Perpetual Growth Is Impossible:
Notes
on the Usury Paradigm
by
Tom White
The world has had a long love affair with the
idea of growth—growth of everything from population to wealth. And most of
the world still believes that growth is a “good thing.” Unfortunately, it
isn’t a good thing, at least not over the long haul.
Over short periods of time and for special
purposes growth can be borne; in fact without some growth, we should have no
food and no people. All of us start as an ovum and a spermatozoon and go on
from there. We had better bear with that fact cheerfully, or we shall really
be in trouble. The growth of that initial fertilized human ovum is the very
model of sane and acceptable growth, since after nine months a baby results,
and after 90 years, more or less, barring wars, disease, or famine that
shorten life span, that baby dies and makes room for another human being.
Sanity.
I believe the world needs to drop its
fascination with perpetual
growth, which is an insanity. The formula for it
is the formula for “compound interest,” which Einstein is alleged to have
said is the greatest invention of the human race. I should say rather the
“greatest lunacy” of the human race. And I go so far as to say that
“compound interest on money” is THE
paradigm of modern global
society, of finance-capitalist
society.
The whole world is entranced by the
possibility of living like the rich, which means, first, getting hold of a
fortune. As some Wall Street operator has famously said, this is something
you need to do just once. Then you can live on the interest from said
fortune, “invested wisely in sound stocks and bounds.”
This simple program really worked for a time
and some people, notably for the British in their heyday as
rentiers to virtually the whole world. That
world is now gone, as surely as Jane Austen’s world is gone of known
fortunes and predictable returns on them. But not its
central ideology. That still rules us as the dominant social paradigm
of our entire age and over all the world. Our
current U.S. president seems to be convinced that with the right jiggering
the system can be made to work again. I do not think so. Only a huge
disaster can result from what is now going forward in Washington, DC, and
New York City (Wall Street)—and as far as I can see, in the rest of the
world’s capitals.
Which Is It?
Depending on one’s angle of view, the current
world situation and the current American situation can be seen as either
ridiculously simple or murderously complex.
The complex view is the daily staple of the
newspapers and the Internet. It has produced the present national (and
world) mood: a semi-stunned, vast world of plebs (6-plus billion people)
sits around wondering what’s going to happen next (and watching TV if they
have it); a very small elite cooks up “happenings,” wars included, and
delivers them to governments. The pleb watches
and comments and, while money lasts, buys food (including dinners-out) and
pursues daily interests, entertainments, and duties. Does disaster lie
ahead? Will all go forward swimmingly? Who knows? And as long as my “thing”
keeps going, who cares?
The simple view, however, is on display, more
or less stridently, only on certain web sites on the Internet, in certain
new books and many old ones. It has no large clientèle,
because it is hated with an intense passion by the current Establishment
(see below), which has done and will do everything it can to kill it off. At
present the Establishment’s modus operandi is to stifle and ignore it, to
treat it as the ravings of lunatics.
By the “simple view” I mean the call for a
complete overhaul of our money-and-credit system, an overhaul that would
return the issuance of all money from private bankers to the government,
“the people.” The primary website for those who are interested in the
current state of this immensely rational argument is that of the American
Monetary Institute at
http://www.monetary.org/. The AMI is run by Stephen
Zarlenga, director. He has written a superb
book, The Lost Science of Money:
The Mythology of Money—The Story of
Power, which can be bought for $60 through the AMI website but
will cost at least $20 to $30 more through Amazon because Amazon has chosen
to be most uncooperative with the author in selling this anti-Establishment
work.
AMI has a developed program, including a draft
of a monetary reform act that has been presented to Congress, but it gets no
mainstream media publicity because the bankers presently “own” Congress and
rule it, as they do the media.
A few more words on the overhaul AMI seeks: it
involves, first, some combination of a repudiation or write-down of our
national debt and a jubilee of debt forgiveness such as the world has not
seen for several millennia (not since Biblical days). Professor Michael
Hudson of the University of Kansas (website:
http://www.michael-hudson.com/) is an economist and historian and an
authority on the Mesopotamian invention of interest and the use of Jubilee
years and the like debt-forgiveness practices of virtually all governments
before imperial Rome to offset the social evils that always result from
interest-taking.
The proposed overhaul or reform of the money
system also means (or should mean) the end of interest-taking as a function
of the issuance of money. Most of our present bankers’ money represents an
interest-bearing loan to somebody. For there to be more money under the
present system there has to be more debt. That is the deadly connection now
in force nearly everywhere.
