Our World Today

Foolish money

Europe has not been un-familiar with folly. The idea to make Europe something like the United States of Europe must be lauded. To be able to travel and trade across the continent without a custom check is admirable. To introduce a common currency for countries as diverse as Germany and Greece and the Netherlands and Portugal is proving to be utter folly. Southerly climates generate a different type of people. The Northerly harsh winters have inculcated in these sober Dutchmen and frugal Germans a notion of thrift and foresight that never was part of their Mediterranean neighbours who, in a pinch could live off the land year-round. That alone made their attitude toward life totally different. The Euro gave the Mediterranean folk cheap money, easy credit, and so they had a whale of a fiesta. Brussels, from where Europe is governed, knew their lies, tolerated their fraud, obsessed with an idea that would make Europe the envy of the world. The entire Euro experiment reminds me of a penny-pinching person sharing a joint account with a spend-thrift cousin. Count Axel Oxenstierna, onetime chancellor of Sweden during the Thirty Years’ War, said on his death-bed: “Know my son with how little wisdom the world is governed.” The March of the Euro is a March of Folly.

Superlative folly

Then there is the world’s super power: the US of A. Compare its medical expenses to any other of the other large high-income countries. The US spends 18 per cent of its gross domestic product on health against 12 per cent in the next highest spender, France. The US public sector uses a higher share of GDP than those of Italy, the UK, Japan and Canada, though many millions are left uncovered. US spending per head is almost 100 per cent more than in Canada and 150 per cent more than in the UK. What does the US get in return? Life expectancy at birth is the lowest of these countries, while infant mortality is the highest. Potential years of life lost by people under the age of 70 are also far higher. For males this must be partly due to violent deaths. But it is also true for women. Now these crazy Republicans have provoked a Government crisis for the sole reason to deprive the poor of low-cost health care. This is only the latest in a series of follies unequalled in modern history.

The folly of Iraq

The USA, from 2001 till 2008, was governed by President Bush who, when he campaigned, asked his father’s friend, Dick Cheney, to look for a suitable vice-president. Mr. Cheney looked in the mirror and found his man. As the CEO of Halliburton, an oil-service industry, his hungry eyes were always fixated on the Middle East where most of the easy-to-get oil was located. His new position gave him the opportunity to obtain access to this treasure.

September 11 2001 allowed the opening. That’s when America took the first steps on its major March of Folly, based on pure deceit, hubris and thirst for oil, that same polluting stuff that is turning the March of Folly into a Run toward Ruin.

The first obligation of a nation involves the welfare of its citizens: their education, their physical and mental well-being, and the state of their infrastructure, such as roads, water, sewer and utilities. In the last few decades the USA has failed in all these categories. As already noted its medical system is the most costly in the world by far while its populace must endure results far below most developed nations. The same applies to its elementary and secondary education. Where does the money go? The USA with 5% of the world’s population spends as much on the military as the remaining 95 percent of the entire world.

Blinded by the prospect of untapped oil wealth in Iraq, the USA duped congress into believing that Saddam Hussein had WMD – Weapons of Mass Destruction.  What other country could have invaded Iraq, hardly knowing the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite? If there ever was a March of Folly, it is the totally irrational Iraq invasion. Saddam, through brute force kept the population from killing each other in a religious strife. Now, with no central authority able to enforce a stand-off, ethnic cleansing between the two religious streams is killing hundreds of thousands.

Bush and Cheney launched the invasion with plans to garrison Iraq for decades, with the larger goal of subduing neighboring states, especially Iran. In an off the cuff remark Cheney said: “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad; real men want to go to Tehran”.

Just imagine: The US military, in a bare few years in Iraq, have built a staggering 505 bases, ranging from combat outposts to ones the size of small American towns with their own electricity generators, water purifiers, fire departments, fast-food restaurants, and even miniature golf courses at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars and then, only a few years later, abandoned all of them, dismantling some, turning others over to the Iraqi military or into ghost towns, and leaving yet others to be looted and stripped. Why? Because they planned to stay there for decades and use Iraq as a spring board to conquer the entire Middle East for the greater glory of Halliburton.

