifestyles.
     If energy were the coin of the realm, that coin would have two worn sides: first, the problems associated with global warming, and second, the challenges posed by energy security.
     Global warming could initiate a new sense of community among all countries, since “everyone lives down stream” of hostile climate change. About one hundred million people in the world live one meter above sea level.
     With increased global warming exacerbated by burning fossil fuels, the melting ice caps would inflict unimaginable flooding of these poor populations, plus introduce diseases previously unknown in temperate regions.
     Known world petroleum reserves will last 80 to 100 years, natural gas 70 to 90 years.      The geopolitical imperatives to secure control of energy resources mount. Question: was the invasion of Iraq more about weapons of mass destruction or controlling the oil supply? People of faith see a simpler lifestyle and a more intentional use of resources as an essential component of peace building.
     Pope Benedict XVI in his 2008 World Day of Peace Message said, “We need to care for the environment: It has been entrusted to men and women to be protected and cultivated with responsible freedom, with the good of all as a constant guiding criterion.” The “good of all” extends to succeeding generations who equally deserve a healthy, and not degraded, earth.
     Two approaches make sense. First, mount intense and massive national investment on the scale of the moon race to develop renewables (solar, wind, geothermal, biomass, etc.) and high-tech energy (hydrogen-generated power, fuel cells, nuclear fusion, etc.).
     Second, adopt an ethic of “less and local” to address the short term urgency. More oil can be “found” in Detroit by designing more fuel-efficient cars than from ANWR. More electricity can be “generated” from retrofitting homes with better insulation than from another coal-fired plant.
     A new energy consciousness begins with numerous personal choices that collectively grow into the political will to change.
(Father John Rausch is a Glenmary priest who writes, teaches and organizes in Appalachia.)

‘If you want peace, work for justice’
By Fr. John S. Rausch
May 23 , 2008
     The United States spends more on defense than all other nations combined. Considering the basic budget for the Department of Defense that covers salaries, operations and equipment and the supplemental budget that pays for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, defense spending bests the second military spender by nearly a factor of 10. The supplemental itself for funding the two wars looms larger than the combined military budgets of China and Russia.
     In addition, the government has folded a variety of military-related expenditures into departments other than defense. The Department of Energy FY 2008 will spend $23 billion on developing and maintaining nuclear warheads, and the state department will distribute an additional $25 billion among allies as foreign military assistance.
     Add in obligations with Veterans Affairs, military recruiting and Homeland Security, plus military retirement, the paramilitary activities of the FBI, outer space related security and interest for past debt-financed defense spending, and U.S. spending on its military establishment for the current year reaches $1.1 trillion!
     In a 2006 Angus Reid poll, 65 percent of Americans said the country has been “too quick to get American military forces involved” in conflicts. Instead, the American public supports more preventive security measures like diplomacy, nuclear nonproliferation, peacekeeping and foreign aid. A 2007 World Public Opinion poll found 78 percent of Americans “believe all countries should eliminate their nuclear weapons” through a well-coordinated international verification system. Yet, the military budget continues to grow and has more than doubled since the end of the Cold War.
     Behind the expanded military budget lies certain structural reasons for this aggressive spending. Prior to World War II, the U.S. had supported no arms industry. In time of war, manufacturers would convert their facilities from producing consumer to military goods. That changed after the war.
     In his Farewell Address to the Nation in 1961, President Eisenhower confessed, “...we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions.” Yet, later in the speech he issued his famous warning: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial-complex.”
Eisenhower recognized the need for arms manufacturers, yet emphasized their dangers.      Originally, his notable phrase read: “the military-industrial-congressional-complex,” though he chose to drop the one term in the final draft of the speech. Yet, congressional representatives get reelected when they bring home federal money to their districts, and arms manufacturers make profit when they sell weapons to the government.
Killing a weapons system becomes near impossible because of the economic and political impact. The F/A-22 “Raptor” fighter jet, for example, designed to counter a Soviet aircraft that was never built, has 1,000 subcontractors in 42 states.
     People of faith recognize morally troubling aspects of the military-industrial-congressional-complex. Plainly, the opportunity cost what could have been purchased instead of military items represents a matter of justice. The catastrophe of a bridge collapse in Minnesota and the levees failure in New Orleans represent essential infrastructure problems overlooked while unnecessary weapons get funded.
