THIS WAS THE WEEK THAT WAS: ending Nov. 23 2014
I occasionally watch T.V., mainly the newscasts. The picture that fascinated me last week was taken at the G20 meeting in Brisbane, with Putin sitting at a round table with 10 chairs, and he was there all by himself. Had I been there – God forbid that I would ever dwell in such company – I would have joined him, asking him about his relationship to the Russian Orthodox Church, to which, so the tale goes, he is committed. But then that church is no different from any other, I imagine. Last week I was at our regular Thursday night Bible study, where one of the topic was Jesus’ agony in the Garden of Gethsemane. You may remember that twice he found the disciples – reduced to 11 by now – the then church, fast asleep. Jesus scolded them for this. It struck me that today, with God’s creation also in total agony, the church too is asleep. The excuse: creation is none of its business.
Talking about sleep: is there anything more boring than a G20 meeting? For some reason the heads of states from important countries meet once of year to dine and wine, at great expense to the taxpayer and even greater expense to the environment. They all fly in, of course, adding to our precious air megatons of GHG- by now you may know that this means Green House Gases – mostly CO2 which causes Climate Change.
The Australian chairman of the G20, Tony Abbott, wanted to keep Climate Change off the agenda, enthusiastically supported by Stephen Harper, the Canadian P.M, who has found a soul mate in Tony Abbott, whose name has religious connotations, an abbot being the head of a religious order. How fitting!
Both P.M.s are deeply religious: Infinite Growth being their idol, and in that they were at the right church service: the meeting of the G20. The Christian God is a G3, God in Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The Devil favors G666, while the secular church goes by G20, representing multiple gods, with the overarching expression of faith in the sacred duty to deliver exponential economic growth in a finite earth.
At this meeting, as usual, a company of priests prepared the Holy Script which always contains their faith commitment. It never varies: “The G20 is going to boost living standards and create better jobs.” It’s the age-old political clap-trap that is as meaningless as their idols, which are eloquently described in Psalm 115:
Their idols are silver and gold, made by the human hands. They have mouths, but cannot speak, eyes but they cannot see, ears but they cannot hear….Those who make them will become like them, and so will all who trust in them.
Indeed those who believe in the god of silver and gold and in infinite growth have lost all notion of the essence of creation. To see creation as something that cannot feel or hear, or suffer pain, something dead, implies that God is dead. The Bible sees creation as a living entity, now (Romans 8: 22) groaning as in agony. The Psalms see it as alive: hills dancing with joy, the heavens proclaiming God’s glory. To trust in the Lord means trusting in the goodness of creation, seeing it as the symbol of God’s greatness, and treating it God’s gift to us. That same Psalm, 115, tells us that “the highest heavens belong to the Lord, but the earth he has given to us.” That is a holy trust.
The G20 in Brisbane, Australia, where the outside temperatures had again reached a record, the matter of Climate Change was on the agenda in spite of the protests from Abbott and Harper. The final official communique said that:
“Our 800-point action plan will increase the size of the global economy by more than 2% over the next four years. It is going to step up the fight against climate change, make banks safer, modernize infrastructure, crack down on tax evasion and win the battle against Ebola.”
Stephen Harper certainly did not help to cure Climate Change the week of November 9-16. He must have generated tons of Green House Gases, by first flying to Beijing, for an APEC conference – APEC standing for Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation – then back to Ottawa, for the November 11 commemoration, trying to score political points, and then right away hopping in the plane flying 14 hours to Brisbane, Australia. Of course Harper is one of those Christians – the majority actually – who does not believe in Climate Change. He does believe in Infinity that is in Infinite Economic Growth a faith he shares with his soul-buddy Tony Abbott who scrapped the carbon tax when he came to power. Everything is sacrificed on the altar of Economic Growth. I wonder have these fellows ever read Isaiah 24, where the consequences of molesting the earth are outlined:
See the Lord is going to lay waste the earth and devastate it;
He will ruin its face and scatter its inhabitants –
It will be the same for priest (abbot) as for people…………
The earth will be completely laid waste and totally plundered.
Last week I read in E. F. Schumacher’s Small is beautiful that Jesus’ admonition to First Seek the Kingdom has not only a promise – all things we need will come to us – but also a threat: unless we first seek the Kingdom, that is the welfare of creation, these other things which we also need, will cease to be available to us. That’s what happens when we pursue Economic Growth and neglect the welfare of creation. The Bible says that the ‘wages of sin –polluting is sin – is death.”
