Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

Yes…Yes (7)

An appeal to all Christians.

Can Christians really make a difference in this world? They should, of course. A little leaven does the trick in bread. Will a small band of Christians do the same in society? It should be able, but only when their message finds resonance in others. It is no secret that this is not the case today. This was the case when Paul went around the then known world and set it ablaze for Christ. Why was his mission successful where now the Message only serves to turn people off, at least in the Western world? The reason is that times have changed, but not the sermons, the official mouth of the church. What we need today is a Paul who understands today’s world and speaks the message of real hope, something everybody yearns for.

That we are in trouble on all fronts is no secret. That the world is grasping for solutions is also no secret. It is also plain to all that our troubles are our own doing. We are there for the simple reason that we like the status quo: people just don’t change, because change is simply too difficult. Most of us like to float with the flow and hate to go against the stream of public opinion, believing that the crowd knows best.

There are various examples in history where ample warnings were given, but people ignored them. The prophets in the Old Testament kept on telling the people to turn back to God or they would be exiled or even be wiped out altogether. The Ten tribes of Israel disappeared for ever, while Judah and Benjamin suffered 70 years of banishment. More recently the same sort of calamity happened again to the Jewish people, this time in Germany, in 1933, when Hitler came to power. He too had completely outlined his future plans for them in his book “Mein Kampf.” So the Jews in Germany, all 523,000 of them, could have known what was in store.  But they stayed put and that included Jewish bankers, all of whom could have left. They thought they could deal with Hitler; they thought that their money would do the trick, that their allegiance to the German Reich would help them, so they ignored the threats Hitler had outlined in his auto biography. Only about 7% did leave early: 38,000 out of 523,000, while more left after 1938.

At some inconvenience almost all could have left, but for most the immediate cost was too great, involving leaving business, homes, friends, making it necessary to learn a new language, and resettle in a strange land, where they would have arrived in poverty, would have to start from scratch again, but then Jews had faced those options ever since the Assyrian captivity in the eighth century B.C, that 70 year exile, so well described in the Hebrew bible, and also in Spain in the 16^th Century when many were forced to move to Germany, the Netherlands, Poland and other countries.  

Of course not all of them would have escaped the Nazis. Those who lived in, or had fled to the Netherlands almost all died, and the same was true for those who migrated to other European countries that were overrun by Germany after 1939. But the majority could have tried to get away, but they stayed: they refused to read the signals or heeded such events as the Crystal Night happening. They reasoned that “It can’t be that bad.” It was worse.

Jews are like us. Just as they, we too hate to take signs seriously. We too say or think: “No problem. We can handle it.” Just like the Armenians who went through the same thing. The Turkish massacres of 1895 were a foretaste, but most of them remained behind. Then came the genocide of 1915 when millions were killed.

So what has this to do with today? People don’t change, but circumstances do. Look back at the economy in October 2007, not even 2 years ago. The Dow was at 14,000, the banks were booming, real estate was down a little, but the experts said not to worry and so gave no warning. They were wrong, all of them. Today the Dow and real estate is down by 40 percent. The experts were wrong, all of them.

Today the U.S. government is running a $1.8 trillion deficit, while Federal tax receipts are down 34%, which means that the deficit will go above $2 trillion, but nobody cares. No one says, “This is the end. The American economy will never again be what it was.”

Go back less than 20 months. Would you have believed that Chrysler and GM were both headed for bankruptcy? In October 2007 GM shares were at $43. Now they are at $1. Then there was an industry called investment banking, such as Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, who were not part of the commercial banking system. They are gone. So is Merrill Lynch. Bank of America and Citigroup were bailed out by the government. They would have gone under. They sell for a fraction of what they did in 2007. And what do most people say? “No problem.”

Where are we today? Today in the USA the ‘per family’ debt stands at $546.668 (US), an increase of $55,000 in just one year, but the general feeling is that “there is no problem.” With so much debt Medicare will go bust and so will Social Security there. Again, “No problem, why worry.”

The unemployment rate keeps rising, is approaching 10 percent. Again “No problem, why worry.”

When people refuse to face reality, because reality is going to be more painful than anything they have experienced, they look for signs that the problems they cannot avoid without changing are really not that bad. They look for offsetting good news, so they assume that the status quo will return. They cling to the hope that the U.S. government will spend another $30 billion to buy the ‘dead on arrival’ General Motors on which the US treasury already had spent $20 billion. “No problem,” Obama knows best. The government in Washington penalized GM’s bondholders for $27 billion in exchange for 10% of the company, 72% owned by the government and 17% by the United Auto Workers medical insurance fund. “No problem.”

Remember Wilson’s famous quote in the 1950’s, “What is good for General Motors is good for the USA?”  He then was the head of General Motors when it had 50 percent of North American auto sales. Now the reverse is equally true: what is bad for GM is worse for the US.  The company will never return to what it was, and neither will the USA, with no savings and trillions in debt, and disappearing jobs, people will not buy as many cars as before from a company run by the government and the United Auto Workers, but again the same refrain, “No problem.”

But there are big problems: Oldsmobile is gone; Pontiac is going; Hummer is now a Chinese company; Saturn is sold; Opel bought by Magna; Saab is on the block. Yet the mass believes that there are “No problems.” Readers look at the reports, and the reports look awful: falling home prices, rising unemployment, an astronomical Federal deficit. But the media say we are close to a bottom – the bottom of a crash that none of them forecasted. Optimists speak of a slow, weak recovery. Pessimists speak of hyperinflation and depression simultaneously. But as the chorus proclaims “No problem,” the public mindlessly picks up this refrain.

