Fed's rescue attempt has failed
By Ambrose Evans-PritchardThe Telegraph, LondonMonday, March 3, 2008
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2008/03/03/ccview...
The verdict is in. The Fed's emergency rate cuts in January have failed to halt the downward spiral toward a full-blown debt deflation. Much more drastic action will be needed.
Yields on two-year US Treasuries plummeted to 1.63 percent on Friday in a flight to safety, foretelling financial winter.
The debt markets are freezing ever deeper, a full eight months into the crunch. Contagion is spreading into the safest pockets of the US credit universe.
It is hard to imagine a more plain-vanilla outfit than the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which manages bridges, bus terminals, and airports.
The authority is a public body, backed by the two states. Yet it had to pay 20 percent rates in February after the near closure of the $330 billion (L166 million) "term-auction" market. It had originally expected to pay 4.3 percent, but that was aeons ago in financial time.
"I never thought I would see anything like this," said James Steele, an HSBC economist in New York.
No sane mortal needs to know what term-auction means, except that it too became a tool of the US credit alchemists. Banks briefly used the market as laboratory for conjuring long-term loans at Alan Greenspan's giveaway short-term rates. It has come unstuck. Next in line is the $45 trillion derivatives market for credit default swaps (CDS).
Last week the spreads on high-yield US bonds vaulted to 718 basis points. The iTraxx Crossover index measuring corporate default risk in Europe smashed the 600 barrier. We are now far beyond the August spike.
Sub-prime debt is plumbing new depths. A-rated securities issued in early 2007 fell to a record 12.72 percent of face value on Friday. The BBB tier fetched 10.42 percent. The "toxic" tranches are worthless.
Why won't it end? Because US house prices are in free fall. The Case-Shiller index for the 20 biggest cities dropped 9.1 percent year-on-year in December. The annualised rate of fall was 18 percent in the fourth quarter, and gathering speed.
As the graph here shows, US households are only halfway through the tsunami of rate resets -- 300 basis points upwards -- on teaser loans.
The UK hedge fund Peloton Partners misjudged this fresh leg of the crunch. After an 87 percent profit last year betting against sub-prime, it switched sides to play the rebound. Last week it had to liquidate a $2 billion fund.
Like many, Peloton thought Fed rate cuts from 5.25 percent to 3 percent (with more to come) would end the panic. But this is not a normal downturn, subject to normal recovery. Leverage is too extreme. Bank capital is too eroded. Monetary traction eludes the Fed. An "Austrian" purge is under way.
UBS says the cost of the credit debacle will reach $600 billion. "Leveraged risk is a cancer in this market."
Try $1 trillion, says New York professor Nouriel Roubin. Contagion is moving up the ladder to prime mortgages, commercial property, home equity loans, car loans, credit cards, and student loans. We have not even begun Wave 2: the British, Club Med, East European, and Antipodean house busts.
As the once unthinkable unfolds, the leaders of global finance dither. The Europeans are frozen in the headlights: trembling before a false inflation; cowed by an atavistic Bundesbank; waiting passively for the Atlantic storm to hit.
Half the eurozone is grinding to a halt. Italy is slipping into recession. Property prices are flat or falling in Ireland, Spain, France, southern Italy, and now Germany. French consumer moral is the lowest in 20 years.
The euro fetches $1.52 (from $0.82 in 2000), beyond the pain threshold for aircraft, cars, luxury goods, and textiles. The manufacturing base of southern Europe is largely below water. As Le Figaro wrote last week, the survival of monetary union is in doubt. Yet still the ECB waits; still the German-bloc governors breathe fire about inflation.
The Fed is now singing from a different hymn book, warning of the "possibility of some very unfavourable outcomes." Inflation is not one of them. "There probably will be some bank failures," said Ben Bernanke. He knows perfectly well that the US price spike is a bogus scare, the tail-end of a food and fuel shock. "I expect inflation to come down. I don't think we're anywhere near the situation in the 1970s," he told Congress.