     Morally, opportunity costs represent choices: eradicate polio worldwide or do three tests of the missile defense system; vaccinate 10 million children worldwide or buy six Trident II missiles; provide health coverage for seven million children or fund the nuclear weapons program for one year.
     The words of Paul VI remain true today: “If you want peace, work for justice.” Justice demands we rethink the military-industrial-congressional-complex that robs society of essential goods and services while raising the threat of more and longer wars.
(Father John Rausch is a Glenmary priest who writes, teaches and organizes in Appalachia.)

‘We need to rethink our social fabric’
By Fr. John S. Rausch
April 18 , 2008
     Not since the Gilded Age of the 1890s has the wealth gap between the rich and poor in the United States been wider. With 469 American billionaires, the richest 1 percent of Americans own 33.4 percent of all U.S. wealth measured as stocks, bonds, cash, real estate and personal possessions.
     The bottom 90 percent of all Americans divide only 30.4 percent of the wealth between them. While 37 million Americans live in poverty, most breadwinners among them have jobs, and some have two or more. The numbers seemingly measure only the economic gap, but on deeper reflection they indicate a disturbing trend: the diminishing of the middle class in America.
     Harley Shaiken writing for Washington’s Economic Policy Institute described the era, at least until this most recent slowdown, as the Great Disconnect where the economy grew while wages remained flat or even declined. Basically, the gains of productivity were not shared fairly within the economy.
     Productivity expanded by a vigorous 20 percent between 2000 and 2006, but real wages edged up only 2 percent during this period. Corporate profits more than doubled since 2001, jumping from 7 percent of national income to 12.2 percent in five years. The ratio of average CEO pay to average worker’s pay in 2006 reached 431 to 1. The gravy train pulled out of the station leaving most workers behind.
     Historians credit organized labor in great part for building the American middle class, and hence fostering fuller equality in society. While labor fought against child labor, it campaigned for the minimum wage, unemployment insurance, overtime pay, pensions, health care, safety laws, Social Security and Medicare. For every gain labor achieved, nonunion workers received a ripple effect of improvement as employers raised wages to avoid unionization.
     Whereas in the aftermath of World War II one in three workers belonged to unions, today only 12 percent of the workforce (7.4 percent of the private sector and 4.6 percent of government workers) is unionized. The union force that created the dream for a middle class society has not been strong enough to capture the gains of productivity for today’s workers. It could not set human and labor standards for free trade agreements that favor transnational corporations. As a result, jobs go overseas and wages stagnate.
     In addition, the decline of the labor movement has crippled the unions’ ability to shape public policy that currently shifts the tax burden away from the rich resulting in shrinking revenues for health care, education and infrastructure projects that benefit the middle class.
     Over 20 years ago, the U.S. Catholic bishops issued an economic pastoral letter, “Economic Justice for All.” The extreme free market proponents roundly criticized their teaching about limitations on property rights, because the bishops emphasized accountability toward all the stakeholders that produce wealth in society: workers, managers, shareholders, vendors and the local community.
     To build back the middle class means to rethink the rules weaving our social fabric. A 2006 poll conducted by Peter Hart Associates found 58 percent of non-managerial working Americans would join a union if they could, but employers currently possess disproportionate power to prevent a successful union drive.
     The pendulum needs to swing back to labor for a fairer society. Also, the tax cuts since 2001 need special scrutiny to avoid contributing to the rise of an American aristocracy with more billionaires. Finally, within the definition of wealth must come a sense of community and a respect for creation.
     Rethinking our social fabric ultimately means identifying the threads to weave the common good for a just society.
     (Father John Rausch is a Glenmary priest who writes, teaches and organizes in Appalachia.)

Resolve to work for common good this Lent
By Fr. John S. Rausch
February 8 , 2008
     Franklin-Covey, a company specializing in personal effectiveness training, conducted its third annual New Year’s Resolutions Survey by polling 15,031 customers. The respondents’ top three resolutions for 2008: 1. Get out of debt or save money, 2. Lose weight, and 3. Develop a healthy habit like exercise or healthy eating.
     The survey further reported only 23 percent keep their goals for a year and fully 35 percent break their New Year’s resolutions by the end of January. More than a third said they were too busy to change, and another third shrugged off being committed to them.
     Some resolutions on their top 10 list would directly impact loved ones, like Number 6: Spend more time with family and friends, or Number 9: Break an unhealthy habit (e.g. smoking, alcohol, overeating.) Other resolutions would further a career, like Number 4: Get organized, or Number 10: Change employment.