Here is the harsh truth: what we now are experiencing is composed of two interlocking phenomena: (1) a quickly progressing financial catastrophe caused by ever expanding globalization, which  has fermented growing instability and increasing disparity and (2) a continously progressing environmental disintegration which, unless there is a radical change in living habits, will lead to an inevitable creational crash, effected primarily by our lifestyle that knows no limits, based as it is on our blind exploitation of finite natural resources.

Our governments – by offering stimulus packages – encourage such unreal behavior, yet their actions are nothing less than the preservation of employment opportunities on the Titanic’.

People usually calculate the costs of making a change. This is wise. Jesus taught: “Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Will he not first sit down and estimate the cost if he has enough money to complete it? For if he lays the foundation and is not able to finish it, every one who sees it will ridicule him saying, ‘This fellow began to build and was not able to finish it.’ Or suppose a king is about to go to war against another king. Will he not first sit down and consider whether he is able with ten thousand men to oppose the one who comes with twenty thousand? If he is not able, he will send a delegation while the other is still a long way off and will ask for terms of peace.” (Luke 14:28-32).

In short, count the costs, especially the environmental one. This is what we have refused to do. Now the cost of doing something radical has become too high, so we prefer doing nothing, doing nothing about Climate Change; doing nothing about the inevitable day when Oil is gone; doing nothing about growing disparity; doing nothing about jobs disappearing; doing nothing about mass transit or urbanization, let alone the growing debt load.

Now is the time for Christians to show the world that we must live so that God’s creation is enhanced, is made better. Talking will not help. Sermons are passé. Only example will serve as a model. Christians need not fear ridicule. Paul already wrote to the Corinthians that “The Message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing.” (1 Corinthians 1:18). That’s exactly the message we have to bring: foolishness.

Now is the time to plan ahead. Now is the time to prepare for an unfolding disaster: Global warming, resource depletion, rising government ownership, massive deficits, rising unemployment, falling house prices, busted retirement pensions, rising interest rates (falling corporate bonds), and Federal Reserve inflation on a scale never seen in North American history.

The beauty of living within the means of ecological and financial  limits is that not only will we be prepared for bad times, but by doing so we conform more to the will of God and prepare ourselves for the Kingdom to Come. As always, doing the will of God is the answer: always.

So what does the Bible say about the current economic conditions?

Yes…Yes (6)

An Appeal to all Christians

Who am I that I make an appeal to all Christians, as if I have the authority and know-how to make definitive statements concerning such issues as theology and economics and how they relate. Even though I come through sometimes as a ‘know-it-all’ I too see matters through a glass dimly. But in my long life – I am in my 81^st year – I have always been an ardent student of the connection between faith and life, how religion relates to what we do in business, learning, eating and recreation, just to name the most relevant.

I know that I am correct that no church has a claim to the truth, negligent as all of them have been, and still are, in giving God the glory whose glory is revealed in creation. Whenever I go to church – which I do every Sunday – I often am promptly turned off by the pomp and elaborate vestments and historical rituals, and usually by the sermon as well, which frequently caters more to public acceptance than divine approval. The church in general, especially the Roman Catholic, the high Anglican-Episcopalian, and the Greek Orthodox churches, with their Old Testament approach to worship, is especially out of touch with the reality of life. That does not mean that denominations such as Southern Baptist and Pentecostal denominations make the grade: they don’t because of their rapture approach to eternity, which has done more harm to God’s beloved creation than any other dogma, as it has given both them and industry in general a church-sanctioned license to pollute.

Just as ecclesiastical Christianity has separated God from creation, so also ecclesiastical Capitalism has separated Capital from the environment, with the result that we now face immense natural challenges as well as tremendous resource constraints. Just as the economists had no clue that what they were doing to the economy would lead to a financial meltdown and the depletion of the most basic ingredients on which development depends, such as all carbon products, so the theologians too have led us astray in matters of God and creation.

Basically the old answers do not work anymore, because we live in different times. That’s why Christians now have a golden opportunity to take the lead in fashioning a society that embraces God’s justice, which is captured in John 3:16 “God so loved the cosmos” which means that we must do the same. It’s as simple as that. Jesus, in that same chapter also says that he came not to ‘condemn the world, the cosmos, but to save it’. When the church preaches that its members go to heaven, then, in essence it ‘condemns’ the world, in total opposition to the sacrifice Jesus made. The church generally has interpreted that passage to apply to ‘humans’ only, yet if Jesus had meant that, he would have used the Greek word ‘anthropos’ which means a ‘human being’. Instead he consistently points to the ‘cosmos’ which means the entire universe, that well-ordered entity, as opposed to ‘chaos’ the state we, under Satan’s guidance, have caused it to become. Our ‘heaven’ orientation is a perfect compliance with Satan’s aim to destroy God’s world, a direct violation of Jesus’ intent. He came to ‘save’ the world from the clutches of Satan, who now rules it. He saved it because it was lost. The French bible uses the word ‘racheter’, which literally means ‘to buy back’, the same meaning as the English ‘redeem.’ That is just one instance where the church has misread the gospel, under the influence of Gnosticism – which sees the world as an object of condemnation – and Greek philosophy which has separated Nature- the cosmos – from Grace – God.

Another striking example of misreading the Bible is in Jesus’ explicit call that when we “Seek the Kingdom, everything else will fall in place.” Seeking that kingdom where Jesus is the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords, refers to God’s beloved ‘cosmos’ and means pursuing its welfare.

That is the first and foremost task of the Christian and the church should give leadership there, but has failed to do so and, since ecclesiastical ways are so fundamentally ingrained, the leadership that churches should provide, will not be forthcoming, hence my appeal is not directed that institute, but to Christians at large.

