"Rediscovering Values On Wall Street, Main Street, and Your Street: A Moral Compass for the New Economy." Jim Wallis

 

Jim Wallis

A commentator on ethics, religion and public life, Jim Wallis is founder-editor of Sojourners magazine. His Christian commitment to social justice evolved from his student years in the civil rights and anti-war movements. In '95, he helped form Call to Renewal, a national federation of churches, denominations and faith-based organizations across the political spectrum, working to overcome poverty. Wallis taught at Harvard's Divinity School and Kennedy School of Government, on faith, politics, and society, and is a best-selling author.



INTERVIEW WITH TAVIS SMILEY ON PBS
airdate January 19, 2010

Tavis: Always pleased to welcome Jim Wallis to this program. The president and editor-in-chief of "Sojourners" is also a best-selling author whose latest is called "Rediscovering Values On Wall Street, Main Street, and Your Street: A Moral Compass for the New Economy." Jim Wallis, good to have you back on this program.

Jim Wallis: Good to see you, friend.

Tavis: You doing all right?

Wallis: I'm doing great.

Tavis: Good to have you here. When I first saw the book, "Rediscovering Values," my first thought was, is it too late?

Wallis: Well, I think the country is ready for a conversation about values. These town meetings began in my home town of Detroit (unintelligible) and the meeting may not be ready but the country is, because underneath this economic crisis there's a values crisis. So we won't get to an economic recovery without a moral recovery too.

The question they all want to ask is when will the crisis end? I'm saying that's the wrong question. It's how will the crisis change us? That's the real question.

Tavis: Tell me more about the link between the lack of values and the economic downturn.

Wallis: Well, this is Wall Street, Main Street, and your street, so just the news this week on Wall Street, I'd say it's a bad morality play. In Detroit, my hometown, 30 percent unemployment. In reality, one in two workers are looking for a job.

They got billions of dollars in bonuses coming down in the next two weeks. Tavis, it's being called a scandal. I say it's a sin of biblical proportions. There's a parable that you know - Jesus says about the kingdom, here's a master, he has a servant who owes him a debt. The servant says, "I can't pay it, give me time," and he forgives it.

The servant goes out and somebody owes him some money, and he won't forgive it. The master brings him back and says, "You're going to jail." Well, the banks have done that. There's a meltdown, and so you might say we extended grace to them.

They're now extending grace to nobody else. So Bank of America, turns out their bonus pool, post-salary compensation, there's so much money there it could have resolved the foreclosure crisis by itself for two million people, but they have so far adjusted 100 loans.

So Joy and I, my wife, we just fired Bank of America. We took our little account out of that bank and we're putting it in a community bank. There's now a little mini-movement growing to move your money - there's even a website, MoveYourMoney.info.

So the banks say they're too big to fail; I say let's make them smaller. So on Wall Street there's this morality play going on - banks, bailouts, and bonuses - but I think it's more than that. It's a cultural thing. In the book I talk about these new maxims that have taken over - greed is good, it's all about me, and I want it now. Those maxims destroy economies but also cultures, families, and I would say our souls.

Then I counter that with some old virtues like enough is enough, we're in this together. And I love the Native American notion of you evaluate decisions today by their impact on the seventh generation out. Now, that would change things.

Tavis: I see the greed as a good concept on Wall Street. What role do we play, everyday people, in rediscovering our own values?

Wallis: Well, my Depression-era parents, they wouldn't have spent money they didn't have for things they didn't need, and that's become - wealth may not trickle down, but bad habits do, bad values do.

So we've got to look at Wall Street here, I'm pretty tough on them, but also at ourselves - look in the mirror here. So I think crisis gives us a chance to rethink and reset. This could be a reset time. All the pain and suffering in Detroit, for example, is going to be in vain if we go back to business as usual. So how do we do a new normal?

In the book I have at the end 20 moral exercises about - I coined a phrase in D.C. a while back, I said, "Budgets are moral documents." Well, now I'm saying calendars are moral documents too. I'm saying sit down with your spouse, your closest people - what are your life priorities? Then look at your budget and your calendar and see how it matches up. It's kind of a wake-up call. It's a gift to be simple, as the song goes, the old Shaker hymn sung at Barack's inauguration.

Values like simplicity, stewardship, patience, modesty, are religious and spiritual values, and they're real correctives now. Jesus said, "Don't be anxious for what you eat, drink, and put on." Advertising says, "Be anxious all the time, worry all the time."

So we have become really trapped by this notion, keeping up with the Joneses. How about making sure the Joneses are okay? I think a lot of us have to look at this, and this could be a chance to rebuild some sense of community.

I talk in the book about changing our habits of the heart. You've had great shows about clean energy, so I have a chapter there - the clean energy economy. But we'll have to rewire the energy group but also rewire ourselves - our habits, our practices, our expectations. Return to a family matters culture.

I'm a Little League baseball coach for my 11-year-old and six-year-old. All my Little League stories are in the book. So a lot of people I'm reading are doing more, a "Times" article said, but spending less, so returning to family and relationships.

I think we can redeem this, all the pain and suffering, if we reset, both personally, communally, and then in Washington, then on Wall Street.

Tavis: I'm glad you said Washington, because I want to add - I want to be presumptuous and add one more street to your subtitle, although it's really not a street, it's an avenue.

Wallis: Pennsylvania.