     While personal improvement appeals to everyone, people of faith might pause and ask how these resolutions address the biting problems of the world. Is self-improvement another expression of narcissism, or can self-improvement be intentionally linked to the common good?
     In short, at the end of 2008 will people be wealthier and look more like fashion models, or will society radiate more human compassion wrapped in a healthier environment with fewer people living in poverty?
     Eric Reece, author of “Lost Mountain,” thinks that 2007 will be remembered as the year Americans finally realized the urgency of the global environmental crisis. Last year, Al Gore and the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change won the Nobel Peace Prize.
     Also last year, scientists learned that the Arctic ice cap is melting faster than previously thought. Recently, the phrase “ecological footprint” entered our popular lexicon to highlight the amount of nature needed for our unsustainable consumption choices (Google “Ecological Footprint Quiz.”)
     Frequently, resolutions that serve the common good prove compatible with those for personal improvement. A resolution to recycle, for example, will lessen our ecological footprint while encouraging a review of our consumption choices as we sort the bottles and containers.
     Turning off lights will save money while sparing the destruction of Appalachia through mountaintop removal. Walking when possible will preserve the atmosphere while adding a few steps of exercise.
     However, an emphasis on personal improvement tends to overlook the demands of the larger community. Violence continues to grip our society. At Virginia Tech 33 people were killed in April, 2007, and six months before, five Amish girls were murdered in Pennsylvania. The challenge: To build a culture of non-violence and reconciliation.
     Since the average American child views approximately 12,000 murders on television by adolescence, what’s the alternative to teaching problem-solving by killing, war and capital punishment? For one thing, fasting from violent TV would offer time for analysis through reading, study and contemplation.
     Ultimately, when more people resolve to get involved and reach out to socially troubled and isolated individuals, our schools and malls will be safer from rampage murders.
Finally, the plight of 37 million Americans in poverty cannot be overcome by one individual’s resolution. However, two public policies would help: universal health care and a path to legalization for undocumented immigrants as recommended by the U.S. Catholic bishops. Both policy changes will require considerable effort, but for someone wanting better employment, these goals represent meaningful work.
     By January’s end, most New Year’s resolutions fade. For people of faith Lent, which starts in early February, seems an appropriate time to see past the vanity of personal improvement goals and resolve to work for the common good.
(Father John Rausch is a Glenmary priest who writes, teaches and organizes in Appalachia.)

Bishops advocate ‘responsible transition’ out of Iraq
By Fr. John S. Rausch
January 11, 2008
     When the church beatified Franz Jagerstatter on Oct. 26, 2007, it telegraphed an alternative message to a world too easily provoked to war. Political leaders can get it wrong. An individual’s conscience, formed by an intense and prayerful study of the Gospel, remains the final arbiter of human action.
     Jagerstatter, an Austrian farmer, refused induction into the German army during World War II, because he knew the war was unjust. No fewer than two priests and one bishop reminded him about his duty to his widowed mother, his wife and three small children, yet he refused military service. When the Nazis guillotined him in 1944, Franz Jagerstatter became the only layman in Germany executed as a conscientious objector (CO).
     Today, a growing number of U.S. military personnel are opting for CO status in light of the Iraq War. While the official number of formal applications for CO status remains low, 425 between 2002 to 2006, veterans opposing the war charge the actual number seeking CO status has been underreported due to the difficult application process and peer pressure. Still, military policy recognizes the religious and moral beliefs of service personnel can evolve to a conscientious objection to war.
     This Iraq War began under the darkest cloud of moral uncertainty. Recall that John Paul II had grave moral reservations from the start. At the time Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, as quoted in 30 Days (April, 2003), summarized the pope’s position saying, “Reasons sufficient for unleashing a war against Iraq did not exist.”
     The administration’s paean about the world being safer without Saddam Hussein ignored the moral principle: “the ends do not justify the means.” With no discovery of WMDs (weapons of mass destruction), the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, the use of torture and the ignition of sectarian violence seemingly exacerbated by the U.S. occupation of Iraq, military personnel could easily have the needed epiphany to push them to seek CO status.
     The U.S. Catholic bishops this past November advocated a “responsible transition” out of Iraq. They rejected the polarizing caricatures of “stay the course” and “cut and run.” They also counseled against establishing permanent military bases in Iraq, or controlling Iraqi oil resources. Bishop William Skylstad, U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) president said, “Our nation must now focus more on the ethics of exit than on the ethics of intervention.”