In short, the system that our ecclesiastical and political leaders are trying to keep going or revive is spiritually bankrupt and also environmentally dangerous. I also have no illusion that my call to all Christians to re-examine our basic assumptions, will be heeded, so I see myself as a voice crying in the wilderness, where my whispers whirling through the world-wide-web may reach a person here and there, but whether it will have an impact, only the Lord knows, who also will, I believe, steer these words where they have to go.

I am convinced that any attempt to return to those good old days, are no longer possible. Society can no longer function that way for a number of reasons, the foremost being Oil depletion, Climate Change and the precarious state of the US dollar and the English pound, due to the great indebtedness of those nations.

The Bottom Line is no longer a ruthless pursuit of profit at all costs, at the expense of the environment. We all, rich and poor, young and old, are subject to the laws of nature, those four laws of ecology, which we have disregarded at our own peril. They are “nature knows best, nothing disappears, everything is connected to everything else and there is no free lunch.” When we observe these ecological guidelines, when we love all of creation as ourselves, then we express directly the great commandment: “Love God above everything else, and our neighbor as ourselves.”

I have no illusions that we ever will create a society in which people routinely act in altruistic and generous ways toward others, or see Creation as God’s precious gift to us. Our carbon-rich diet has made life too easy for us. Now that this slave-rich era is coming to an end -finite energy has given us North American the equivalent of 120 personal servants 24/7/365 – we have gone too far down the road to revert to physical self-sufficiency, while our television-honed existence has been an additional tool to mentally rob us of the ability to think for ourselves. Psalm 115 has a line which applies to us and the idols we worship: “those who fashion these idols will resemble them” says this psalm. Now that these idols are disappearing, we will go that same way unless we obey God’s rules for life.

Tinkering at the edges is not enough. Buying a Prius will not do it.  A total new approach is needed. It looks increasingly likely that capitalism is indeed beginning to consume itself, the same way it devoured the minds, bodies, and labor of countless human and nonhuman beings over the course of centuries. For the first time in generations, perhaps ever, we may have a brief opening in which to imagine something else and to set the terms for a new way of organizing human society and economy.

But we cannot wait too long. The dangers are incalculable. Should we squander this historical moment through inaction or despair, it may soon be too late for Christians to do anything, except to see world events spiral out of control. 

More about human nature in the next segment.

Yes…Yes (5)

                                                                                         An Appeal to All Christians.      

The rich will always be with us…. That phrase fits our society better than the more familiar one from Matthew 26 when Jesus reminded us that the ‘poor’ would be our constant companions, perhaps referring to Jesus himself who also was among the poor, lived on welfare, depended on others, mostly well-off women, for room and board.

The Bible often tells us that it’s the rich who exploit us, who never have enough, who always want more. Capitalism is so unchristian because it solely exists for the benefit of the wealthy. The government helps them, based on the mistaken notion that “a rising tide lifts all boats”. That’s why those in the top income bracket are bailed out, and receive the bulk of the trillions of tax-payers dollars, which will eventually be bounced back to the backs of the poor, especially the current crop of young people, already loaded with study debt, credit card debt, environmental debt, and now the bail-out debt.

Somehow the current economic crisis can be traced back to the many of us who always hoped to wade in money. To be really well-off is the true American dream. We do anything to get our hands at money. That’s why the current money meltdown is such a tragedy, because this dream has now become a nightmare. The American dream, in which everybody can reach the top, has been exposed as a pipedream, an impossibility. The pursuit of money for its own sake has proved to be a fallacy, the wrong thing to do, because it excluded the pursuit of what really counts: to seek the Kingdom of God. You may wonder what religion has to do with money. Well, the pursuit of money is a religious quest, an object of worship that now is showing its true nature: a branch of hell.

First an assessment of what the future looks like. I have in front of me a bank note from Zimbabwe. The face value of that money unit is 100 billion dollars, issued by the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe. The signature on that piece of paper is from Dr.G. Gono, Governor.  It features a pair of giraffes and underneath the description of the SPECIAL AGRO-CHEQUE is a picture of a row of some 17 large grain silos, suggesting that a lot of food is stored there. I paid $1.00 for that One Hundred Billion Dollars bill, probably not even enough to buy one loaf of bread in Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital.

Dr Marc Faber, an economist born in Switzerland, believes that this is also what is in store for us: hyper inflation. Our relentless pursuit of money and the Western governments relentless efforts to revive a moribund economy has already resulted in burdening every one of the 80 million plus American families with a debt that stood on June 1 2009 at $546,668, an increase of $55,000 in 2008 alone. Only hyper inflation will make these awesome figures disappear.

Mr. Posner agrees. He is a federal circuit judge and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, and in his just-published “A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of ’08 and the Descent into Depression” (Harvard University Press), he writes: “A commitment of such magnitude (referring to the $12 trillion bail-out) — stacked on top of enormous budget deficits enlarged by sharply falling federal-tax revenues — could lead to high inflation, greatly increased interest costs on a greatly increased national debt, much heavier taxes, the restructuring of major industries, and the redrawing of the line that separates business from government.”

He also states that the key to understanding a capitalist economy is that, even though it is immensely dynamic and productive, it’s also inherently unstable. At its heart is a system that depends on large-scale borrowing and lending, needed to bridge the gap between input costs and expected revenues and allowing consumers to buy their toys. When the banking system breaks down and credit stops, economic activity plummets, which has happened recently.

Of course, bankers are not the only ones to blame. A large portion of this disaster can be traced to the influential economists who assured us that there could never be another depression. They argued that in the face of a recession the Federal Reserve had only to reduce interest rates and flood the banks with money and all would be well.