Indeed not. Real wages are being squeezed. Oil and "ags" are acting as a tax. December unemployment jumped at the fastest rate in a quarter century.
The greater risk is slump, says Princeton Professor Paul Krugman. "The Fed is studying the Japanese experience with zero rates very closely," Krugman says. "The problem is that if they want to cut rates as aggressively as they did in the early 1990s and 2001, they have to go below zero."
This means "quantitative easing" as it was called in Japan. As Ben Bernanke spelled out in November 2002, the Fed can inject money by purchasing great chunks of the bond market.
Section 13 of the Federal Reserve Act allows the bank -- in "exigent circumstances" -- to lend money to anybody and take upon itself the credit risk. It has not done so since the 1930s.
Ultimately the big guns have the means to stop descent into an economic ice age. But will they act in time?
"We are becoming increasingly concerned that the authorities in the world do not get it," said Bernard Connolly, global strategist at Banque AIG.
"The extent of de-leveraging involves a wholesale destruction of credit. The risk is that the 'shadow banking system' completely collapses," he said.
For the first time since this Greek tragedy began, I am now really frightened.
Monday, March 3, 2008
Sunday, June 3, 2007
St. John Chrysostom and The Problem of Wealth
Wealth … is like a snake; it will twist around the hand and bite unless one knows how to use it properly.– Clement of Alexandria, “The Instructor,” 3.6.34
In our social, political, and religious discourse, we tend to focus on poverty as a problem to be solved, but for St. John Chrysostom, poverty as such is not the problem, but rather how we acquire and use wealth, the ideologies and practices that shape economic exchanges, and the ways in which “the love of money” pervades and poisons human personal and social relations and, most of all, our relation with God.
In one of his frequent appeals to the wealthy to give to Christ in the person of the poor, Chrysostom remarks that he makes his exhortations, not so much because of anxiety for the poor but because I care for your souls. For they [the poor] will have some comfort, if not from you, yet from some other quarter; or even if they be not comforted, but perish by hunger, the harm to them will be no great matter. In what way did poverty and wasting by hunger injure Lazarus? But none can rescue you from hell, if you obtain not the help of the poor. 1
At first glance, it appears that Chrysostom is not really interested in alleviating poverty, but rather in using the poor as a means to secure the salvation of the wealthy. Indeed, the last sentence might be taken to justify allowing the continued existence of extreme poverty as a necessary means for the salvation of the wealthy.
Consider Chrysostom’s claim that Lazarus was not injured by his poverty. This is an instance of his more general claim that no one is injured in respect of virtue by suffering injustice or wrongdoing. Given that our final end is to obtain “everlasting and pure blessings in Christ Jesus our Lord,” our proper human virtue consists in “carefulness in holding right doctrine and a righteous life” or “in being vigilant and sober in the Lord.” In the ancient philosophical tradition, the specific virtues or excellences (aretai) of something are those characteristics that it requires in order to live or function well. Drawing upon a variety of examples found in Holy Scripture (e.g., Job or the three children thrown into the furnace), Chrysostom argues that none of them was injured, in respect of virtue and attaining their final end, by any of the things that they suffered – indeed, the adverse things they suffered only strengthened their virtue and deepened their bonds to God.
Although Chrysostom frequently praises poverty and criticizes wealth, in his view neither is good nor evil in itself. In his Homilies on the Statues, he praises Abraham for his proper use of wealth. Chrysostom, moreover, does not view poverty as uniformly good since it can produce despondency in the poor. Although he often portrays the poor in ways that emphasize the dire conditions to which they were subjected, he does not romanticize them. So in contrast to Lazarus, he writes that the poor “generally speaking, are filled with envy and ill-will when they see wealthy people even if they have adequate food and other people are providing for them.” Nevertheless, Chrysostom has little sympathy with those who wanted to lay the blame for poverty entirely on the poor and, thus, excuse themselves from showing mercy, from providing assistance to the poor, or from moderating their acquisitiveness.
