Rediscovering Values: On Wall Street, Main Street and Your Street by Jim Wallis (New York: Howard Books , 2010)

IN HIS NEW BOOK ON THE ECONOMIC CRISIS, JIM WALLIS argues that the division between the rich and poor is leading us toward a new Great Depression. He backs up this claim with some staggering statistics:

– The average American is slowly sinking in a quicksand of personal debt. In 2006, 173 million Americans were using 1.5 billion credit cards. By 2008, total credit card debt had reached $973 billion.

– The super rich are carrying a bundle of debt. From 1995 to 2004, the top 1 percent of America’s richest people accumlated $383 billion in new debt. The top 5 percent account for 20 percent of our country’s entire debt.

– The earnings gap between company executives and average workers is growing by leaps and bounds. In 2006, the CEO of Walmart made $17.5 million in annual salary – 900 times the pay of Walmart’s average worker. Steve Jobs at Apple made $647 million in 2006 and James Simons, a hedge fund manager, made $1.5 billion in 2005.

– The middle class is a vanishing species. Just one family in America is wealthier than almost half of all Americans. The wealth of the Walton family, which owns Walmart, is estimated at $90 billion – the equivalent of the wealth of the bottom 40 percent of Americans, or 121 million people. The top 1 percent have more wealth than the bottom 90 percent of Americans.

THESE STATISTICS POINT TO A DISTURBING TREND. The only other time in American history that such an enormous gap in wealth existed between Americans was just before the Great Depression in 1928. Wallis warns that America is facing a populist revolt if it doesn’t change its ways. Soon.

The strength of this book is its sense of moral urgency. Its weakness is a simplistic prescriptive formula for curing what ails us. After regaling readers with sixteen chapters of doom and gloom, Wallis offers a final chapter containing “Twenty Moral Exercises” to get America into shape. It’s a self-help guide for our national Depression.

The moral exercises include admonitions to watch less television, read the Bible more and buy a hybrid car. After spending so much time reading that America is on the precipice of disaster, it was a disappointment to end up with an abridged version of Changing the World for Dummies. Admittedly, the suggestions are creative and practical. (I especially like Moral Exercise #19 about starting a book club.) But how do you turn a list of suggestions into a movement for social change? Ay, there’s the rub! The moral exercises constitute a shift in values that would transform our country if followed by millions of Americans. If.

ULTIMATELY, WALLIS IS CONFRONTED WITH THE SAME DILEMMA THAT EVERY PREACHER FACES: THE COMPETITION. Who are Americans more likely to listen to? A preacher like Jim Wallis who tells them to stop their evil capitalistic/consumer ways or a preacher like Joel Osteen who tells them that God will help them to get rich.

There is a reason that prophets get killed. When they threaten rich and powerful elites with a message of change, the noose-makers get to work. If a populist revolt against the plutocracy in America were ever to materialize, I suspect that noose-making courses at the University of Phoenix would be a hot ticket. In the meantime, feelings of despair and anger afflicting millions of Americans will continue to fester. What will be the tipping point? When will it come? Which way will the country turn? How will we change? Right now, it seems like all we have are the questions. The answers have yet to be published.