As the situation now stands, it is very likely that foreign investors will suddenly pull their money out of the United States, making the dollar worthless and presenting us with a replay of the Deutsche Mark in 1923, when ordinary Germans paid for loaves of bread with wheelbarrows of money. Either way, the structural contradictions in the world system are profound, and they are not going to go away any time soon.  

Unlike in the 1930s, when the Western world nations spent themselves out of depression, first through massive state investment in public works, coupled with a new social compact with labor (as in the United States, with the New Deal), and, more effectively through a massive arms buildup and military expansionism, aided by the onset of World War II, this time no such cruel remedies are available, unless we start a nuclear war, bringing about the Final Solution: nobody left to live. 

As matters stand today, the state sector already accounts for a large portion of the national economies of the United States, Japan, and Europe. In the 1920s, the U.S. national debt (relative to GDP) was flat and even declined, while GDP per capita grew at an extraordinary rate, ushering in higher wages, improvements in agricultural productivity, and vast improvements in quality of life for millions of Americans, including electricity in the home, increasing availability of rail travel, and the introduction of automobiles into everyday life. During the latest economic expansion, by contrast, debts public and private soared at every level of society. The national deficit grew, banks and corporations assumed mind-boggling amounts of risk (often in the form of obscure financial instruments like derivatives), and ordinary working people piled up trillions of dollars of debt in the form of home and car loans and credit card debt. At the same time, wages and quality of life fell. It is therefore difficult to see how the United States and other nations will be able to spend their way out of the present crisis, when, even before the collapse of Lehman Brothers last year, the population was already tapped out, and government expenditures hovered near record highs. In other words: spending more borrowed money is not possible: debts are too high already. More debt will cause more inflation.

Then there is something new under the sun: pollution: capitalism has savaged the earth, leaving billions of people without a decent livelihood, and the ecosystem in tatters. But the social and ecological costs of “doing business” are about to grow exponentially greater. Even without a world-wide financial crisis, we can anticipate more, and more devastating, natural disasters, which in turn will mean disruptions in agricultural production, flooding of cities and entire countries, mass starvation, increasing migration pressures, and so on. All of this will in turn exact an increasing toll on the legitimacy of the liberal nation state. Now with the state, both in Washington and Ottawa, and in Europe as well, becoming more and more the lender and owner ( GM, banks) of last resort, and agreeing to protect us from harm, we, in exchange, consent to be obedient subjects. Another, now much more likely scenario, is that even the “last resort= government ownership” will proves inadequate, resulting in total chaos.

What will come then? America had a taste of dictatorship under Bush and Cheney. Will Barack Obama be able to navigate the ship of state in the face of a full-blown economic hurricane, without it capsizing? Given the people he chose – all Wall Street veterans – to steer his economy through the current fiscal turmoil, his chances look dismal.

I read the New York Times every day. This spring, its columnist, the liberal economist and writer Paul Krugman criticized the administration for continuing to “believe in the magic of the financial marketplace and in the prowess of the wizards who perform that magic.” Citing “the failure of a whole model of banking,” Krugman faulted the administration in particular for trying to preserve a model of “securitization”-i.e., the process by which banks have essentially made risk a commodity by carving up loans and debts and selling them as obscure instruments on the market. “I don’t think the Obama administration can bring securitization back to life,” Krugman wrote, “and I don’t believe it should try.” 

What Krugman and others fear is that the administration’s temporizing maneuvers may only end up creating the conditions for an even bigger economic collapse later on. 

Just as the Reagan Administration’s monetary policies sowed the seeds for the storm we are reaping today, the Obama administration’s failure to grapple with the structural contradictions of capitalism may be sowing the seeds for an even more cataclysmic day of reckoning in the future.

Yes…Yes (4)

An appeal to all Christians

Why should Christians challenge Capitalism? I already have mentioned a number of reasons. There is also another very important one. Capitalism is basically undemocratic. By nature, if not by design, capitalism is a system in which a small minority of individuals controls the wealth, labor, production, political power, and cultural expression of the whole of society. Under capitalism, the ‘demo’ = people in ‘democracy’ is permitted to exert only the mildest, most indirect of influences on the direction of state and society. All of the truly important decisions – the ones that concern what kinds of technologies and commodities get produced, what kinds of laws will be passed, and which wars should be fought (or whether any should be fought at all)-are effectively left in the hands of a small clique whose members are drawn from the ranks of the so-called “the power elite.” No matter how many finance reform laws are passed its implementation will never be completely able to neutralize the tremendous gap between the wealthy few and the ordinary many.

Of course, all this is bred in the bone. Nobody is so naive as to believe that the ordinary John Doe, be he or she a plumber, teacher, or transit worker commands the same respect or influence on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, or Capitol Hill in Washington, or in the Bundestag in Berlin or the Knesset in Israel, as the chief executive officer of Wal-Mart or Exxon or Siemens or Bechtel, never mind the powerful bankers. And while we may profess to be “shocked” upon learning that this or that politician (or presidential appointee) is engaged in corrupt activities at the public’s expense, in truth we are seldom surprised at all. Everywhere in the world, those who control the moneys, also rule the roost.

In a word, it’s all about money and the power it exerts. We sometimes ask ourselves, WWJD: What Would Jesus Do? So What Would Jesus Do today, in our current precarious economic situation?

We live in a society obsessed with money. In the church we say: Blessed are they who come in the name of the Lord. But both in and outside the church we confess: blessed are they who come in the name of silver and gold. By and large people are not measured by what they do or say, but by the amounts of possessions they have. Money is the most important rule in today’s society and the acquisition of it is seen as its highest goal. Some are so taken in by its mere possession that money becomes their secret life: they always think themselves poor and portray themselves as such, but they do this because they simply cannot part with money and become hoarders, avaricious, like the infamous Tartuffe. Others are fascinated by money because it enables them to buy things and show off their acquisitions. Most North Americans seem to fall in that category. Curiously, even though they regard money as the highest goal in life, where the two-income-family has become the norm, they often spend it before they have it, and mortgage their future at a rate never experienced before in modern history, something now coming to haunt many.