Tavis: Pennsylvania Avenue. So "Rediscovering Values on Wall Street, Main Street, Your Street, and Pennsylvania Avenue." I raise that because the last time we actually saw each other in person I was at your big conference in Washington where you were talking about ending poverty. You've dedicated the majority of your life to talking about ending and eradicating poverty. It can be done. There are plans - you have a plan, others have laid out plans, I've discussed it on this show about how we end poverty.

With all due respect, and those who have watched this program know I've raised this before, this potential, respectfully, has not gotten serious about ending poverty. This Wall Street stuff you're talking about - he did that. Now here in the second year of his presidency he understands, he's said it himself, Rahm Emanuel said it the other day, they get it now: jobs, jobs, jobs.

But how do we rediscover our values when the people we elect and send to Washington have not yet - I don't want to say figured out. It's not about figuring it out, first and foremost. It's one, about making it a priority to end poverty. It can be done. Nobody in Washington talks about this.

Wallis: That's right. Well, as you know, I've known Barack for 10 years, before he was president, and when he was elected he said right afterwards, "To accomplish anything important I will need the wind of a movement at my back." So I wrote him a note that day and said, "Yeah, and probably one at your front, to clear the way and pull you along sometimes, because presidents need that."

I've heard you say that Lincoln needed Frederick Douglass, Johnson and Kennedy needed King, FDR needed that labor movement. So a political movement elected Barack Obama. It hasn't yet become a social movement to make those things occur.

I was on Pennsylvania Avenue before Christmas with some folks who'd been foreclosed, and these were first-time homebuyers, mostly Latino and African American, who'd played by the rules. They'd saved their money; they even qualified for fixed mortgage rates and got tricked into these exotic time-bomb mortgages.

So I was supposed to be the religious guy coming up and bringing moral authority. The woman who spoke before me, Mercy Martinez, and she cried, and across the street is the White House. The president's meeting with the bankers while we're having a press conference, from Wall Street, and here's Bank of America right down the street, and here's Treasury.

I just got mad. I just got mad. I did that biblical parable. This is the parable of the unmerciful bankers, and this economic recovery has been aimed more at bailing out the people who caused this when the people who have suffered from it have not gotten the same treatment.

Tavis: But we apparently aren't throwing them out the temple.

Wallis: The emperor has no clothes here. The market's become a golden calf. The market is god. The market's fine if it stays within a moral framework. Even Adam Smith talked about the invisible hand of the market making things coming out okay.

Well, things haven't come out okay and the invisible hand has let go of the common good and our values. Smith said without a moral framework the market really can't function properly, and Schumpeter, Joseph Schumpeter, the Austrian economist, said, "When there's no ethical sensibility the market ends up devouring every other sector and finally ends up devouring itself."

That's what we've seen. The book says relationships matter between bankers and lendees and people - employers. Social sins will find you out. So Gandhi had two of his deadliest social sins: Wealth without work, commerce without morality. The common good is our own good. The book is trying to say let's start a national conversation, and I'm feeling a lot of people eager for it.

Wall Street people are coming to New York and they kind of snuck in like Nicodemus at night to talk to me sometimes. (Laughter) They say, when all the wealth is leverage, not producing anything of any substance, when our economy's based on 70 percent is consumption, this is a bad foundation, infrastructure, either physically or morally.

So I think we've got to really examine Pennsylvania - we should add that, we'll just write that in - Pennsylvania, because the administration, I think, has got to be very tough now about the financial regulations debate coming up and jobs have got to be central here.

Tavis: If we do not discover our moral compass in this new economy, what happens?

Wallis: Well, I think it's a disaster, a squandered opportunity. Business as usual, we'll just be right back again where we were. I think we're going to be in some serious trouble down the line. As you know, jobs - wages have been stagnant for a lot of people.

I talk in the book, there's two chapters. One is called "When the Gaps Get too Big," so the two peak times for the big gap between the top and the bottom, CEO salaries and the average worker, is two times - the year before the Great Depression and the year before this great recession.

I would say in God's economy, two principles: There is enough if we share it, so these gaps, they destroy relationships and covenants and social contracts, and people think things aren't fair anymore.

The other thing is called listening to the canaries. As you know, the coal miners took canaries down in the mine with them, because these canaries have a sensitive respiratory system. When they start coughing and wheezing you know the air is toxic.

Tavis: Time to get out.

Wallis: Time to get out. So a West Virginia state senator told me his dad was a coal miner, and what he told me was, "The canaries are a metaphor for the poor in all of our religious traditions. If we don't listen to them, when the poor begin to cough and wheeze and choke, as you were saying, we're all going to be in trouble soon."

Now the poor are not the "other," they're in the church and the pew, our friends and neighbors and relatives. This is a big shock for mainstream churches now. If we don't listen to the canaries, we haven't listening to the warning signs, now the air we breathe is all toxic, it's unhealthy.

So it's a values question. The crisis is a structural crisis, so we need some structural solutions. It's also a spiritual crisis, so we need self-regulation as well as social regulation. If we don't do that we will have missed an opportunity and we'll just keep spinning out of control here.

Tavis: The new text from perennial "New York Times" best-selling author Jim Wallis is called "Rediscovering Values On Wall Street, Main Street, and Your Street." It's a book I highly, highly recommend. Jim Wallis, always an honor to have you on this program.

Wallis: It's a blessing to be with you, my friend.
Tavis: Blessing to have you here.