I would cheerfully agree to “abolish”
interest-taking (usury properly so-called), except that you cannot abolish
such things. It’s like trying to abolish sexual wanderings or greed. But one
can withhold the use of the law to
enforce interest-taking, and that should effectively end the
worst of the usurers’ depredations. Even that, of course, is a far-away
eventuality in our banker-ruled world.
Now for a few elucidations
There is an immense more to be said about
money. I advance some thoughts in the remainder of this piece. These
thoughts are set down in no particular order and are basically
free-standing, except that they are all connected to my principal topic.
A Viable Government
By the words “nation,” “state,” or “country”
we usually mean essentially the same thing. Let's start with what defines a
State or an independent country. (This is quoted from the geography section
of About.com):
Begin quote:
An independent State:
—Has space or territory, which has
internationally recognized boundaries (boundary disputes are OK).
—Has people who live there on an ongoing
basis.
—Has economic activity and an organized
economy. A country regulates foreign and domestic trade and issues money.
[This is where Matt Rosenberg, the author of
this definition, goes off track. If any “independent state issues money” I
am not aware of which they are. I’d like to know. I suspect this is the
reason for the strength of China, but I simply don’t know the facts. I
remind you I am not a finance professional; else
I should almost certainly be arguing for the divine right of bankers, which
is the default mode of most financial writers. The U.S. for example
presently has (no doubt temporarily) the most powerful money in the world;
oil, the “black gold,” is marketed in dollars worldwide; and all our current
wars, in one view, are designed to obtain oil sources or oil-pipeline routes
The U.S. dollar is virtually a world standard, but it is issued by the
private bankers who own the Federal Reserve, a condition I argue in this
article needs to be ended.]
—Has the power of social engineering, such as
education.
—Has a transportation system for moving goods
and people.
—Has a government which provides public
services and police power.
—Has sovereignty.
No other State should have power over the country's territory.
[Again,
an objection to author Rosenberg’s point. Sovereignty
is defined as the “supreme power.” It rules the nation and issues its money.
I remind you of Meyer Anselm Rothschild’s classic remark to the effect that
so long as he controlled a nation’s money, he didn’t care who made its laws.
He knew, of course, that he who issues a nation’s money is its true
sovereign.]
—Has external
recognition. A country has been "voted into the club" by other countries.
There are currently
195 independent countries or States around the world. Territories of
countries or individual parts of a country are not countries in their own
right.
End of quote.
Usury: A Definition
By usury I mean the taking of any interest on
a loan of money—any interest, any kind of money. There are other definitions
of usury, but this is the one that our Western world began with, the one
that undergirds the Bible’s prohibition of
usury. I am sticking with it.
The Model
The model or pattern for the rise of the
“perpetual growth paradigm” or, as I also call it, the “usury paradigm,” is,
as I have said, compound interest.
Please bear with me for a bit of a somewhat
technical set-out: the formula for compound interest is
D=P(1+r)n, where
D is the debt at the end of a
designated number of years; P
is the principal loaned; r is
the rate of interest; n is the
number of years the principal was loaned for.
Doubling
From this formula one can quickly derive the
famous “Law of 72,” the law of doubling. To determine (approximately) how
long it will take for a quantity of anything to double at a certain rate of
growth, divide 72 by that annual growth rate.
You probably are already aware of how quickly
one reaches astronomical numbers by repeatedly doubling any quantity: 1, 2,
4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096, 8192, 16,384. . . . Thus
one can go from, for example, $1 million to $1,638.4 million (that figure
equals $1.638 trillion or $1,638,000,000) in a mere 14 doublings.
As to “doubling”—it is clear that any growth
persisted in long enough will lead to a doubling, and if the growth
continues, to still further doublings, and so on, forever. Continued,
everlasting growth of anything is simply impossible in our finite world. The
formula for compound interest is the formula for perpetual growth. Perpetual
growth is impossible; compound interest is the formula for the
impossible—for utter ruin. Nature stops all growth. There are no
14-foot-tall human beings, no 500-lb. mosquitoes, no 900-foot-tall Sequoias.
Compound interest on money is possible for a
while, but if persisted in, it must produce disaster. We are just now at the
end of a 500-year growth binge produced by the astonishing “success” of
capitalism. It has also produced a disaster, although not everyone is yet
convinced of that, chiefly because we have not yet seen the final chapters
of the story.