     The ethics of exit underscores the U.S. obligation to address the humanitarian crisis it helped create. To build the peace means to repair the damage. Currently, two million Iraqis have fled their country, including 40 percent of all professionals and 33 percent of all doctors. Another two million Iraqis are displaced within their country, allowing only 30 percent of Iraqi children to attend school last year.
     On the home front, a relatively small percentage of the American people are assuming the greatest burdens of this war. With the number of U.S. soldiers killed approaching 4,000 and almost 30,000 wounded, many of the 160,000 U.S. troops are serving their second, third, or even fourth combat tours.
     The prolonged overseas tours of duty predictably are stressing marriages and increasing the incidents of post-traumatic stress disorder. Dealing with the destruction around them and the stress within them, soldiers must form their consciences about war.
Bishop Skyltsad said, “Our nation must also make provisions for those who in conscience exercise their right to conscientious objection or selective conscientious objection.”
     At Sunday liturgy, people of faith frequently pray for the safety of our troops. Perhaps the petitions need to include those in the military suffering moral anguish who feel this war is wrong.
(Father John Rausch is a Glenmary priest who writes, teaches and organizes in Appalachia.)

Single-payer system for health care sounds good
By Fr. John S. Rausch
November 23 , 2007
     Michael Moore’s movie, “Sicko,” opens with a man sewing up his own leg-wound because he lacks health insurance. The audience then learns that 18,000 Americans without health insurance die each year. Those with insurance still face a managed care system that gives a bonus to doctors with a high rate of treatment-denials.
     One doctor confesses in her testimony that in 1987 she denied a man a necessary operation that caused his death. Her company told her she was “not denying care, just denying payment.”
     At my video store, “Sicko” was tagged “comedy.” Given that the movie unabashedly promotes universal health care to save lives, is Michael Moore a comedian or a contemporary moralist?
     The numbers reveal a sick medical delivery system getting sicker. Reuters reports the number of Americans lacking health insurance rose to 47 million, a spike of 8.6 million from 2000 to 2006. For workers, erosion in employer-provided health insurance registered its sixth straight year of decline leaving just 71 percent of the workforce with health insurance, down from 75 percent in 2000.
     With so many Americans uninsured, the U.S. still has the most expensive health care system in the world. In 2004 U.S. per capita spending on health care averaged $6,280, which amounted to 16 percent of GDP. In comparison, other countries with universal health care spent far less staying healthy: Canada 10 percent, Australia 9 percent and England 7 percent.
     Because our patchwork medical delivery system misses people, we rank poorly in the World Health Organization’s latest survey that puts the U.S. as 37th among nations for quality health care. Our infant mortality rate with 77 babies on average dying every day in the U.S. rates us 42nd in the world. Life expectancy is shorter in the U.S. than all but 34 countries. Canadians with universal health care live three years longer than we do.
     In essence, universal health care is neither an economic nor health issue. It is a moral issue. The Catholic Health Association (CHA), rooted in the church’s social teachings, maintains that health care remains the service of healing that can never simply be a business. To affirm human dignity health care cannot merely be a consumer good, but must be a “birth right,” hence, a human right.
     A strictly market based medical system has failed to deliver. The free market approach has created a two-class system with some patients receiving the most advanced medical care in the world and others going without.
     Talking with primary health providers in clinics throughout Appalachia – the ones who treat the uninsured and people not covered by Medicare or Medicaid, I hear resounding support for a single-payer system (SPS) for health care.
     With more than half of America’s low-wage workers (those making less than $20,000 a year) without health insurance, people of faith are seeing universal health care as a matter of justice that could be addressed by SPS. It eliminates out-of-pocket payments, preserves free choice of providers and establishes public accountability.
     SPS is not socialized medicine, but a government-run payment system. The plan pays the medical provider directly without relying on an insurance intermediary. Currently between 15 to 30 percent of health premiums in the private sector go to overhead and profits, while a single-payer system, like Medicare, spends only 2 percent of its revenue on administrative costs.
     When one million people file for bankruptcy each year because of medical bills – with 68 percent of them having health insurance when they filed, the system is sick. Advocating for SPS represents the needed therapy for this strained system.
(Father John Rausch is a Glenmary priest who writes, teaches and organizes in Appalachia.)