Money, in short, is seen as the meaning of life: our actions are geared toward that goal, and if we can’t make it by working, perhaps playing the lotteries will do it, or a bit of cheating here and there might help as well. It seems that no institution or person has become immune to the power of a bribe. Nothing seems sacred anymore.

Money is a dangerous thing and a strange substance as well. In the past two years the money market has gone crazy: the overriding issue today is to rescue the money industry from collapsing altogether with government bail-outs and capital infusions from federal banks, while stock markets are hyper nervous and gold is seen as the best source of value.

In spite of all its drawbacks, money, as a tool to facilitate the commerce between human beings, was and is, nevertheless, an inspired invention, with tremendous potential for both good and evil. That is why, when first invented, it was administered by the priestly class. Today, more than ever, Money makes the world go round and goes around the world with a velocity equal to the speed of light and in torrents unequaled in history: the daily flood amounts to Trillions of Dollars. Because of Money the global economy is like a jet plane, fast, comfortable and when it crashes, its fall is also spectacular. And what has all this to do with Jesus?

When Jesus came to earth, forever to retain the status of both God and Human, he could have been a human being of any description, stature, degree and condition; and yet he chose to be poor. The English poet Christopher Harvey said of him in the seventeenth century: It was Thy Choice, whilst Thou on Earth didst stay, And hadst not whereupon Thy Head to lay.

No wonder that throughout the Middle Ages Jesus is appearing not just as God, but as a pauper. Curiously the fastest growing Protestant movement in Brazil, the so-called Crentes, as the believers are known, preaches the theology of prosperity, which promises material success as well as eternal salvation, a puritan ideology imported from the United States. Compare Joel Osteen and his converted Football Stadium. With such a complete reversal of what Jesus portrayed in his life, we do well to investigate the relationship between Jesus and money a bit closer.

I am convinced that Jesus had some basic misgivings about money – just like we do at times- because we all know that wealth and its acquisition makes people do crazy and often dishonest things. “The love of money is the root of all evils,” is Paul’s warning to Timothy and this probably was one reason why Jesus did not like money.

If I understand Jesus correctly – and I must admit that this is no easy thing to do, because it means a great degree of self-knowledge – I think that with Jesus there also was a deeper reason, something very personal. I get the impression that Jesus went out of his way to avoid contact with money and was even loath to touch the stuff.

Why do I make that assumption? Well, Jesus has a perfect recall of everything, past, present and future and so had perfect insight, hindsight and foresight into everything. We will we recall that his betrayal, his suffering and death was directly associated with money. How would we feel – how would I feel – if I knew that money would eventually kill me? Well, I think that this view governed Jesus’ attitude towards money and perhaps even towards economic theory.

I better back this up with some concrete examples, so here are a few. Take the feeding of those thousands: Jesus knows that if these people had gone off to buy bread and fish in the neighbouring stores, the merchants, being good businessmen, would have suddenly increased the prices of these basic food items because of greater demand. The law of supply and demand is certainly not a latter-day invention: it has existed as long as people have traded. That’s what economics is all about: charge high when everybody needs it. It happened in Ontario and Quebec with the prolonged blackout during the ice storm: the few candles available tripled in price overnight in the disaster areas. So what did Jesus do to forestall this price-gouging? He simply by-passed the economic law of supply and demand and created bread and fish ex nihilo- out of nothing- well, almost out of nothing.

Then there is that so uncharacteristic incident where Jesus almost went berserk when he chased the money changers out of the temple, upsetting much more than the tables. After all having these business people do their work in the temple was an age-old tradition and necessary to keep the Jewish house of worship functioning properly because only certain kinds of money were accepted in the temple. And how else would the temple worshippers get the proper animals for sacrifice? I think it was money and its abuses that made Jesus so angry.

Another, more indirect, indication: I find it curious that Judas, the unredeemed among the saints, carried the purse and handled the finances: Judas, who loved money more than Jesus. In the end he ended up with thirty pieces of silver and then discovered that money as an idol wants our very lives. In that sense we are much closer to Judas than to Jesus. Just look at the havoc Money has created and is creating today in our world. With ‘we’ I include all people in the overly rich West.

Also to me a tip-off was Jesus’ great disdain for the nominal value of currency, evident when Mary spent perhaps a year’s income on that precious oil. “So what,” Jesus remarked, “so what if such a large sum was spent. It is only money.” Or consider the occasion when Peter was asked if Jesus would pay the temple tax. “Of course,” is Peter’s immediate reaction, “of course Jesus pays.”

But for Jesus this was not such a straightforward matter. Why this reluctance to pay the temple tax? Well, I have my theory about this. I think Jesus knew that perhaps this very money given to the temple was going to buy his life and ensure his death.

And then, in an ironic twist, with almost a touch of black humor, Jesus shrugs his shoulders and says: “OK, not important. Let me not major in minors. Go to the lake, catch a fish and there you’ll find a silver coin enough for the both of us.” I like that. Jesus is never skimpy. And, of course, with this gesture, he shows that all the fish in the sea and- by implication- the cattle upon a thousand hills, are his. Here we see Jesus’ royalty coming through. Queen Elizabeth never carries a wallet. Wherever she goes on an official visit, she goes free. Jesus is the same and much more so. Here he shows that he is the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords, even as most people do not recognize him that way.