Chrysostom, however, wrote that many people, regardless of social and economic status, engaged in exploiting others who are weaker than they. That is, while Chrysostom’s remarks on covetousness or the love of money most frequently targeted the wealthy, he believed that this sort of love was rampant throughout society. So, in discussing the vice of covetousness, he remarks: "Let us therefore, both poor and rich, cease from taking the property of others. For my present discourse is not only to the rich, but to the poor also. For they too rob those who are poorer than themselves. And artisans who are better off, and more powerful, outsell the poorer and more distressed, tradesmen outsell tradesmen, and so all who are engaged in the market-place. So that I wish from every side to take away injustice." 2
Chrysostom recognized that, insofar as people love money, “all things become money,” “everything is reckoned in terms of it,” and economic gain becomes the criterion for action. “Should it be military service, should it be marriage, should it be a trade, should it be what you will that any man takes in hand, [the lover of money] does not undertake anything until he see these riches are coming in rapidly upon him” (Homilies on Matthew, 90.3).
Put in more modern terms: the love of money leads to the commodification of all goods, services, and people such that economic gain drives all transactions and interactions with others.
Because the love of money poisons human relations and the ways in which we acquire and use wealth, Chrysostom questioned the legitimacy of acquiring wealth, whether for security, status, family, almsgiving, etc. Moreover, he frequently raised questions as to the manner in which wealth was acquired. He argued, for example, that inherited wealth often rested on unjust acquisition or theft.
Indeed, despite his claim that wealth in itself is neither good nor evil, at times he seems to view the notion of honest wealth as a virtual oxymoron. More importantly, since all things belong primarily to God, theft consists not simply in taking what belongs to the poor but in failing to render assistance to them and depriving them of the material goods that they need in order to live. He also took note of how people pursued wealth to escape poverty while remaining indifferent to the ways in such pursuit might drive others into poverty.
And what is the specious plea of the many [for loving wealth]? I have children, one says, and I am afraid lest I myself be reduced to the extremity of hunger and want, lest I should stand in need of others. I am ashamed to beg. For that reason therefore do you cause others to beg? I cannot, you say, endure hunger. For that reason do you expose others to hunger? Do you know what a dreadful thing it is to beg, how dreadful to be perishing by hunger? Spare also your brethren! Are you ashamed, tell me, to be hungry, and are you not ashamed to rob? Are you afraid to perish by hunger, and not afraid to destroy others? And yet to be hungry is neither a disgrace nor a crime; but to cast others into such a state brings not only disgrace, but extreme punishment.3
Throughout his writings, in exhorting people patiently to care for the poor, Chrysostom raised significant questions about the ways in which people acquired wealth, the dubious ends for which wealth was used, and the distribution of wealth and other economic means within his society. He explicitly rejected the idea that we can give alms without regard to how our wealth has been acquired. In his Homilies on John, he writes: “By almsgiving, I do not include what is maintained by injustice, for this is not almsgiving, but savageness and inhumanity. What profits it to strip one man and clothe another?” In other words, we cannot seriously appropriate Chrysostom’s teachings about wealth and poverty for ourselves without raising critical questions about how we acquire and use wealth in the face of widespread poverty and suffering.
Yet, these sorts of questions and concerns may seem moot given Chrysostom’s own view that voluntary poverty – poverty undertaken out of love for Christ – is desirable and his constant admonition to the poor patiently to bear their poverty. After all, if the poor are patiently to bear their poverty and poverty itself is not to be feared but even embraced, then why should we be concerned with the alleviation of poverty even when it arises through injustice? Yet consider this passage:
The multitude…imagine that there are many different things which ruin our virtue: some say it is poverty, others bodily disease, others loss of property… Some bewail and lament the inmates of the prison…others those who have been deprived of their freedom, others those who have been seized and made captives by enemies…but no one mourns those who are living in wickedness: on the contrary, which is worse than all, they often congratulate them, a practice which is the cause of all manner of evils. 4
For Chrysostom, it is precisely those who “live in wickedness” that we should mourn, since those who commit injustice are harmed by themselves rather than those who are subjected to injustice and suffering.