Commons generally provide equal access to services
By Fr. John S. Rausch
November 2 , 2007
     In 1903 John Muir took President Teddy Roosevelt on a three-day camping trip to the Yosemite wilderness. There among the ancient sequoias and cascading waterfalls, Muir convinced T.R. to preserve the beauty before them.
     Later Roosevelt would argue the concept of democracy includes future generations, because it would be undemocratic to diminish the nation’s resources for present profit: “We do not intend our natural resources to be exploited by the few against the interests of the many.”
     A millennium and a half before, in 528 C.E., Roman Emperor Justinian proclaimed, “By the law of nature these things are common to all humanity: the air, running water, the sea and consequently the shores of the sea.” Justinian’s code, widely known as the Public Trust Doctrine, insured the heritage of all citizens by protecting the commons.
     The commons describe the many resources we own collectively. Some commons represent physical assets like the global atmosphere, ecosystems, mountains, roads, wildlife and clean water, while other commons comprise public institutions like libraries, museums, schools and government agencies.
     Unlike markets, where people need money to participate, the commons generally provide equal access to a resource. The children of the poor can enjoy the playground at a city park, while the kids of the wealthy may own their own Jungle Jim set. This access to a park represents a civic or social right and not a privilege enjoyed by only the elite.
     Today, however, the commons face a threat to their very existence by an untrammeled spirit of privatization. After three decades of portraying government as inept, beginning with President Reagan’s famous statement, “Government is the problem,” privatization has become the solution.
     Advocates of privatization see laissez-faire individualism and free market economics as offering efficiency, smaller-sized government and greater individual choice – appealing sound bites. In reality, the commons pass into private hands, especially to corporations, and the people, not government, lose.
     Indiana leased its 157-mile Indiana Toll Road with hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks to a foreign consortium for the next 75 years for $3.8 billion. Economist Roger Skurski valued the road over that period at $11.38 billion.
After 2010 the consortium can raise the tolls by a specified percentage each year which drivers can either pay or drive the alternative, clogged circuitous routes between Toledo and Chicago.
     The myth persists: corporations are inherently more efficient than government. That comparison mixes grapefruits with avocados. In the global economy, corporations pledge loyalty to their shareholders, not necessarily to the country or the common good.
Corporate efficiency comes largely from paying lower wages to employees and occasionally from shortcutting the suppliers they buy from and cheapening the products they deliver.      The savings from this efficiency not infrequently find their way into extravagant executive compensations and higher profits.
Conversely, government has an obligation to serve everyone, including those needing higher cost services, such as rural postal patrons. Responsible legislators using the ability-to-pay principle can raise taxes to insure delivering public services and preserving the commons for all.
     If lawmakers avoid the tax debate and choose privatization, corporations will cherry-pick the most profitable parts of a public service and leave the most costly for government.
Government at all levels is experiencing the push for corporate takeovers in schools, parks, prisons, hospitals, tax collection, environmental protection, police work and military forces.
     During this assault on the commons, people of faith need to ask in a moral context: are there any functions, or responsibilities, of society that should never be outsourced for profit – but rather preserved for future generations?
(Father John Rausch is a Glenmary priest who writes, teaches and organizes in Appalachia.)

Don't look away from Darfur
By Fr. John S. Rausch
August 31 , 2007
     Nothing quenches a thirst like cool water, whether it’s PepsiCo’s Aquafina (13 percent of the bottled water market), or Coca-Cola’s Desina (11percent of the market), or a specialty water from Nestle. Every day millions of Americans grab a clear plastic bottle of water from the cooler at a convenience store, or pull a case of it from the shelves at their local supermarket. Toting water has become as indispensable for some people as carrying a cell phone.
     The $15 billion a year industry has grown from a marketing approach evoking purity, natural springs and the great outdoors. In 1976 the average American drank 1.6 gallons of bottled water, but 30 years later consumption jumped to 28.3 gallons. Within a decade bottled water is projected to surpass the current 52.9 gallons per year consumption rate of soda.
     While drinking water rather than soda offers positive health benefits, the delivery of individual servings of water in polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles brings a headache to landfills. Americans used 50 billion PET bottles last year, about 167 per person, but recycled only 23 percent of them. Landfills got the other 38 billion. Add to this the pollution from moving one billion bottles of water weekly by ship, truck and train, and bottled water represents a genuine environmental concern.