Another example is that familiar encounter with the Pharisees who were out to trick him. They asked Jesus whether Jews should pay the Roman head-tax. The story is well known. Jesus calls for a denarius (No, he does not carry money on him) and asks; “Whose image?” They dutifully answer, “Caesar’s.” Jesus replies: “Give to Caesar what belongs to him and to God the things that are God’s.”

Here is a story we have grown up with in the church. On it we have based the separation of church and state and have interpreted this to mean that there are two important divisions in society: God and the State. I happen to disagree, mainly because we live in times where all automatic responses need to be questioned, so let me try another angle. In the first place Tiberius, the then emperor, could not possibly have owned the coin anymore than the heirs of George Washington or Queen Elizabeth have the legal right to the bank notes which carry their image. In his compact answer Jesus touches upon two important segments of society: the political-economic reality represented by Caesar and money on the one hand, and the eternal as expressed in the Kingdom of God on the other. He implies in the political part that, no, he would not support an armed revolt or even passive resistance to Rome, and in the economic sector he asserts that the tax and the coins themselves are simply a human device and that all of life, including money, is a matter of faith. That the latter is true is evident today more than ever, now that the stock market has dropped by 40 percent and house values everywhere are still decreasing rapidly. In essence Jesus implies that the value of money is sheer fiction, something we now also see very clearly. The only matter that counts is the eternal – God’s kingdom- which is at hand.

So here is a curious twist in the historical explanation of this incident. Where Jesus, by his life and in this particular instance proclaims an almost puritanical and revolutionary renunciation of the world of money, today we explain this passage to mean exactly the opposite. Where Jesus saw only the Kingdom – which includes all things, also money – as the dominant factor of his life and his followers, and money at best a minor player, today, based on this very text we believe that there are two realms of equal importance: Caesar, the State, represented by taxes- money – and the Church, in charge of the sacred. Here we are face to face with a dilemma: where Jesus abhorred money by all indications because it contributed to this death, we adore it. Where Jesus lived without money, our lives are centered around it. Jesus once made a radical statement: “You cannot serve God and Mammon.” In our Western world everything is about money: the stock market, the strength of the dollar, the price of gold, three items mentioned in almost every newscast. Let’s not kid ourselves: Mammon is God, the Dollar is King in the world and its possession a holy grail. We now put a price tag on everything. First on Jesus – 30 pieces of silver – and now also on the rest of creation: the woods are paved, the mountains mined, the seas eaten, species eliminated: all because of money. We all participate in that criminal act. Jesus was sold for the price of a slave: we are selling creation to serve us as a slave. We, as 6 percent of the world’s population cause 40 percent of the world’s pollution, in perfect accordance with the aims of Capitalism which defines itself as Creative Destruction. I am more and more inclined to think that Capitalism and its exponent, the global money economy, is the Anti-Christ. I know, that is a strong statement, but I think that’s why Jesus feared money because he foresaw how destructive it would be for him, for his creation and for us. He died so that we too could be included in his life, a resurrection life, a far better life than we can ever live in a money society. If we want to share in that life then we must regain a new sense of value; we must reset our priorities to have our treasures expressed not in money but in love, in genuine compassion for all God’s creatures, humans, animals, trees, flowers, air, water. God so loved the cosmos…. (John 3:16).

Yes…..Yes(3)

An appeal to all Christians.

 It seems to me that Capitalism is the exact opposite of Christianity. Here’s why. The celebrated economist, Joseph Schumpeter (born in 1883) defined Capitalism as “A perennial Gale of Creative Destruction,” with as its goal “to maximize personal consumption.” We know all about that, as we, with no exceptions, are constantly urged by every media source to buy the newest, the most up-to-date models, while discarding the old ones: it’s called planned obsolescence.

There is just a slight problem with this assumption: the current version of the Market economy was designed more than a century ago in a world with a few people – perhaps one billion – and to function there assuming unlimited resources. But our present world will soon have 7 billion of us greedy customers, and there now are shortages of arable land, fish, trees, and, one of these days, oil as well. Increasingly the constraints the world faces are environmental, not economic. Yesterday, in the 20^th Century, the size of the fish catch depended on the investment in trawlers, but, today, in the 21^st Century, the sustainable yield is the controlling factor. Yesterday, in the 20^th Century, the amount of water pumped to irrigate the 250 million hectares in the world which lack sufficient rain, was determined by the number of wells drilled into the aquifers. Today in the 21^st Century it is the sustainable yield of the underground water sources that determine the amounts used.

The trouble with Capitalism is that it has no mechanism to stop the ongoing devastation and must, by its own momentum, continue until every last bit of creation has fallen victim to its relentless goal. Technology and cheap oil has made exponential growth possible, which has taken us in a surprisingly short time from a relatively empty world to a world full of people and their furniture. It is now saturated with our things, but empty of what has been there before.

All this offers a golden opportunity for Christians to point out the right way. The Lord tells us in Micah 6:8 to “act justly, to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.” Granted, Capitalism can be rightly credited with having unleashed enormous forces of productivity and technology, but at what cost? Take the automobile, our means of transportation of choice. While I am writing this, the entire Western world is frantically trying to save its automotive industry. Billions of taxpayers money are being expended to help the domestic car manufacturers to re-organize so that it can thrive again.

And what does the automobile do, apart from bringing a person from A to B in comfort? Calculate the cost! If the car were invented today, it would not pass of being fit for human use. Each year more than a million people are killed in accidents and more than 20 million injured, many maimed for life. The environmental damage cannot be calculated, so immense. Its main merit is that it and technology in general has speeded up “The Return of Christ,” because it has increased the tempo of global destruction to the point where Christ’ return has been advanced by decades if not centuries.