Hence, despite the fact that each of us should patiently endure the unjust suffering to which we might be subjected, we cannot be indifferent to acts of injustice. Indeed, with due regard for our own sinfulness, we must seek to correct injustice and evil primarily for the sake of those who inflict it since, in Chrysostom’s view, it is the perpetrators rather than the victims who are harmed.
Thus, given Chrysostom’s views about the evils caused by love of wealth and the apparently great difficulty of obtaining and using it justly and virtuously, it is not surprising that, in continually admonishing people to obtain and use wealth properly, he can say that he is less concerned with the poor as such than the wealthy or, for that matter, anyone who acquires and uses wealth improperly.
Note, however, that Chrysostom was not indifferent to the terrible sufferings and humiliations that the poor endure. While he exhorted people patiently to bear their own poverty and suffering, while he commended the life of voluntary poverty, he also encouraged the citizens in Antioch (as we see in his Homilies on Acts) to share their belonging in order to eliminate poverty. Indeed, in his Homily on Almsgiving, he tells his listeners to “correct poverty and do away with hunger.”
But from the standpoint of our proper virtue – the one thing that really matters – the love of money poses a far more serious problem to humans than being subjected to poverty.
The following text illustrates the profound extent of this problem:
How long shall we love riches? For I shall not cease exclaiming against them: for they are the cause of all evils. How long do we not get our fill of this insatiable desire? What is the good of gold? I am astonished at the thing! There is some enchantment in the business, that gold and silver should be so highly valued among us. For our own souls indeed we have no regard, but those lifeless images engross much attention. Whence is it that this disease has invaded the world? Who shall be able to effect its destruction? What reason can cut off this evil beast, and destroy it with utter destruction? The desire is deep sown in the minds of men, even of those who seem to be religious. 5
Chrysostom’s critique here is obviously not directed simply at those who love gold and silver but to those for whom, in loving money, “money becomes everything.” Suppose, however, we substitute commodities for money. Given powerful messages in consumer societies that happiness, security and self-worth lie in consumption; that we should buy whatever we desire; and that, because our desire for things is unlimited, we can in principle never attain “self-sufficiency” (autarkeia), it is not hard to see how deep seated the problem of the love of money is in our society.
We may disagree with the particular analyses and solutions that Chrysostom offers, but as Fr. Georges Florovsky rightly observes:
[Chrysostom] had to face the life in great and overcrowded cites … He simply could not evade social problems without detaching Christianity from life … In his sermons we find, first of all, a penetrating analysis of the social situation. He finds too much injustice, coldness, indifference and suffering in the society of his day. And he sees well to what extent it is connected with the acquisitive character of [his society].
Even if we correctly grant, with Fr. Florovsky, that Chrysostom was not primarily a social reformer, nevertheless, we cannot follow Chrysostom’s teachings about wealth and poverty and remain unwilling to critique and change the social relations, institutional structures, and ideologies that undergird our acquisition and use of wealth; and to challenge the widespread belief that people are poor simply because of their alleged behaviors and attitudes.
For Chrysostom, our primary task is not simply to establish new modes of economic exchange and social relations. Our primary task is neither reducible to, nor understandable within, purely secularized approaches to social reform. For this task is grounded in metanoia (repentance) – “the complete change and renewal of heart and mind: from the heart and mind of sin to ‘the mind of Christ’.” This requires a spiritual transformation of our relationships with one another in an imitation of Christ that is made possible by our cooperation with divine grace.