     Fiji Water comes from the islands of Fiji, which lie roughly 8,000 miles from New York.      The bottles for the Fiji Water nearly double the trip because first they are brought to Fiji, filled, then shipped to their final destination. Transportation represents fully half the wholesale cost of Fiji Water. In addition, the Fiji Water plant further impacts the environment because it operates 24 hours a day requiring uninterrupted electricity that the factory supplies with three large generators run by diesel fuel.
     The bottled water closest to home comes from Aquafina and Dasani because they start with the local municipal water throughout the country. Both Pepsi and Coca-Cola add an energy-intensive filtration process to insure purity and consistency. As researcher Charles Fishman writes: “They are recleaning already-clean tap water.”
     Despite safe, clean municipal water in the U.S. costing pennies per gallon, many consumers still choose to buy water at twice the price of gasoline. For some, bottled water represents convenience, for others, status and for still others, matters of health.
     The marketplace sees purchasing bottled water as a consumer choice, but people of faith reject the “it’s-my-money” argument. Water “constitutes an essential element of life” – according to Benedict XVI’s 2007 Message for World Water Day – and “water cannot be treated as just another commodity.” The principles of subsidiarity and solidarity paint a larger picture about the global water supply.
     Worldwide, one billion people lack safe water and everyday over 3,000 children die from diseases caused by unhealthy water. While Fiji Water ships one million bottles of water per day, more than half the people in Fiji lack safe, reliable drinking water. By purchasing bottled water that promotes profits over the public good, i.e. the privatization of water, the consumer can encourage the disregard for local community rights (subsidiarity) to provide safe drinking water for all.
     In addition, solidarity requires examining present patterns of water delivery with its pollution and waste in light of future generations, because today’s convenience might produce tomorrow’s hangover.
     While promoting greater water drinking for health reasons, we can responsibly tap safe local supplies using additional filters and refillable bottles. If giving a cup of cold water brings God’s blessing (Mat 10:42), how much more will insuring safe water for all with the minimum of pollution?
(Father John Rausch is a Glenmary priest who writes, teaches and organizes in Appalachia.)
(Father John Rausch is a Glenmary priest who writes, teaches and organizes in Appalachia.)

Don't look away from Darfur
By Fr. John S. Rausch
July 20 , 2007
      Falling refrigerators dropped from planes plus old car chassis and kegs of nails raining down on innocent civilians during aerial bombardments are cited as some of the Sudanese government’s weird war tactics in the “Unity Statement” of Save Darfur, a coalition of over one hundred groups including the United States Catholic Conference of Bishops.
     The bizarre bombings coupled with the more horrifying strategems of razing villages, raping women, murdering boys and attacking food and water supplies describe the atrocities perpetrated on villagers by government troops and their shadow military partners known as the Janjaweed.
     Yet again, the world watches in horror. This time Darfur approaches a tragic genocide similar to Rwanda’s a decade earlier.
     The quick facts: over 400,000 Darfurian civilians have died – an estimated 150,000 from violent attacks and 250,000 from disease and starvation. About 2.8 million have been displaced within Sudan and another 250,000 have fled abroad, mainly to Chad where they face further violence.
     Ninety percent of the villages of Darfur’s targeted ethnic groups have been destroyed. Approximately 3.6 million people are dependent on international humanitarian assistance, but a third of those in need are beyond the reach of humanitarian workers.
     The bloodletting began in 2003 when rebels from Darfur challenged the government for genuine political representation, investment in their impoverished region and a share of potential oil revenues. Sudan’s government, widely considered one of the most repressive regimes in the world, responded by arming and supporting a militia, the Janjaweed, to fight on its side against the rebel insurgents.
     The Janjaweed, a colloquialism translated as “horsemen with guns,” or “evil horsemen,” represents a mob of armed thugs more than a militia that has rampaged through villages and towns killing and raping.
     Drawn mainly from pastoral peoples of different tribes, the Janjaweed are attacking the farmers in the Darfur region to gain access to land and water for their herds. The government for its part promotes regional instability to maintain its grip on power and its eye on oil reserves.
     The international community raises largely ceremonial protests, while jealously guarding its individual self-interests. The world community has indeed supplied humanitarian aid, but has stopped short of exerting substantive political clout.
     Critics charge that although the U.S. has labeled the situation “genocide,” behind the scenes it avoids spoiling relationships with Khartoum because it wants useful information about terrorists in the region.