My wife and I recently got a money pitch in
the mail from Shell Oil, with whom we have a gasoline account. If we
accepted their generous offer to advance us $1,200, they would be delighted
to do so. In the small print, however, they made it plain that if we failed
to meet their terms in some way, they would be forced to charge us 28%
annually on the outstanding balance. By almost anyone’s definition of usury
that’s usury. At that rate an outstanding balance would double in less than
three years. The only people who would take such an offer have arrived at a
state of desperation awful to think about. You might well ask why an oil
company is in the usury racket. I think the answer is,
it is the best racket in town. In our city of fewer than 100,000 people the
number of banks grows continually and “paycheck lenders” proliferate in our
strip-mall storefronts like dandelions in an untended lawn.
Paradigm
The word “paradigm” in its present meaning
came into common use in the years since 1962, when Thomas Kuhn employed it
tellingly in his now famous book, The
Structure of Scientific Revolutions. To simplify, Kuhn held that
science meanders along according to one “paradigm” until, after many
contributions from many scientists, the “old paradigm” comes to seem
inadequate to explain things; the scientists who held stubbornly to the “old
paradigm” have the good grace to die off; and lo! a
new paradigm comes into existence.
Kuhn thought the word “examplar”
just as good as paradigm to indicate what he was talking about, but
“paradigm” has carried the day and been much expanded in its meaning and
applications over the last 40 years.
I contend that the Usury Paradigm, which
fosters the adoption of governmental and financial policies to promote
“growth,” as applied to the human cultivation of the earth, to the
industrial production of nations, and especially to the “growth” of money by
means of “interest” as the enabler of all plans for the future, has led to
our present quite grievous dilemma. To summarize; it has resulted in an
unsustainable, rising level of world population, and intensifying global
crises in food, energy, pollution, and lately and above all, in the
financial world.
(Wikipedia gives
this on paradigm: “The Merriam-Webster Online dictionary defines ‘paradigm’
as ‘a philosophical and theoretical framework of a scientific school or
discipline within which theories, laws, and generalizations and the
experiments performed in support of them are formulated;
broadly : a
philosophical or theoretical framework of any kind.’”)
The Nub
Pius XI, coming at essentially the same social
dissension that Marx called “class war,” pinned it down in a brilliant
paragraph that has only one flaw, a flaw of omission; he did not name the
people who had the power he described. Even back then, in 1931, it was not
possible, evidently, for a Pope to get that close to the bone, to name the
class of bankers or hint at their Jewish flavor or the usury “paradigm” they
promulgated. This was in his famous social encyclical,
Quadragessimo
Anno of 1931, in Paragraphs 104-109.
Pius XI was writing in the same period in
which Father Charles Coughlin was being disciplined by the Church for his
outspoken critique—quite a bit too pointed—of the same money masters whom
Pius described. (See Thomas J. Herron’s article, “When Is a Church Burning
Not a Hate Crime? Jewish Lightning Hits Father
Coughlin’s Shrine,” in Culture Wars
Magazine, November 2002.)
Noting that the capitalist system had
undergone many changes since Leo XIII’s
encyclical Rerum
Novarum of 1891, Pius wrote:
“In the first place, it is obvious that not
only is wealth concentrated in our times but an immense power and despotic
economic dictatorship is consolidated in the hands of a few. . . . This
dictatorship is being most forcibly exercised by those who, since they hold
the money and completely control it, control credit also and rule the
lending of money. Hence they regulate the flow,
so to speak, of the life-blood whereby the entire economic system lives, and
have so firmly in their grasp the soul, as it were, of economic life that no
one can breathe against their will.”
Christ’s Either-Or Rule
In several verses of the New Testament that
have no parallels in the Old, Christ says a human being has only two
choices, he will worship God or Mammon. Strong’s Concordance gives the
meaning of Mammon as a Chaldean word for money.
That’s how Msgr. Ronald Knox translated it in his
The New Testament in English
published in the 1940s. The critical verses are Matthew 6:24 (in the Sermon
on the Mount) and Luke 16:13; they are nearly identical and rendered this
way by Msgr. Knox:
Mt: 6:24. A man cannot be the slave of two
masters at once; either he will hate the one and love the
other, or he will devote himself to the one and
despise the other. You must serve God or money; you cannot serve both.
Lk:
16:13. No servant can be in the employment of two masters at once; either he
will hate the one and love the other, or he will
devote himself to the one and despise the other. You must serve God or
money; you cannot serve both.