I am quite sure that behind closed doors the leaders of the world weren’t so optimistic. The entire world is in deep human excrement, to use a diplomatic word. Frankly its politicians are in panic. They are running out of options. The Financial Times reports today that China now resembles the US in 2007. Domestic bank loans have risen 40% since 2008, while “the ability to repay that debt has deteriorated dramatically”. Property prices are falling and the companies that run China’s shadow banking system provide “virtually no disclosure” of their liabilities. Last week the G20 leaders announced that growth in China “is robust and is becoming more sustainable”. That is pure hogwash.
Take debt
A long time ago Shakespeare cautioned: Neither a lender nor a borrower be. Well, today there are plenty of both, and the great bard’s warning is not being heeded.
A report in September revealed that total world debt (public and private) has reached 212% of GDP, $100 Trillion +. In 2008, when it helped to cause the last crash, it stood at 174%. The Telegraph noted that this threatens to cause “renewed financial crisis … and eventual mass default.” Shadow banking has gone berserk, stocks appear to be wildly overvalued, the Eurozone is bust again. Which will blow first? The system the world’s governments have sought to stabilize is inherently unstable, built on debt, fuelled by speculation.
David Cameron, Britain’s PM, came back from the G20 meeting with warnings that we are in for hard times, revealing a bit what his political colleagues also fear. The world has run stuck: there is no alternative policy to the so-called Keynesian policies – pump in more money – with the result that they are making the same mistakes while expecting a different outcome. There is talk in Canada that Harper will call an early election. He has to face the voters in October 2015. When we do go earlier to the polls that is a certain sign that he fears collapse will come before next October.
Back to Oil.
By now everybody knows that fuel prices are down. Speculation abounds that this is a political ploy to play hardball with the “fracking” oil in the USA, which needs at least $70/barrel oil, and to humiliate Putin whose Russian economy depends on high fuel prices, well north of $100 per barrel to make ends meet. The Middle East oil sheiks can get by on less than $40 per barrel. Of course we, in North America, are glad because the cheap oil frees money to spend, especially with Christmas a few weeks away.
Actually low oil prices are a symptom of the opposite the G20 need for growth: they signal stagnation everywhere, in China, in Japan, in Europe, and also at home in North America.
The world at large needs high oil prices to pay for the ever-more expensive exploration costs, such as penetrating the almost inaccessible last frontiers. So the low prices are bad news, because they spell deflation, the exact symbol of the Great Depression of the 1930’s. Deflation is the Great Economic Plague. In a world oversaturated with debt, deflation is makes debt harder to repay. Lower prices mean that people wait to buy, because tomorrow the prices may have gone down even more. Thus lower prices signal economic stagnation. Fact is that the global economy has caught the equivalent of financial Ebola: deflation, which is the recognition that debts can’t be repaid, obligations can’t be met, and contracts won’t be honored. Credit evaporates and actual business declines steeply as a result of all those things.
I dare say that, for the foreseeable future, we will not see higher growth for the simple reason that growth can never go on forever. The earth is tired. It is literally exhausted. It’s been a fabulous 200 years, and now we see the end of growth. Our natural environment cannot continue to support further exploitation. The evidence clearly shows that atmospheric temperatures are rising, nature is failing to sustain many of the services that are critical to human life, and our global theft of everything natural is sharply reducing the biodiversity that safeguards our existence. There is no longer any doubt that ‘growth’ which really means the massive use of carbon energy, the increase of material output per person, and the rapid growth of the overall human population, is the cause of this environmental degradation. And yet, economists across the political spectrum call for ‘restoring growth’ as quickly as possible: the blind leading the blind.
Politicians are plainly petrified
I repeat: at this point politicians and bankers are simply terrified: the global system is overly indebted and so vulnerable to complete collapse of stock markets that very few of our leaders sleep peacefully. That the entire financial world is desperate can be seen by the violent rise and fall of currency values. The Japanese yen and the euro go down, the dollar goes up. It happens in a few months, which is quickly in the world of money.
Yet the stock markets go up, no longer a portrayal of the real state of affairs. Nobody wants to be the first to pull the plug: perhaps there are yet a few paper dollars to be made. Both Greed and Fear rule the roost.
My advice? No, I won’t hazard a guess. There is no rule that applies to all. Become aware of the utter frailty of the system we have devised. Support and strengthen the community you live in. There is real wisdom in community. Now more than ever we will need friends and family and strong churches, just as the time when all these bodies are often in deep disarray.
Pray without ceasing is perhaps the best and only option.