Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

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?

Yes….Yes(1)

An appeal to all Christians.

Times are never better for us, Christians: we suddenly live in an era as advantageous for the proclamation of the Gospel as the post-Pentecost time 50 days after Jesus rose from the dead, when the Good News spread like wild-fire.

Then too the world was one, under the rule of the Roman Emperor, travel was easy, sort of, one language, one political power, not unlike today. Then too people were confused where and what to worship.

Now too we have a single ruler: the Mighty Market dominates the globe, as yet there is one currency recognized by all, the still mighty U.S. dollar, English monopolizes all transactions, and travel never has been easier. Now too people are uncertain and mixed up, not knowing what will come next, because all is not well.

Capitalism, the banner under which the world operates, is having a brown-out, as suddenly its power is waning, its influence collapsing, its rule being challenged. That’s why Christianity has a second chance, because the gods of this age are found wanting.

Let me warn you: I can’t write this in the way you are used to when you watch television: a few pictures, a comment from a so-called expert, a sob story, then an opposing view, and a bit of a wrap-up, all done in 10 minutes, with advertising introducing and ending the show. That won’t work. Matters are too complicated, and, frankly, because we live in New Times, the Gospel too needs updating.

I will divide this into shorter segments, but that also means that this will be a long series, because it’s a rather involved question, and will involve some serious questioning. I hope this will not turn you off, even before I begin.

Let me start with Barack Obama, president of the USA, whom I admire greatly for his forthrightness, his intellect, and his efforts against terrific odds. We all should pray that he will succeed.

He has pumped trillions of dollars into the financial institutions. As an aside, a trillion dollars is one million times one million. To give you an idea what this means in practical terms: Canada’s total Gross Domestic Product is just over a trillion, which includes all the money changing hands by the 30 million Canadians in one year.

Obama’s money infusions were called ‘stimulus packages’, extra cash created by the Federal Bank to replace the bad debts banks have on their books.

You may wonder what all this has to do with the Gospel’s Golden Opportunity. Patience, I will come to that eventuality, because all of life is religion, especially including money matters. It’s money, the lust for money, actually, that is at the root of today’s crisis.

The origin of today’s recession started more than 30 years ago, in 1975, to be exact. It wasn’t the sub-prime lending, or the housing bubble that caused it. It wasn’t Wall Street greed, or the investment managers’ feckless “innovations,” or even the reckless borrowing that has characterized almost all sectors of the economy. These factors have all played a role, but they are at best proximate causes.

What really started today’s malaise was that since 1975 wages, the take-home pay of American workers, went flat. Before that, the 30 years after World War II, 1945-75, was capitalism’s “Golden Age,” when the great boom in wages that began with World War II lifted tens of millions of Americans to a life of home ownership and unprecedented comfort.

All workers then shared in the productivity growth that capitalist innovation produced, but this “social democratic contract” expired in the mid-1970s.

So how come that, until just a year or two ago, business still boomed? What was the magic there? With wages flat, how was it possible that people still bought the products, as over the past thirty years the average annual salary in America increased only 10 percent? The answer is simple: they borrowed. Credit card debt increased sevenfold (adjusted for inflation) since 1975, home equity loans mushroomed, students went deeper into debt, and automobile loans rocketed upward. All in all, outstanding household debt grew from 47 percent of GDP in 1975 to 100 percent of GDP thirty years later.

I am a statistics man. Each day I record the distance I bike, the kilometers I run, the hours I work outside, and total it  monthly and yearly. Especially debt figures fascinate me.

Here’s the current picture, obtained from Zero Hedge:

U.S. Debt                              Consumer Balance Sheet

$9.7 Trillion in bailouts             $20.5 Trillion residential real estate

$11 Trillion National debt          $8.8 Trillion equities

$17 Trillion corporate debt        $7.7 Trillion deposits and cash

$13.8 Trillion household            $4.1 Trillion durable goods

$1 Trillion credit card               $1.6 Trillion corporate bonds

$10.5 Trillion mortgages           $960 Billion municipal securities

Total $115 Trillion of Debt        $44.9 Trillion of Equity

Even if I don’t count the 52 trillion in social security/medical obligations, reducing U.S. Debt to $63 Trillion, this by far exceeds the equity picture.

The banks and other lending institutions are now loath to lend because they know that these debts are never going to be repaid.

Especially the Wall Street money-men did exceedingly well in the last three decades.  Those earnings flowed into the stock market, setting off a bubble there, and then, later, into real estate. The Dow Jones doubled during the Golden Age from 500 in 1956 to 1,000 in 1972, during which time wages doubled also, but it increased fourteen fold from 1975 till 2007 when it hit 14,000. People felt richer, so they spent more and were able to borrow more against ever-rising asset values. Now, 2 years later, the Dow Jones is down 40 percent and so are house prices in the boom areas.

Will happy times come back again?