It seems obvious to me that we live in the Age
of Mammon, or in Augustine’s terms, we live in the City of Man. The City of
God is remote from us. We may try to connect with it, but the opposition is
tremendous and the encouragement to self-delusion equally so. In Hindu
terms, we live in the Kali Yuga, the end times of the end times.
The Classical Truth
About Money
The stand-out classical point about usury or
interest-taking is Aristotle’s: “Usury is unnatural.” Aristotle understood
that money is sterile. And he said that "Money exists not by nature but by
law," and, "The most hated sort (of wealth
getting) and with the greatest reason, is usury, which makes a gain out of
money itself and not from the natural object of it.
For money was intended to be used in
exchange but not to increase at interest (my emphasis). And this
term interest (tokos),
which means the birth of money from money, is applied to the breeding of
money because the offspring resembles the parent. Wherefore of all modes of
getting wealth, this is the most unnatural" (1258b
Politics).
The Modern Understanding
As an illustration of the commonplace
assumption nowadays that “growth is good,” let me now quote a 5-column
headline in our local Sunday newspaper only a few months ago: “U.S. Economy
is growing despite doomsayers.” The piece was written by a local man, who is
widely revered hereabouts because he is apparently vastly well-to-do and is
an economist, but no mere academician, rather an effective player in the
markets of the state and nation. He owns a fine house rumored to have cost
many millions.
This pundit assures the local “investing
public” that they can count on achieving “compound annual growth rates
(CAGR) that exceed those of the U.S.” And that means, he says, a growth rate
higher than 3.77 percent, which is what he
calculates for the nation “for the long term (until 2030).” (That rate of
growth would produce a doubling of Gross National Product in a mere 18
years! And you thought that things were a bit dicey already!) How the rate
of inflation figures in this our author does not say. There is not the
tiniest note of skepticism about the need for and the general excellence of
“growth.” Welcome to Nut-World thought as presently prevailing (or as still
prevailing about a year ago).
I notice in all my recent
surfings of the Internet that “growth” is being called for at
virtually every hand: pundits look for signs of “green shoots,” eagerly
prospect for this or that manifestation of renewed “expansion,” or signs of
growth in anything at all. They speak with one voice as to the excellence of
renewed “growth.” Meanwhile the only thing growing is our total of national
and personal debt, and that is going off the charts for sure.
The Establishment
The most effective element in the American
“Establishment” and in fact in the “Establishment” of
all the world is the Jewish one. That is not really new in America or
the world but it has become quite obvious since World War II. By
“Establishment” I mean simply “the people who run things, whose word goes,
who have the controlling (not necessarily the only) voice in the councils of
politics, finance, war, and peace.”
In America until WW II, the WASPs, white
Anglo-Saxon Protestants, were unquestionably our Establishment, although the
Jews were important from the beginning. It was Jewish influence that got us
into WW I under Wilson and, actually a year before that war opened—four
years before we entered it—the Jews in their role as international bankers
(think Rothschild, Warburg), achieved the legal creation by our Congress of
the privately owned Federal Reserve System, and Jews (or their surrogates)
have dominated it ever since, thus controlling the issue of our money and
the purposes to which it is put, with the result Pius XI described in the
passage quoted above.
The years since 1946 have seen something now
called the “rise of the Jews,” the tremendous increase in America in the
wealth, power, and numbers of the Ashkenazim, the Central European Jews, who
have, incidentally, very little but a literary connection with the Holy
Land.
Just a few years ago Americans became aware
that fully half of the “great rich” of our land, that is to say, its
billionaires, are Jewish, although Jews make up less than 3% of the
population. In recent years something called the “Jewish (or Israeli)
Lobby,” —AIPAC and the hundreds of other Jewish organizations in the
land—has proved immensely powerful, capable of seeing that billions of
dollars of American support go to Israel every year, despite Israel’s record
of waging relentless war on the Palestinians it shunted aside and has
brutally oppressed since 1948.
