Where Jesus served, we must, too
Tom Ehrich/Religion News Service
Issue date: 1/31/10 Section: Divine Intervention
(RNS) On an airplane bound for a family visit, I fly over Manhattan and New Jersey, where the financial geniuses who brought us the Great Recession are planning how to handle vast fortunes being heaped on them in year-end bonuses.
In a slight nod to public opinion, bonuses averaging nearly $600,000 and ranging up to eight figures are being paid this year mainly in stock, not cash. Not to worry. Despite worsening unemployment for everyone else, Wall Street's paychecks will soar back to pre-recession levels -- up 19 percent at JPMorgan Chase, for example -- as if the $700 billion federal bailout were a blip on someone else's radar.
Our flight soars above Rust Belt states where entire communities watch the post-industrial economy leave them behind and the fraud of "trickle-down economics" is revealed as the same old top-down plundering.
I know before landing that my home state of Indiana has turned strangely gray, with unemployed auto workers struggling, state services under budget pressure, cities imploding, strip malls empty. Not even the triumphant Colts can make this recession end.
We will land, of course, and will have to face headlines of disaster and the inescapable consequences of cruelty and plundering.
Take, for example, Haiti, where a massive earthquake has plunged the hemisphere's poorest country even deeper into despair and suffering. Millions are troubled by scenes from Haiti and are trying their best to respond. Governments waging war elsewhere are sending relief to Haiti, citizens are making donations, and soldiers and medical workers are flying in.
Little has changed, however, on Wall Street, where a vast chasm separates them from ragged Lazarus at the gate. Like the financiers who recently held their annual come-in-drag victory banquet at a posh hotel, they party on as if other people's misery weren't their concern.
For those who drink deeply from wealth they didn't create, human suffering is just one more "play" in the quest for gain. Even as Goldman Sachs' chief defended $20 billion in bonuses as necessary to retain key staff, it was revealed that those very staff had sold defective investments and then bet against anyone stupid enough to purchase them.
In a slight nod to public opinion, bonuses averaging nearly $600,000 and ranging up to eight figures are being paid this year mainly in stock, not cash. Not to worry. Despite worsening unemployment for everyone else, Wall Street's paychecks will soar back to pre-recession levels -- up 19 percent at JPMorgan Chase, for example -- as if the $700 billion federal bailout were a blip on someone else's radar.
Our flight soars above Rust Belt states where entire communities watch the post-industrial economy leave them behind and the fraud of "trickle-down economics" is revealed as the same old top-down plundering.
I know before landing that my home state of Indiana has turned strangely gray, with unemployed auto workers struggling, state services under budget pressure, cities imploding, strip malls empty. Not even the triumphant Colts can make this recession end.
We will land, of course, and will have to face headlines of disaster and the inescapable consequences of cruelty and plundering.
Take, for example, Haiti, where a massive earthquake has plunged the hemisphere's poorest country even deeper into despair and suffering. Millions are troubled by scenes from Haiti and are trying their best to respond. Governments waging war elsewhere are sending relief to Haiti, citizens are making donations, and soldiers and medical workers are flying in.
Little has changed, however, on Wall Street, where a vast chasm separates them from ragged Lazarus at the gate. Like the financiers who recently held their annual come-in-drag victory banquet at a posh hotel, they party on as if other people's misery weren't their concern.
For those who drink deeply from wealth they didn't create, human suffering is just one more "play" in the quest for gain. Even as Goldman Sachs' chief defended $20 billion in bonuses as necessary to retain key staff, it was revealed that those very staff had sold defective investments and then bet against anyone stupid enough to purchase them.
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