     China, on the other hand, derives fully 10 percent of its oil from Sudan. In terms of trade, Sudan represents China’s third largest trading partner in Africa, and since the 1990s China has sold arms and weapons to Sudan. Human rights organizations have reported sighting Chinese-made small arms weapons and military trucks used by government and Janjaweed forces in Darfur.
     The enormity of the suffering in Darfur staggers the mind, but Martin Luther King Jr. warns us against “the paralysis of analysis.” Save Darfur suggests a few doable steps: 1) send money to appropriate humanitarian relief organizations; 2) divest in companies investing in Sudan; and 3) petition Congress to call on China to pressure the Khartoum government to end the violence.
     For people of faith, charity demands we help the victims of Darfur immediately, yet justice beckons us to step back and develop greater foresight to prevent future Darfurs.      What are the humanitarian principles that should trigger economic and political responses before a crisis develops, even at the expense of our own self-interest?
     How can we utilize the International Criminal Court to deter genocide and war crimes? How can we stop looking away when the crisis is not in our own backyard?
(Father John Rausch is a Glenmary priest who writes, teaches and organizes in Appalachia.)

Problem: Not guns but people with guns
By Fr. John S. Rausch
May 25, 2007
     Virginia Tech University recently conferred 27 diplomas posthumously on the students killed in the April 16 shootings. The granting of degrees to those slain represented another step in healing the brokenness that gun violence brought to that campus.
     Although the 32 deaths at Virginia Tech represented the deadliest shooting in U.S. history, commentators quickly recalled the 13 deaths at Columbine High School in 1999 and the 5 Amish girls killed in Pennsylvania last fall. Analysts ask: why.
     Some shooters appear mentally disturbed, some loners, some rebellious and angry.      The common thread: everyone of the shooters had easy access to high-powered firearms.
     The number of guns in the U.S. has quadrupled from 54 million in 1950 to over 222 million today including 76 million handguns. The U.S. far exceeds the industrialized nations in gun deaths because of its level of lethal firepower. More than 30,000 people die each year from gunshot wounds through murder, suicide and accidents.
     However, the National Opinion Research Center reports that currently gun ownership continues to decline as support for firearms control rises, even after 9/11. Whereas in the mid 1970s modern household gun ownership peaked at 55 percent, by 2006 that number dropped to 35 percent. Researchers suspect that fewer people hunt for recreation and, with a declining crime rate, fewer home owners buy guns for protection.
     People of faith view violence in a holistic way. The U.S. Catholic bishops in their 1994 statement, “Confronting a Culture of Violence: A Catholic Framework for Action,” said,      “Violence in our culture is fed by multiple forces . . . We have to address simultaneously declining family life and the increasing availability of deadly weapons, the lure of gangs and the slavery of addiction, the absence of real opportunity, budget cuts adversely affecting the poor, and the loss of moral values.”
     The root causes of violence challenge the very economic fabric of society. Poverty breeds violence. Lack of decent jobs seeds frustration. The widening income gap leaves those left behind feeling like losers.
     The forces of globalization with its outsourcing of middle income jobs and its undercutting of union strength diminish family life when the market demands more than one wage earner for the family to survive.
     Weakened family life invites the pseudo-security of gang membership, and additive substances offer a quick escape from harsh life choices and economic failure.
Society in general contributes to this moral breakdown by solving problems with violence.      Abortion and capital punishment appear as quick fixes. The U.S. military budget now ranks larger than the combined defense budgets of every other nation in the world, and our foreign policy makers rely more on the stick than negotiations, thus modeling problem-solving with violence.
     Heavy doses of violence spew forth from the media, TV, movies and video games. Child advocates claim the average U.S. child views 12,000 to 15,000 murders on television by adolescence, and talk-radio regularly traffics in anti-black, anti-Arab, anti-gay and anti-female rhetoric that further coarsens society.
     Fear of terrorism funds the arms manufacturers that ever increases the budget of the military. Fear for personal safety enriches the gun industry, while its lobbyists campaign to neutralize state and federal gun laws.
     Then, when someone tragically murders multiple numbers of people at a school or mall, public analysis turns to mental health issues and psychopathic behavior-topics that need attention in our society without waiting for a violent act.
     Yet few acknowledge that the anti-social or psychotic behavior of the perpetrator caused such carnage and death, because he had such easy access to guns.
(Father John Rausch is a Glenmary priest who writes, teaches and organizes in Appalachia.)