Conspiracy
All comments of the foregoing kind are
routinely dismissed by various Jewish spokespeople as predictable
anti-Semitism on the part of non-Jews, but the one thing one never hears is
a believable denial that
there is, in fact, no plan or intention on the part of Jews (the BIG Jews
who have the money for it and not the little Jews who do not) to “rule the
world.” All their actions as bankers indicate they intend to. Israel Shamir,
a Christian, former Jew, and great writer, clearly thinks the Jews intend to
rule the goyim, and in certain ways do now. He calls them “the Masters of
Discourse,” controllers of public speech. They appear to already rule
America. We await at this moment word that
Obama can defuse
Natanyahu’s radical program for the Middle-East: “Jews
Über Alles.” The
issue is in doubt, at least. Shamir makes the curious observation that the
Jews are like locusts; with no manifest individual leader, they still
succeed in ravaging any country they choose to.
The Crime of the Ages
The three-millennium-old drive by the Jews to
install usury everywhere has accelerated in modern, “capitalist” times. They
came back into England after centuries of banishment with Cromwell (whose
father was a banker in Holland), and in 1694 rigged up (with a non-Jewish
front man) the monopoly privilege of issuing British money. Around the time
of Napoleon, the Rothschilds arrived and
prospered mightily. One observer has noted the
Rothschilds ruled England by 1820 and have since. Their tactic was to
intermarry with the British royalty and cut them in on the profits.
Essentially the same story was repeated in America when the Rockefellers
joined the Warburgs in establishing our Federal
Reserve System (a private bankers monopoly of the
right to issue U.S. money).
The use of usury to turn a nation of free
people into debt slaves is the basic idea; it is no exaggeration to say that
it is the crime of the ages and cries out for correction.
Australian scholar Peter Myers has lately
provided an illustration of Jewish awareness of what they are about in
supporting debt for gentiles. (Myers’s website, where one may sign on for
his frequent emails is
http://mailstar.net/index.html.)
Myers quotes a
Lubavitcher source printed in an April 7, 2009 issue of
Actualité
Juive, a “respectable Jewish
magazine” in France. It is a "Positive Mitsva N°
198: “It's the command we were instructed to demand interest from a non-Jew
to whom we lend money, so that not only we don't help him and don't do him a
service, but we *harm* him by lending money with interest, something we are
forbidden to do to a Jew."
Myers comments: “I already knew this
Mitsva, but it's the first time I read that its
goal is to harm gentiles. I translated the French verb "nuire"
("nuisions") by "to harm." A scan of the page is
at
http://www.cijoint.fr/cjlink.php?file=cj200908/cijmNY94nK.jpg.
Myers quotes two verses from the O.T. to the
point:
"You will lend to
many nations, but you will not borrow. The LORD will make you the head, and
not the tail; you shall be only at the top, and
not the bottom . . ." (Deuteronomy 28:12-13).
"You shall not charge interest on loans to
another Israelite, interest on money, interest on provisions, interest on
anything that is lent. On loans to a foreigner you may charge interest, but
on loans to another Israelite you may not charge interest . . ."
(Deuteronomy 24:19-20).
Population
This is the word for the biggest problem of
all. If moral sanity were somehow ascendant in the world, all attention
would be focused on feeding everybody adequately. And on redesigning world
systems, not by fiat but by humane changes everywhere, so as to continue to
provide food for all. This should be the main focus of every locality from
this point forward: arranging for successful growing of food within easy
travel range: virtual agricultural self-sufficiency. Of course this is a
“Utopian” program. The tragedy is that a sane response to the most necessary
challenges is considered Utopian. I’ll say no more,
just perhaps direct you to the website www.dieoff.com for some scary
estimates of what lies ahead if we just keep going as we are now.
Except to say that the overstretch of world
population up to and beyond the Earth’s carrying capacity, especially in the
teeth of the crash in cheap energy supplies, that is, oil, may never be much
discussed by politicians, but at some point these folk will be swept away.
Then, at last, we shall see the “population problem” writ large, with who
knows what kind of dire consequences or inventive solutions.
Austrian
Economics
One of the more significant of opinion-makers
about money in America goes by the name of the “Austrian School of
Economics.” It is currently headed by Lew
Rockwell, a co-worker of Murray Rothbard in his
last years, who now heads the von Mises
Institute in Auburn, Alabama, a focus of libertarian opinion. His school
would liquidate or disestablish the Federal Reserve System in favor of a
return to the “gold standard.” In other words, they hold entirely with the
commodity money principle: money should have intrinsic worth and not be just
a measure of other values. Ron Paul was their candidate in the last
election.
