Last Thursday, George W. Bush declared "''there ought to be zero tolerance of people breaking the law during an emergency such as this, whether it be looting or price-gouging at the gasoline pump or taking advantage of charitable giving or insurance fraud."
The "ethics of looting" during a catastrophe will provide many a good topic for sermons for months to come. If you were without food and water for three days would you resupply yourself from Ma's convenience store? from WalMart? If one and not the other why discriminate? We learn that New Orleans police whose homes were underwater, who were out contact with their families, and whose police station was destroyed by the storm making a Super-pharmacy into their staging area and eating the food of the shelves. Were they looters? Their authority came from necessity, and was made on the spot. They applied for no warrant. Emergencies give all us liberties not delegated by constitutions.
I am not advocating a situational ethic, I argue that human beings share a morality that gives us standards of judgement, but that we make judgments about particular choices based on the concrete situation. But in every disaster there are those who take advantage, those who loot television sets, designer clothing, alcoholic beverages, drugs are criminals along with all those who engage in "price-gouging at the gasoline pump or taking advantage of charitable giving or insurance fraud."
Criminals must be prosecuted, including those who loot the people at the gasoline pumps. I agree with Derrick Z. Jackson who wrote in Friday's Boston Globe that in the midst of this national crisis:
"big oil looted the nation. The pumps instantly shot past $3 a gallon, with $4 a gallon well in sight. In a thinly disguised attempt to act as if it cared about the people wading in the water, Chevron has pledged $5 million to relief efforts. Exxon-Mobil and Shell have pledged $2 million apiece. British Petroleum and Citgo have pledged $1 million each.
This is nothing next to their wealth. Of the world's seven most profitable corporations, four are Exxon-Mobil, Royal Dutch Shell, BP, and Chevron. Exxon-Mobil is the world's most profitable company, making $25.3 billion last year. It and the other three corporations had combined profits last year of $72.8 billion. Exxon-Mobil is also the world's most valuable company, with a market value, according to Forbes magazine, of $405 billion. The combined market value of Exxon-Mobil, BP, Royal Dutch Shell, and Chevron is nearly $1 trillion.
And that was last year. A month ago, Exxon-Mobil, Chevron, and Conoco-Phillips announced record second-quarter profits of $7.6 billion, $3.7 billion, and $3.1 billion, respectively. Royal Dutch Shell's quarterly profits of $5.2 billion were up by 34 percent over the same period last year. Other well-known companies like Sunoco also had record second-quarter earnings.
If Exxon-Mobil were to maintain its current pace of profits, it would cross the $30 billion barrier for 2005. The company's chief financial officer, Henry Hubble, bragged in classic corporatese, ''Our disciplined project management and operating practices deliver the benefits of strong industry conditions to our shareholders."
Those disciplined operating practices are hardly confined to the oil fields. Everyone knows that Bush does not really mean what he says about price-gouging at the pump, since he just gave energy companies the bulk of $14.5 billion in tax breaks in the new energy bill. Surprise, surprise. In Bush's two elections, oil and gas companies gave Republicans 79 percent of their $61.5 million in campaign contributions, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
If Bush really meant what he said, he would call for a freeze or cap on gasoline prices, especially in the regions affected most dramatically by Katrina. He would challenge big oil to come up with a much more meaningful contribution to relief efforts.
If Bush meant what he said! Well long time ago Woody Guthrie sang:
Yes, as through this world I've wandered۬I've seen lots of funny men;۬Some will rob you with a six-gun,۬And some with a fountain pen.
Funny men with power. Funny men with connections. Funny men with an agenda.
We see unfolding in our nation reported to the people by a variety of media an important religious, moral and ethical lesson. There is a difference between the politics of domination and the ethics of mutuality. The corporate power elite sees the people of the United States as consumers. Their politicians are charged with keeping order. Their media are charged with portraying a picture of smart elites who benevolently rule happy contented consumers. But sometimes the world is turned upside down by a crisis, and we see even through the corporate media ordinary people coping with disaster in the face of bureaucrats, criminals and the grass roots of our nation responds with solidarity and compassion. Despite the attempts to portray New Orleans as a city that had descended into anarchy, needing a "strong hand," we the people instead choose empathy and compassion. Mutuality happens in the face of greed, corruption and political conspiracies. Unitarian Universalists can learn a significant lesson from the crisis, the principles of our faith community are based on an ethic of equality, mutuality and interdependence. Oftentimes, we celebrate those principles in the abstract, but in this crisis we can see how they apply on a mass scale. And we can choose to be people who live those values, or passive consumers in a corporate state who come to church to be comforted, entertained and "intellectually stimulated."
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