Chrysostom notes that “the rule of the most perfect Christian life is seeking those things that are for the common advantage…. For nothing can so make a man an imitator of Christ as caring for his neighbor.” In particular, almsgiving is not simply a means by which wealthy people give money to the poor. He exhorts everyone to give alms. No one, he often says, is so poor that they cannot imitate the poor widow who gave two mites. Even if they have not a single penny, they can always provide a cup of water to a stranger, comfort others, or in some way show mercy and kindness to others.
First in Antioch and then in Constantinople, Chrysostom sought to establish a community in which people mutually cared for one another. Such a community is grounded in a gift economy – that is, in intentions and actions that have a fundamentally Eucharistic nature to them. In giving alms to Christ in the person of the poor (more broadly, in rendering assistance to all of those in need), we effectively offer a sacrifice on the altar, the body of Christ, that is the poor person.
Having said “The first and great commandment is ‘You shall love the Lord your God,’” he added “and the second … is like it. ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’” And see how with nearly the same excellence he also requires this. For as concerning God, he said “With all your heart”: so concerning your neighbor, ‘as yourself’ is the same as ‘with all your heart.” If this commandment were duly observed there would be neither slave nor free, neither ruler nor ruled.… There would be no poverty, no unbounded wealth if there were love, but only the good parts that come from each. From the one we should reap its abundance, and from the other its freedom from care and should neither have to undergo the anxieties of riches nor the dread of poverty. 6
In this way, our actions are a way of giving thanks to Christ for the love he showed to us in his passion and resurrection. In this self-sacrificial love or, better, co-suffering love, we take up the Cross and follow Christ. In so doing, we obtain Christ’s loving kindness towards us. That is, through our actions we communicate to others the loving kindness that Christ has shown to us. In this way, we imitate Christ and become in some way like Christ.
For Chrysostom the real solution to the problems posed by wealth lies precisely in this sort of love writ large in community. Noting that for Christ “the sign of perfect love for him is the love of one’s neighbors,”
Chrysostom offers this remarkable observation:
Dr. John D. Jones is Professor of Philosophy at Marquette University. One of his research areas is poverty and social marginalization. He is currently working on a book on philosophical and theological issues pertaining to poverty. He is a member of SS. Cyril and Methodius Church in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He is also participating in the local Late Vocations Program of the Orthodox Church in America with the intention of seeking ordination to the deaconate. The complete text of this article, with notes and a reading list, will also appear in a forthcoming issue of the Marquette journal, Philosophy and Theology.
1. “Homilies on John” 37.3; Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers [NPNF] XIV:147
2. “Homilies on I Thess.” 10 (NPNF XIII:504).
3. “Homilies on 1 Thess.” 10 (NPNF XIII:502)
4. “No One Harms Himself” 2 (NPNF: IX:294)
5. “Homilies on 1 Thess.” 10 (NPNF XIII:502)
6. “Homilies on 1 Cor.” 32.11 (NPNF XII: 263)
In our social, political, and religious discourse, we tend to focus on poverty as a problem to be solved, but for St. John Chrysostom, poverty as such is not the problem, but rather how we acquire and use wealth, the ideologies and practices that shape economic exchanges, and the ways in which “the love of money” pervades and poisons human personal and social relations and, most of all, our relation with God.
In one of his frequent appeals to the wealthy to give to Christ in the person of the poor, Chrysostom remarks that he makes his exhortations, not so much because of anxiety for the poor but because I care for your souls. For they [the poor] will have some comfort, if not from you, yet from some other quarter; or even if they be not comforted, but perish by hunger, the harm to them will be no great matter. In what way did poverty and wasting by hunger injure Lazarus? But none can rescue you from hell, if you obtain not the help of the poor. 1
At first glance, it appears that Chrysostom is not really interested in alleviating poverty, but rather in using the poor as a means to secure the salvation of the wealthy. Indeed, the last sentence might be taken to justify allowing the continued existence of extreme poverty as a necessary means for the salvation of the wealthy.
