God bless the rich America

If ever there was a week to prove the ironic interplay of news stories in this country, the second week of this month was it.

First came the fall of that great crusader for Wall Street morality, New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, on charges he paid prostitutes as much as $80,000 for their services.

Then there was the impending collapse of the major investment bank Bear Stearns, and the $200 billion loan, guaranteed by us taxpayers, to bail out those inept (but influential) investors caught in the latest sub-prime mortgage debacle.

Finally came the outraged demands of newscasters asking presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama to explain sermons preached by his family’s pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, in which the pastor asked God to damn America for the suffering caused to black people by the wealthy white power-elite who run this country.

And all three events were made to order by the same wealthy power-elite the Rev. Wright was talking about. In one glorious week they brought down their enemy, Spitzer; got $200 billion from the taxpayers; and damaged Obama’s candidacy with his own preacher’s words. Yes, a very good week, all in all.

If you’re having a problem seeing the connections, you need only Google Greg Palast’s Web site to link the first two. Mr. Palast, a former investigator of financial fraud and author of the best-selling book “The Best Democracy Money Can Buy,” reports that “Spitzer was in Washington to launch a campaign to take on the Bush regime and the biggest financial powers on the planet.”

Palast quotes Spitzer as having written, “When history tells the story of the subprime lending crisis and recounts its devastating effects on the lives of so many innocent homeowners, the Bush administration will not be judged favorably.” Clearly, it was time to pull the plug on Spitzer, and it is tragic for this country that Spitzer made himself such an easy target for destruction.

OK, you say, but what’s this got to do with the Rev. Wright’s damning of America? Well, as Palast’s investigation reports, “73 percent of high-income black and Hispanic borrowers were given subprime loans versus 17 percent of similar-income whites. Dark-skinned borrowers aren’t stupid – they had no choice. They were ‘steered,’ as it’s called in the mortgage sharking business.”

In other words, what the Rev. Wright was ranting about is not the injustices of the civil rights 1960s – it’s the injustices that were going on when he gave those sermons, and that still go on today. If you were a black preacher seeing your community still exploited 40 years after Martin Luther King Jr. – and exploited by wealthy bankers worth millions or billions of dollars – wouldn’t you be waving your arms and crying out for justice, too?

Does this mean that the Rev. Wright hates America? No. It means he hates the fact that America’s wealthiest 1 percent hold all the cards and still go on robbing from the middle class and poor. It’s the middle class (soon to be poor, as things are going) that is right now being driven from their homes – and even from rentals mortgaged by landlords foreclosed upon.

Do you see the federal government rushing to help those folks who were steered into the subprime mortgage trap? No, but in a matter of hours the Fed came up with $200 billion to help the wealthy out of a run on their bank.

Which leads me to the question the Rev. Wright must ask every day: Has this country lost all sense of decency, honesty and justice in the distribution of assets, in the availability of health care and educational opportunity, in the equal legal treatment of its citizens? When we ask God to bless America, are we asking for a blessing only on the rich and powerful, or are we asking that “God’s will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven”? We are far from doing God’s will, it seems, and those chickens are coming home to roost. We all should pray that a new administration can, with God’s help, get us back on course before it’s too late.

Lee Witting is a staff chaplain at Eastern Maine Medical Center, pastor of the Union Street Brick Church in downtown Bangor, a doctoral candidate at Bangor Theological Seminary, and a Voices columnist for the Lifestyle section of the Bangor Daily News. He may be reached at leewitting@midmaine.com.