How come Capitalism crept up on us so stealthily that we now think of it as the most common and preferable mode of life?  We are in that peculiar situation which reminds me of the Proverbial Frog, who, if it were thrown into a pan of hot water, would immediately jump out, but, when seated contentedly in a pan that is slowly brought to a boiling point, will blithely be cooked to a crisp. That’s what Capitalism is doing to us, literally.

Yes, Capitalism has reduced much of the world to ruin and squalor, a world that God, when he created it, called ‘good’ seven times, and ‘very good’ when it was all finished. If it is a sin to kill and to steal, then surely it is a sin to destroy carrying capacity – the capacity of the earth to support life now and in the future. To hand back to God the gift of Creation in a degraded state capable of supporting less life, less abundantly and for a shorter future, is surely a sin. Of all people Christians should realize this grave misstep and start planning for alternate ways to honor the Lord, repent from this sin against creation and take steps to move about so that it benefits us as well as enhances God’s world, and devise an alternative to Capitalism.

Here is where we are at: after a century or so of triumph as the dominant mode of global development, capitalism has fashioned for itself a world in which one out of two human beings lives on $2 per day or less, and more than one in three still lacks access to a toilet. It was not so before Capitalism, when Africa was flourishing and Asia’s personal income equal to Europe’s. Now most children in the world never complete their education, and most will live out their lives without dependable medical care. As the world economic crisis deepens, already deplorable conditions in the Third World will only deteriorate further.

I cited the prophet Micah who urges us to act justly, to love mercy and walk humbly with our God, because, if we closely examine ourselves, then we must admit that the church at large too is in the grip of Capitalism, is also like that frog which is slowly burning to a crisp. We are told to act justly. That applies not only to being honest, not to steal or kill, or worship false gods. Capitalism is actually a god. We must face the failures of the Growth Society. We must stop crying out to the growing economy, “Deliver me for you are my god.” We must have the courage to ask with Isaiah, “Is not this idol I hold in my right hand a lie? Isaiah 44:20”.

Justice equally applies to the cosmos. Says John 3:16, God loved so much that His beloved Son was offered to rectify the mess we have made of creation, thanks to our infatuation with Capitalism. Yes, ‘to act justly’ applies to all of creation as well. When you attend a baptism in church, as I did recently, then the parents or the persons concerned are asked questions regarding their commitment to Christ, such as resisting evil, seek Christ, strive for justice among people, but never is there a question asking to seek the best for Creation, the cosmos God loves so much. (John 3:16)

No wonder our planet is dying. Or rather, its flesh and blood creatures are. At the height of the financial crisis last year, a Swiss conversation group released a study showing that as many as one-third of known mammals on earth face imminent extinction, perhaps in a matter of decades, as a result of habitat destruction and mass killing by human beings. I have, in my columns, been one of the few that has consistently connected the dots between this and similar warnings of mass species extinctions and our, so revered, system of capitalism, which slowly at first, but now with earth-breaking speed is threatening human civilization and the natural world alike.

To ‘love mercy’ applies to the entire human race, none excepted. We, the original beneficiaries of the capitalistic system have failed to share our wealth, have failed to ‘love mercy’ for the greater majority of the human race, evident in almost universal poverty.

Our failure to ‘walk humbly’ is evident in our arrogant approach to the environment. So severely has capitalism disrupted the world’s climate (the petroleum economy, let us not forget, has been the main pillar of capitalist industrial development for the last 100 years) that even if all carbon emissions were halted tomorrow, scientists now believe that the earth’s atmosphere would warm for another 1,000 years. Hundreds of millions of people, and billions of other animals, will be displaced by rising sea levels, or will starve or suffer malnutrition as a result of flooding, drought, and fire, or else will die from illnesses caused by new plague vectors opened up by sudden climate change and a gravely weakened world health system.

In 1997, a group of European academics published a book called The Black Book of Communism, in which they documented the brutality and mass killings committed by totalitarian Communist regimes in the course of the twentieth century. Perhaps a group of academics will one day publish a Black Book of Capitalism. It won’t be difficult to do, and, of course, just as the Black Book on Communism came about after it had collapsed, so the one on Capitalism will only then appear when it too has been written off as a Crime Against Humanity, as a mode of life that subordinates all human and spiritual values to the pursuit of private wealth and maximum personal consumption of the chosen few, at the expense of most others in the world. Blind as we are to our current state, history will view us as criminals. I might mention the hidden indignities and daily humiliations of the working class and the poor; the strangulation of daily life by corporate bureaucracies such as the telecom companies, and the computer giants; the corruption of art and culture by money; the destruction of eroticism by pornography; the corruption of higher education by corporatization; the ceaseless pitching of harmful products to our children and infants; the obliteration of the natural landscape by strip malls, highways, and toxic dumps; the abuse of elderly men and women by low-paid workers in squalid for-profit institutions; the fact that millions of poor children are sold into sexual slavery, and millions of others are orphaned by AIDS; the fact that tens of millions of women turn to prostitution to pay their bills; and the suffering of the 50 million to 100 million vertebrates that die in scientific laboratories each year. I might also mention the dozens of wars and civil conflicts that are directly or indirectly rooted in the inequalities that are always part and parcel of the capitalist system – the bloody conflicts that simmer along sometimes for decades without ever coming to a solution, in such places as Somalia, Ethiopia, Darfur, Rwanda, Congo, Nepal, Afghanistan, Vietnam, and Iraq, where millions of wretchedly poor people die at the hands of other wretchedly poor people. Capitalism is responsible for all this too.  

If all this is true, and I think it is, should not the Christian Community rise up and protest, while simultaneously, now that Capitalism has been found wanting, offer a new approach, a new Way to Life?