Consider Chrysostom’s claim that Lazarus was not injured by his poverty. This is an instance of his more general claim that no one is injured in respect of virtue by suffering injustice or wrongdoing. Given that our final end is to obtain “everlasting and pure blessings in Christ Jesus our Lord,” our proper human virtue consists in “carefulness in holding right doctrine and a righteous life” or “in being vigilant and sober in the Lord.” In the ancient philosophical tradition, the specific virtues or excellences (aretai) of something are those characteristics that it requires in order to live or function well. Drawing upon a variety of examples found in Holy Scripture (e.g., Job or the three children thrown into the furnace), Chrysostom argues that none of them was injured, in respect of virtue and attaining their final end, by any of the things that they suffered – indeed, the adverse things they suffered only strengthened their virtue and deepened their bonds to God.
Although Chrysostom frequently praises poverty and criticizes wealth, in his view neither is good nor evil in itself. In his Homilies on the Statues, he praises Abraham for his proper use of wealth. Chrysostom, moreover, does not view poverty as uniformly good since it can produce despondency in the poor. Although he often portrays the poor in ways that emphasize the dire conditions to which they were subjected, he does not romanticize them. So in contrast to Lazarus, he writes that the poor “generally speaking, are filled with envy and ill-will when they see wealthy people even if they have adequate food and other people are providing for them.” Nevertheless, Chrysostom has little sympathy with those who wanted to lay the blame for poverty entirely on the poor and, thus, excuse themselves from showing mercy, from providing assistance to the poor, or from moderating their acquisitiveness.
Chrysostom, however, wrote that many people, regardless of social and economic status, engaged in exploiting others who are weaker than they. That is, while Chrysostom’s remarks on covetousness or the love of money most frequently targeted the wealthy, he believed that this sort of love was rampant throughout society. So, in discussing the vice of covetousness, he remarks: "Let us therefore, both poor and rich, cease from taking the property of others. For my present discourse is not only to the rich, but to the poor also. For they too rob those who are poorer than themselves. And artisans who are better off, and more powerful, outsell the poorer and more distressed, tradesmen outsell tradesmen, and so all who are engaged in the market-place. So that I wish from every side to take away injustice." 2
Chrysostom recognized that, insofar as people love money, “all things become money,” “everything is reckoned in terms of it,” and economic gain becomes the criterion for action. “Should it be military service, should it be marriage, should it be a trade, should it be what you will that any man takes in hand, [the lover of money] does not undertake anything until he see these riches are coming in rapidly upon him” (Homilies on Matthew, 90.3).
Put in more modern terms: the love of money leads to the commodification of all goods, services, and people such that economic gain drives all transactions and interactions with others.
Because the love of money poisons human relations and the ways in which we acquire and use wealth, Chrysostom questioned the legitimacy of acquiring wealth, whether for security, status, family, almsgiving, etc. Moreover, he frequently raised questions as to the manner in which wealth was acquired. He argued, for example, that inherited wealth often rested on unjust acquisition or theft.
Indeed, despite his claim that wealth in itself is neither good nor evil, at times he seems to view the notion of honest wealth as a virtual oxymoron. More importantly, since all things belong primarily to God, theft consists not simply in taking what belongs to the poor but in failing to render assistance to them and depriving them of the material goods that they need in order to live. He also took note of how people pursued wealth to escape poverty while remaining indifferent to the ways in such pursuit might drive others into poverty.