The “Austrians” particularly deplore the idea
of government as the issuer of money. They want banks to run on a basis of
100%- reserves, employing the gold standard; and they have adopted an
unremitting anti-government stance. Their contention is that everything
government does can be done better by private entities. Many of their
published writings are extremely well done, those of Murray
Rothbard especially, but there is a radical
blindness endemic to their work: they cannot see that government—of one sort
or another—has been with us since the dawn of history, and is apt to be with
us to the end of it—and for good reasons that have been shown up in the
current crisis.
I repeat: the only power great enough to stop
the bankers in their drive for control of the world is government-of-the-people,
of the dwellers in those 195 nations we spoke of above. And even it is
challenged as never before by the fact that banker cooperation in financing
the world is running way ahead of national cooperation in managing it, with
the looming possibility the bankers will “win.” It would help if government
were not so corrupt, so on the take with respect, precisely, to the bankers,
who are (or ought to be) their traditional enemies.
Other Voices
I have already mentioned here and there some
people whose work is vital to the needed money reform. Here, briefly stated
are a few of the more significant opponents of the bankers’ unfair monopoly
of the power to issue money:
—Ezra Pound, to whom I owe my own conviction
that the money question is the most important question before all nations. I
have written about him before in Culture Wars.
—Eustace Mullins, a man who met Pound while he
was in St. Elizabeths Hospital in D.C. charged
with treason. He has written and published a number of vital books on the
Federal Reserve and other financial and cultural topics, many of them
unobtainable. I own a few of them and propose soon try to get in touch with
Mr. Mullen again, not having heard from him in five or more years.
Google for Eustace Mullins and follow where that leads.
An impressive education will result.
—Rupert
Ederer, who writes for Culture Wars magazine.
He agrees that bankers should not issue our money, the government should.
I m not sure how he would propose that should be done
differently than the American Monetary Institute’s Stephen
Zarlenga’s proposals.
A curious feature of the present scene is that
all the various writers who have a common disdain for the present system, do
not seem to be united in a mass to drive for change. They give the
impression of being isolated individuals rather than a strong movement.
Apparently that is as it must be after the sweeping takeover in the last
century of nothing less than the world by the bankers, who gave
globalized successfully way ahead of everybody
else.
—Ellen Brown, an attorney and brilliant
writer, I am less familiar with her work than I should be, but she is
right-on.
—Richard Cook, an astonishingly brave writer
and critic who has retired from the U.S. Treasury
and is now supporting the money reform the American Monetary Institute
proposes: Government issue and control of money. Cook is especially keen to
see Major Douglas’s Social-Credit ideas put into effect. Ezra Pound was a
major promoter of Douglas right after World War I. I believe Cook’s scheme
is the right one, but of course highly unlikely to be adopted unless there
is a sharp turn in D.C. at some point.
—The “Truth in Money” people. Currently their
website says they are “taking a leave of absence.” I own the book of that
name and am entirely convinced by it. Used copies of the
paperback that I own, and paid perhaps less than $10 to buy 20 years ago,
are now selling on Amazon for close to $200.
Truth in Money was written by
two engineers who really figured out what was going on.
—David
Astle’s The
Babylonian Woe.
I have mentioned this work before. I think it one of the most
interesting of all studies of banking practices and money.
Astle tells the story from earliest times in
Mesopotamia to Greece and Rome. Amazon has a used copy at $96; Barnes and
Noble, where I bought my copy years ago, no longer
offers it. It, like Truth in
Money, offers a wonderful chance, it seems to me, to make a good
profit on a reprint, but it doesn’t happen.
I should be offering more detail on important
books. The above citations are rather at random. A good list would go on for
pages. And when it comes to the Internet—I stand down.
Incredible riches there. But this piece is already too long. I leave
it to the interested reader to do his own research. The whole campaign of
getting the usurers off our backs will take many people and require their
doing much work—which will not, unfortunately, likely get done or achieve
the result of driving off the crooks who are siphoning money out of the U.S.
in a kind of high glee. It’s too easy, and Americans are too stupid and
distracted to get it. What we’ll get out of all this is what we’ll no doubt
deserve.
Prognosis
My own sentiment (and it is hardly more than
that since it is an entirely emotional reading) is that there will be no
very successful solution found to the economic distress the economy has
encountered in the last year or more. A chief reason for my great skepticism
about the economy and its “recovery” is that the same bankers who created
the present financial mess have been enlisted by government to provide the
solution. One might perhaps be forgiven for calling this crazy, but that’s
what we’ve done.
