JULY 2011
FORGIVE US OUR DEBTS
Debts have been very much in the news lately, with Greece grand-standing the show. Its government, ever since this ancient country joined the Euro block, has acted as the sugar daddy to its citizens. Money was cheap, so the politicians shared it liberally, putting half the population on the public payroll. One hospital had 16 landscapers on its staff but it had no garden. The Railroads’ overhead was so large that it would have been cheaper to cart its passengers anywhere by taxi.
Now it is crunch time not so much for Greece – that too – but especially for the banks that loaned the funds: if Greece goes broke- and it will sooner or later – then banks everywhere go belly-up too, that’s why Bernanke (USA), Merkel (Germany) and Sarkozy (France) have been kicking that can up the debt- mountain, hoping that economic growth – that capitalistic concept that has done the trick in the past – will do its magic again. Someday soon that can will reach the top, signifying good-bye to a sensible money solution. Crunch-time is coming.
Actually there’s nothing new in our world today. Politician never want to rock the boat, never want to disturb the electorate, always act as if nothing is the matter, always tell us that tomorrow will be better. That was true once, perhaps, but not anymore.
Thomas L. Friedman, a New York Times columnist, wrote: “You really do have to wonder whether a few years from now we’ll look back at the first decade of the 21st century — when food prices spiked, energy prices soared, world population surged, tornados plowed through cities, floods and droughts set records, populations were displaced and governments were threatened by the confluence of it all — and ask ourselves: What were we thinking? How did we not panic when the evidence was so obvious that we’d crossed some growth/climate/natural resource/population redlines all at once?”
Our prayer should constantly be “Forgive us our debts, our growth-at-any-cost- debts; our climate debts; our natural resources debts”. These debts are much more god-forsaken acts than our money debts, which now are increasingly mere computer screen figures, making money measures meaningless.
Writes Dr. Chris Martenson, “On a pure debt, deficit, and liability basis, the US, much of Europe, and Japan are all well past the point of no return. No matter what policy tweaks, tax and benefit adjustments, or spending cuts are made — individually or in combination — nothing really pencils out to anything that remotely resembles a solution that would allow us to return to business as usual.
“At the heart of it all, the developed nations blew themselves a gigantic credit bubble, which fed all kinds of grotesque distortions, of which housing is perhaps the most visible poster child. However, outsized government budgets and promises, overconsumption of nearly everything imaginable, bloated college tuition costs, and rising prices in healthcare utterly disconnected from economics are other symptoms, too. There’s no possibility of a return of generally rising living standards for most of the developed world. A new era is upon us”. (Quoted from his article entitled Death by Debt.)
Nobody knows the exact figure, but some reliable estimates put the per-household debt in the USA at $650,000 for government debt alone, not counting personal liabilities. The monetary debt is so big that either the borrower or the lender will have to take a substantial cut, because a debt is always paid. The borrower will only be able to pay if there is astronomical inflation, where a loaf of bread might cost a thousand dollars. If it is up to the lender- the governments and their banks -they will have to declare bankruptcy. Either way we all become third world citizens, reduced to scrounging and scraping, because we have lived far beyond our means.
Our daily prayer must be ever more fervently to “Forgive us our debts”. Robert Guelich in his monumental 450 page book dealing solely with The Sermon on the Mount, (Matthew 5-7) comments on Matthew 6:12 (Forgive us our debts) that the word for debt reflects a common Aramaic metaphor for a sin drawn from the commercial realm. For today this means that money has become the ultimate destroyer: woods paved, mountains mined, seas eaten, species eliminated, all because of our senseless quest for growth at the expense of everything that is holy. In Russia House Le Carré writes that “When the world is destroyed, it will be destroyed not by its madmen, but by the sanity of its experts and the superior knowledge of its bureaucrats.”
“Forgive us our debts…..”
Bert Hielema lives a leisurely life in not always tranquil Tweed. He welcomes comments at bert@hielema.ca.