And what is the specious plea of the many [for loving wealth]? I have children, one says, and I am afraid lest I myself be reduced to the extremity of hunger and want, lest I should stand in need of others. I am ashamed to beg. For that reason therefore do you cause others to beg? I cannot, you say, endure hunger. For that reason do you expose others to hunger? Do you know what a dreadful thing it is to beg, how dreadful to be perishing by hunger? Spare also your brethren! Are you ashamed, tell me, to be hungry, and are you not ashamed to rob? Are you afraid to perish by hunger, and not afraid to destroy others? And yet to be hungry is neither a disgrace nor a crime; but to cast others into such a state brings not only disgrace, but extreme punishment.3
Throughout his writings, in exhorting people patiently to care for the poor, Chrysostom raised significant questions about the ways in which people acquired wealth, the dubious ends for which wealth was used, and the distribution of wealth and other economic means within his society. He explicitly rejected the idea that we can give alms without regard to how our wealth has been acquired. In his Homilies on John, he writes: “By almsgiving, I do not include what is maintained by injustice, for this is not almsgiving, but savageness and inhumanity. What profits it to strip one man and clothe another?” In other words, we cannot seriously appropriate Chrysostom’s teachings about wealth and poverty for ourselves without raising critical questions about how we acquire and use wealth in the face of widespread poverty and suffering.
Yet, these sorts of questions and concerns may seem moot given Chrysostom’s own view that voluntary poverty – poverty undertaken out of love for Christ – is desirable and his constant admonition to the poor patiently to bear their poverty. After all, if the poor are patiently to bear their poverty and poverty itself is not to be feared but even embraced, then why should we be concerned with the alleviation of poverty even when it arises through injustice? Yet consider this passage:
The multitude…imagine that there are many different things which ruin our virtue: some say it is poverty, others bodily disease, others loss of property… Some bewail and lament the inmates of the prison…others those who have been deprived of their freedom, others those who have been seized and made captives by enemies…but no one mourns those who are living in wickedness: on the contrary, which is worse than all, they often congratulate them, a practice which is the cause of all manner of evils. 4
For Chrysostom, it is precisely those who “live in wickedness” that we should mourn, since those who commit injustice are harmed by themselves rather than those who are subjected to injustice and suffering.
Hence, despite the fact that each of us should patiently endure the unjust suffering to which we might be subjected, we cannot be indifferent to acts of injustice. Indeed, with due regard for our own sinfulness, we must seek to correct injustice and evil primarily for the sake of those who inflict it since, in Chrysostom’s view, it is the perpetrators rather than the victims who are harmed.
Thus, given Chrysostom’s views about the evils caused by love of wealth and the apparently great difficulty of obtaining and using it justly and virtuously, it is not surprising that, in continually admonishing people to obtain and use wealth properly, he can say that he is less concerned with the poor as such than the wealthy or, for that matter, anyone who acquires and uses wealth improperly.
Note, however, that Chrysostom was not indifferent to the terrible sufferings and humiliations that the poor endure. While he exhorted people patiently to bear their own poverty and suffering, while he commended the life of voluntary poverty, he also encouraged the citizens in Antioch (as we see in his Homilies on Acts) to share their belonging in order to eliminate poverty. Indeed, in his Homily on Almsgiving, he tells his listeners to “correct poverty and do away with hunger.”
But from the standpoint of our proper virtue – the one thing that really matters – the love of money poses a far more serious problem to humans than being subjected to poverty.
The following text illustrates the profound extent of this problem:
How long shall we love riches? For I shall not cease exclaiming against them: for they are the cause of all evils. How long do we not get our fill of this insatiable desire? What is the good of gold? I am astonished at the thing! There is some enchantment in the business, that gold and silver should be so highly valued among us. For our own souls indeed we have no regard, but those lifeless images engross much attention. Whence is it that this disease has invaded the world? Who shall be able to effect its destruction? What reason can cut off this evil beast, and destroy it with utter destruction? The desire is deep sown in the minds of men, even of those who seem to be religious. 5
Chrysostom’s critique here is obviously not directed simply at those who love gold and silver but to those for whom, in loving money, “money becomes everything.” Suppose, however, we substitute commodities for money. Given powerful messages in consumer societies that happiness, security and self-worth lie in consumption; that we should buy whatever we desire; and that, because our desire for things is unlimited, we can in principle never attain “self-sufficiency” (autarkeia), it is not hard to see how deep seated the problem of the love of money is in our society.
