By Michael Lerner

THE FEAR IS PALPABLE. THOSE OF us in the non-profit sector feel it deeply already. With predictions of collapse surrounding us, many magazines are reporting drops in subscribers, and many change-oriented organizations are suffering from a drop in membership or donations. And it's likely to get worse. There are predictions that even with the hundreds of billions likely to be spent to ameliorate some aspects of what we face, there might be as many as five million people who will be losing their homes in the mortgage crisis, and millions more losing their jobs as small businesses collapse. And if the price of oil remains high, there will be tremendous suffering next winter when many people can't afford home heating oil.

Unfortunately, none of the major political candidates has been willing to speak honestly about why all this is happening, if they even know. They often seem to be speaking the same language as the media--discussing the economic crisis and gas prices as though they were acts of nature or God, out of our hands completely. They are not.

Acting as though these economic realities had fallen from heaven obscures the source of the problem: materialism and greed which have become a run-away epidemic in the contemporary capitalist world in general, and in the United States in particular. The oil crisis may be partly rooted in the desire of the Chinese and Indians for standards of material well-being comparable to that in the West, but it's mostly rooted in the speculative trading of oil futures that has artificially and wildly jacked up prices. The oil companies have not sought to use their super profits to lower the cost of oil, but like the bandits they are, have managed to bank some $11 billion in profits in one quarter of 2008! Without a media or politicians to articulate our legitimate rage at these profiteers, people feel helpless and alone and are willing to grab at phony solutions like offshore drilling and tapping into the national oil reserves despite the widespread environmental destruction those acts will cause.

The collapse of the mortgage and banking industries has largely been a product of speculative investments as banks and mortgage companies sought to make super profits on their mortgage loans by turning them into monetary forms that could be traded and against which others could borrow money. It is this speculation that has been a major source of the problem. (For a fuller discussion, check out our website at www.Tikkun.org/current.)

For decades we've watched passively as poor people and people of color have lost jobs, and faced a weakened net of social protection in the United States as the conservatives seemed to convince the majority that the marketplace was fair, and that hence people who were not doing well had no one to blame but themselves. It was wrong to over-tax rich people, we were told, because they had taken the risk of investing in projects that could fail, so the public had no claim on their huge profits when they succeeded. The bailouts that the marketplace have required in the past, and now once again with the bailout of Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac and Wall Street investment firm Bear Stearns, demonstrate the emptiness of this argument. The reality? When poor people fail to flourish economically, the government shrugs its shoulders and gives a pittance of relief. But when super-giant firms fail, and the wealthy are endangered, the government, with the votes of many erstwhile conservatives, jumps to the rescue. It reminds me of an old saying: "When is it a 'recession'? When you lose your job. When is it a 'depression'? When I lose MY job!" Too many of the middle class people who are suffering today were all too willing to allow others to suffer when it was "just" in a community of "people of color" or people with a "lower class status." Now, they are upset when it is they whom the larger society is abandoning.

What can be done? Well, although there are many short-term solutions (check our website www.Tikkun.org for some of the recent discussion about such solutions), the real answer is this: when a private firm or enterprise fails, and it's socially valuable to keep that firm alive, then the U.S. government should take it over and nationalize it. That's what should happen to Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac and to the investment firms and banks that have needed our tax monies to bail them out. Or, let the firms remain in private hands, but let the taxpayers automatically get a share of the annual after-tax profits commensurate with their contribution towards the bailout. And we should bail out individuals at the same time as we bail out banks and energy corporations. And the corporations that extract U.S. gas and oil should not be allowed to make a profit off our natural resources except if all of those profits are 100% used to support public investment in alternative energy supplies.

So why isn't this at the center of the campaign? Why haven't Democrats passed laws to prohibit this speculation or to share the super profits of the oil and gas companies with the ordinary citizen? The answer is that all our thinking is constrained by the fear that if we talk about returning profits to our government or allowing government to set a "fair price" that we will be creating a socialist system. Well, I know that socialism "won't sell" in the United States, so instead let's call it shmoe-cialism or even fairness-ism. But be sure of this: if the speculators were in jail instead of running the economy, if super-rich people and institutions were fairly taxed instead of making out like bandits while so many of our fellow citizens suffer, we would get out of this crisis very quickly.

We are told that our fellow citizens would never support even shmoe-cialism, because they imagine that someday they will be rich themselves (do disabuse them of the fantasy) and that they can't feel empathy for others who are suffering (patently false). The truth is not that they don't feel identification with others, but that that part of themselves, their most generous and caring part, has been put down and made to feel "abnormal" so frequently throughout their lives that they don't feel ready to trust their own desires and think that they would just be making a fool of themselves to imagine a world in which people really took care of each other.

Here we get to the fundamental contradiction of antagonism to "big government." The whole point of having a democratic government originally was to provide a way for each of us to coordinate our activities and have this institution available to provide the kind of hands-on-caring that we couldn't do if we want to keep working and making a living. "Government" then, is the institution that should be the manifestation of our caring for each other. Instead, it has been largely shaped by the interests of the wealthy and the powerful, who use government to protect their own interests and honestly believe that their own interests are the public good. And as more and more people begin to see government failing to give a real priority to being an instrument of mutual caring, they get more and more incensed at having to pay taxes for this kind of reality. Unable to imagine any other reality as "realistic," many people decide that their only refuge is to resist taxation and support candidates who promise to lower their taxes.

Yet the underlying desire to be a caring person doesn't go away. Frustrated by the lack of any obvious way to be caring in the public sphere, millions of Americans flock to churches, synagogues, mosques, ashrams and civic institutions where they get an opportunity to actually act on their caring for each other. But these institutions lack the finances to make up for what government fails to do: protect the common good by taxing the super-profiteers like the oil-gas-military-industrial complex and criminalizing the behavior of the speculators that have ruined the mortgage market.

Until these dynamics are presented to the American people, the special interests (no, not workers organizing into unions to try to defend themselves from losing their jobs but the super-rich corporations and their corporate dominated mass media) will predominate and most people will feel powerless to do much. But the way to present this is by emphasizing the positive: that so many Americans really do care about each other, and that they are stunned when they watch the profiteers undeterred as they lead the society into economic crisis. But that stunning can eventually lead to cynicism and despair, to psychological depression, and even to an openness to fascistic solutions if they are not presented with the vision of a really comprehensive progressive vision.

That's one reason why we should be asking our elected officials, at least the ones we trust, to make this kind of analysis more central in the way that they discuss what is happening and what needs to be done, rather than keeping that discussion in vague and technocratic terms that avoid the central ethical issues that are always at the heart of the economy.

TIKKUN'S NOV/DEC ISSUE: In order to discuss the resilts of the election in Novermber, we are postponing going to press till a few days after the election. Assuming that there is a result and not a set of recounts as in 2000, you should be getting your next issue of Tikkun in early December, and then our next issue will come out in early December, and then our next issue will come out in early January.

*SDS IS BACK!*

Well, not the super-militant organization of 100,000 young people that played a major role in energizing the anti-war movement in the middle and late 1960s, but a much smaller version with the feel of SDS's first years from 1962-65. Tikkun staffer Will Pasley is a member, and you can find his account of their summer 2008 conference in D.C. at our website www.tikkun.org

Feel free to contact him at will@tikkun.org