And that was only the beginning

Of course Bush Cheney expected to be there for a couple of decades. Why build a $750 million compound, 104 acre Vatican-size fortress in the centre of Baghdad unless the US administration had plans to stay put there for the foreseeable future? Just imagine: 27 blast-resistant buildings, an indoor pool, basketball courts, a fire station which was to operate as a command-and-control center for our ongoing garrisoning of the country and the region. Now, with the army gone, the embassy’s staff cut, it’s a global white elephant.

With $4-6 trillion wasted on two useless wars, two so-called “good wars” in Afghanistan and Iraq against lightly armed minority insurgencies have only accomplished what Hosea 8: 7 describes as “they sow the wind and reap the whirlwind.” The ungluing of the social fabric in the Middle East and North Africa can be traced directly to the invasion of Iraq.

The damage done by wasting these trillions rather than spend them on education, better health, re-building cities- Detroit comes to mind- will only be evident in the coming years when this March of Folly will have become a Run toward Ruin.

Much worse to come

 Right now the greatest leap into foolishness is still in progress. The stage is set for global disaster when temperatures soar beyond a range in which humans can comfortably thrive. Climate stability is now a thing of the past. As extreme weather events grow in severity, communities should but are not adopting strategies that build resilience against the effect of these and other climate shocks. Needed are dramatic steps to avoid raising global temperatures to more than 2°C above pre-industrial levels. According to Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre, this would require a 10% reduction in CO2 emissions per year, starting now—a rate so significant that it can only be achieved through dramatic reductions in energy use. Will it happen? No.

Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard, has written that our inability to deal with climate change is due in part to the way our mind is wired. Gilbert describes that because global warming doesn’t take a human form this makes it difficult for us to think of it as an enemy. Also our brains fail to accurately perceive gradual change as opposed to rapid shifts. Climate Change has occurred slowly enough for our minds to normalize it, which is precisely the reason why it makes it a deadly threat. Gilbert writes, “because it fails to trip the brain’s alarm, it leaves us soundly asleep in a burning bed.” Climate change is history’s most dramatic and perfect example of the “boiling frog” phenomenon, in which slow, compounding, detrimental change goes mostly unnoticed until it reaches a magnitude where adequate response is exceedingly difficult and costly and even impossible.

The sorriest thing is that those who should know better, and I refer to the church-going crowd, are among the worst deniers of Climate Change. The reason for that is the “Heaven” heresy. The church people, almost unanimously, believe that upon death they go to heaven. So why bother with the earth? Satan is having a field-day in the church.

Governments are no help. They consist of elected officials who, if they are bringers of bad news, are voted out of office. So, always, without exception, they talk optimism, more jobs and greater growth. Governments are hell-bent to stimulate growth. Bernanke infuses $85 billion each month to artificially activate the stalled economy. Fracking is the total opposite of CO2 reduction because its takes lots of energy to free the fuel embedded in rocks underground.

When Hitler came to power in 1933 his aims were clearly outlined in his Mein Kampf. The world – England, and France in particular – chose to ignore his intentions and Munich was the result, now forever associated with appeasement. Chamberlain’s infamous words were: “Peace in our time”. But war came anyway, 60 million died and many more displaced.

Today we have manifold ‘Munichs”:” economic growth in our time”, ignoring the ever more evident signs of Climate Change. Warming of the climate system is beyond a shadow of a doubt. Since the 1950s the atmosphere and oceans have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice have diminished, sea levels have risen, and the concentrations of greenhouse gases have increased. This time death and displacement will be in the billions.

That is the ultimate event of folly: running headlong into ruin.

“A phenomenon noticeable throughout history regardless of place or period is the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests.”

Climate Change is the folly of follies.

Just a thought:

I can imagine that the Lord might ask us: “What have you done to limit your Carbon Foot Print to prevent Climate Change ?”