Yes…Yes (2)

An appeal to all Christians

Are happy times to happen soon again? No, not until debt is paid and we have adjusted to a lower standard of living. Actually, surveys done in the past 50 years indicate that the 1950’s were the best of times, just before the universal advent of television.

Debt is a form of death. Debt is a mortgage on the future. The first part of the word ‘mort-gage’ is ‘mort’ which means death, the second part means ‘pledge’, thus a debt, a mort-gage, literally means to pledge one’s life until death-debt- does us part. Freedom to live does not come back until the mort-gage is paid. That applies to all debt. That’s the reason why God in Deuteronomy 15 stipulated that ‘every seventh year you shall grant a remission of debts’, in other words, God wanted the Old Testament people to cancel all monetary obligations after seven years. He wanted his people to be free, because God knows that money has power, that money can easily become a force for evil.

Actually God even went further: Leviticus 25 states that twice in a century a year of Jubilee must be proclaimed in which everybody will receive back her or his original inheritance, so that a new beginning can be made, with all debts cancelled, all properties restored to their original owners and all bodily bondage abolished. In other words, God does not want rich people to ever grow richer, because God knows that instead of people using money, money has the tendency to use people, who then lose their freedom, which leads to spiritual death. Says Matthew 6:21 “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”

So what’s happening in our real world, a world beset with debt? President Obama is desperately trying to correct the debt situation but rather than telling people to pay off their monetary obligations, to face reality, he has embarked upon an unprecedented increase in money supply, mountains of it.

During the previous depression – when there was little debt – John Maynard Keynes, the British economic whiz, advocated make work programs, and World War II proved to be the perfect remedy. Now the hole is much deeper, so deep, that the only escape possible is to slowly and painfully claw our way out of the pit and ever so cautiously extract ourselves from our deep debt predicament. However the Washington team, appointed by Barack Obama, wants to go back to Keynesianism: create money, cut interest rates and get funds to those banks that are in trouble. Never mind that this makes the hole deeper and deeper, made worse by more tax cuts, less tax income and more government job creation.

Granted immense deficits may boost the economy in the short term – politicians always go for the immediate cure first – but with the debt situation resembling an immense mountain valley, the current recession is bound to become a depression.

The 20^th century Depression was cured by World War II, at a cost of 50 million lives. Unemployment was at 3 percent when it started in 1929. It jumped to 25 percent a few years later, and was still at 17 percent in 1939. Mobilizing millions of men to serve overseas, and, at home, creating jobs for many more millions to arm and equip them to fight, cured that depression.

Although war is never a solution, especially today with the sort of weapons out there, the possibility of a new war happening is not as remote as people might think. It is a well-known fact that the USA spends more on its military than all the other countries of the world combined spend on theirs, and the military everywhere always is a power of evil: after all, their job is to kill and destroy. Money-debt always leads to war, because ‘the lust for money is the root of all evil’ says the Bible.

So how did we get into this ‘owe-owe’ scenario?

In the 1970s wages and economic growth stagnated while inflation increased. This created a new economic condition called ‘stagflation’, the worst of all possible worlds. As a result interest rates shot up and so did unemployment. With higher inflation, wages too increased somewhat, and the resulting higher employment cost caused employers to relocate factories to lower cost areas anywhere in the world, forcing workers to accept less pay, or, at best, preventing them from getting a raise.

Then Alan Greenspan, the US chairman of the Federal Reserve, acted: he lowered the cost of money to almost zero, with the result that house prices went through the roof, and millions of people used their rising home equity to obtain ever larger loans, creating an upward spiral in property values.

Now, with North America, especially the USA, losing jobs, while the employment available gives less pay – look at the GM and Chrysler workers – combined with the sudden fall in house prices and the collapse of the stock market, all this events have exposed the assets of the money houses on Wall Street and the City in London to be pure fraud, and has caused the great fall in monetary assets everywhere in the world were money in various forms is traded.

From Amsterdam to Zurich, from Brussels to Washington, from Frankfurt to Tokyo, in vain do all the king’s horses and all the king’s men – bankers, economists, policy analysts, and government leaders – try to put capitalism back together again. And they will fail, creating an once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for Christians to point the way out of this mess. This requires wisdom, and, as the Scriptures tell us, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of Wisdom”.

S tates in Europe, North America, and Asia have either spent outright, or exposed themselves to financial risks totaling well over $10 trillion – a figure so vast that I am sure that nothing even remotely similar has ever happened before. Just imagine: the entire Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe after World War II cost a mere $9.3 billion (in constant 2005 dollars). According to the United Nations, it would cost $195 billion to eradicate most poverty-related deaths in the Third World, including deaths from malaria, from malnutrition, and from AIDS. So the amount of money committed by policymakers to save capitalism from itself is already fifty times greater than what it would take to save tens of millions of human beings from terrible daily suffering and premature death, which makes me to conclude that capitalism is the most unchristian system ever devised. If the wealthy nations instead invested that $10 trillion into the economies, health systems, and infrastructure of the Third World, rather than transferring it to the world’s richest banks, private financial institutions, and investors, they could usher in a new epoch in the history of the world community in which every human being would be guaranteed a livable life. Isn’t that what    Christianity aims for?

That the financial bailout is a colossal misdirection and waste of public resources, however, is not the most scandalous thing about it. What is truly inhumane is that all this money is being spent to prop up capitalism itself – a mode of economic and social life that has corrupted and hollowed out our democracies, reduced great swaths of the planet’s ecosystem to polluted rubble, condemned hundreds of millions of human beings to wretchedness and exploitation, and enslaved billions of other animals in farms that resemble concentration camps.

Indeed Capitalism has the proper name. It’s solely for the benefit of capital so that those who have it will benefit.

Why should Capitalism fail? Is there a Christian alternative? Is money-debt the only form of future obligations?