We are probably entering a period of decline
and reorientation that will stretch out for many years. I accept the premise
of Peak Oil: the total amount in the world has been half used up; we are on
a declining slope and can no longer count on “cheap energy.” We may hope to
avoid violence and starvation, but perhaps we cannot. The great global
networks of trade and capital transfer, of international lending and
investment, will shrink, as global goods shipments have shrunk in the recent
collapse of economic credit-based activity.
At some point I expect the word to go out from
the “capitals”: save yourselves if you can. At that point I think massive
and expensive governments may go unfunded and smaller and more efficient,
more local ones arise to take their place. If this can be accomplished
without chaos and gunfire we’ll be lucky. My crystal ball
goeth not much beyond this point. It’s
ridiculous to try to plot the future in detail; it will always be something
we can’t foresee.
Some of the understandings one might hope
would go with this reorientation are: “small is better,” “local is
beautiful,” “government is by people we know.” I find myself disbelieving in
monster totalitarian systems where huge, dazed herds of people are ruled by
distant experts. That seems to me a highly dystopian vision that I hope and
pray never comes to be. What I am reasonably sure of is that where we have
lately seemed to be heading is not where we are going to end up. I hope my
“vision” or opinion strikes others as fairly positive.
The Jews
Now we come to the most complex and unlikely
aspect of this whole discussion. E. Michael Jones and writers published by
him have explored this topic extensively over recent years.
As have a number of other writers on money as noted
above. It is possible to talk and write about money and problems with
money without mentioning the connection of Jews to the subject, but it is
misleading to do so.
Karl Marx wrote in
On the Jewish Question, "Money
is the zealous one God of Israel, beside which no other God may stand. . . .
The God of the Jews has become secularised and
is now a worldly God. The bill of exchange is the Jew's real God. His God is
the illusory bill of exchange" (from On
The Jewish Question, tr.
Dagobert Runes as
A World Without Jews) and quoted
from Peter Myers at
http://mailstar.net/leftprot.html).
Leave aside the melodramatic rhetoric. Is this
statement of Marx not plainly true, not just of Jews but
Mammonites of all lineages? It is astonishing
how weak and dithery we Christians have become in the face of contemporary
Mammonism. In fact is it at all accurate to
claim that not very many real Christians any longer exist, in or outside the
churches?
On Violence and War
I have lately accepted the views of Fr.
Emmanuel Charles McCarthy (see his website:
http://centerforchristiannonviolence.org/).
Fr. Charlie insists that to use or defend the
use of violence is to deny the Lord Christ. This view condemns the behavior
of the churches and its leaders pretty generally. They have connived to
misrepresent the teachings of Our Lord from the
Constantinian conversion of Rome to the present. The Lord said we are
to love our enemies and forgive those who wrong us. As we forgive them so
shall we be forgiven our trespasses in life.
Of course Fr. Charlie is widely thought of, if
thought of at all, as a typical clerical dreamer,
unrealist, or what have you. Most of what I have said in this piece
probably falls under the same dismissing rubric. No matter. Without vision
the people perish.
I suggested to Israel Shamir that the
Christian romance with violence (the Crusades, feudal chivalry, and their
illegitimate heir in modern warfare) had been just the mistake Fr. McCarthy
said it was. I included in this the much discussed and honored—except in
practice—“Christian Just War Theory.” Shamir responded that he was not a
pacifist. Nations, particularly weaker ones, he said, must be free to defend
themselves against aggression.
I stand corrected by him: I choose
non-violence for myself because I am a citizen of the most violent and
aggressive rogue state in the world; however, prompted by Shamir, I
acknowledge the right of, for example, the Iranians and N. Koreans to seek
nuclear ability to defend themselves against the aggression of their
enemies. In a dog-eat-dog world, it seems to me right to refuse to be just
another dog, but others also have the right to see things differently.
I am done with warfare myself; but others are
not. The idea of “gunning up” to defend oneself against U.S. armaments is
ridiculous. Our government has moved with lethal force against anyone who
muscles up against it; the sight of your gun(s) gives them the license to
gun you down. The Branch Davidians in Waco were
the classic victims of such government action.
I should like to end with this thought:
God is the Supreme Power. The
rest of us are mere jackanapes unless we submit ourselves humbly to him. We
learn how to do that, in the West at least, through the Christ spirit, and
in the East largely via other divine manifestations, “other mansions.” The
Christ spirit is universally available to human beings under many names; it
is ours anytime we seek it making no demands, just holding to the faith.