We may disagree with the particular analyses and solutions that Chrysostom offers, but as Fr. Georges Florovsky rightly observes:
[Chrysostom] had to face the life in great and overcrowded cites … He simply could not evade social problems without detaching Christianity from life … In his sermons we find, first of all, a penetrating analysis of the social situation. He finds too much injustice, coldness, indifference and suffering in the society of his day. And he sees well to what extent it is connected with the acquisitive character of [his society].
Even if we correctly grant, with Fr. Florovsky, that Chrysostom was not primarily a social reformer, nevertheless, we cannot follow Chrysostom’s teachings about wealth and poverty and remain unwilling to critique and change the social relations, institutional structures, and ideologies that undergird our acquisition and use of wealth; and to challenge the widespread belief that people are poor simply because of their alleged behaviors and attitudes.
For Chrysostom, our primary task is not simply to establish new modes of economic exchange and social relations. Our primary task is neither reducible to, nor understandable within, purely secularized approaches to social reform. For this task is grounded in metanoia (repentance) – “the complete change and renewal of heart and mind: from the heart and mind of sin to ‘the mind of Christ’.” This requires a spiritual transformation of our relationships with one another in an imitation of Christ that is made possible by our cooperation with divine grace.
Chrysostom notes that “the rule of the most perfect Christian life is seeking those things that are for the common advantage…. For nothing can so make a man an imitator of Christ as caring for his neighbor.” In particular, almsgiving is not simply a means by which wealthy people give money to the poor. He exhorts everyone to give alms. No one, he often says, is so poor that they cannot imitate the poor widow who gave two mites. Even if they have not a single penny, they can always provide a cup of water to a stranger, comfort others, or in some way show mercy and kindness to others.
First in Antioch and then in Constantinople, Chrysostom sought to establish a community in which people mutually cared for one another. Such a community is grounded in a gift economy – that is, in intentions and actions that have a fundamentally Eucharistic nature to them. In giving alms to Christ in the person of the poor (more broadly, in rendering assistance to all of those in need), we effectively offer a sacrifice on the altar, the body of Christ, that is the poor person.
Having said “The first and great commandment is ‘You shall love the Lord your God,’” he added “and the second … is like it. ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’” And see how with nearly the same excellence he also requires this. For as concerning God, he said “With all your heart”: so concerning your neighbor, ‘as yourself’ is the same as ‘with all your heart.” If this commandment were duly observed there would be neither slave nor free, neither ruler nor ruled.… There would be no poverty, no unbounded wealth if there were love, but only the good parts that come from each. From the one we should reap its abundance, and from the other its freedom from care and should neither have to undergo the anxieties of riches nor the dread of poverty. 6
In this way, our actions are a way of giving thanks to Christ for the love he showed to us in his passion and resurrection. In this self-sacrificial love or, better, co-suffering love, we take up the Cross and follow Christ. In so doing, we obtain Christ’s loving kindness towards us. That is, through our actions we communicate to others the loving kindness that Christ has shown to us. In this way, we imitate Christ and become in some way like Christ.
For Chrysostom the real solution to the problems posed by wealth lies precisely in this sort of love writ large in community. Noting that for Christ “the sign of perfect love for him is the love of one’s neighbors,”
Chrysostom offers this remarkable observation:
Dr. John D. Jones is Professor of Philosophy at Marquette University. One of his research areas is poverty and social marginalization. He is currently working on a book on philosophical and theological issues pertaining to poverty. He is a member of SS. Cyril and Methodius Church in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He is also participating in the local Late Vocations Program of the Orthodox Church in America with the intention of seeking ordination to the deaconate. The complete text of this article, with notes and a reading list, will also appear in a forthcoming issue of the Marquette journal, Philosophy and Theology.
1. “Homilies on John” 37.3; Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers [NPNF] XIV:147
2. “Homilies on I Thess.” 10 (NPNF XIII:504).
3. “Homilies on 1 Thess.” 10 (NPNF XIII:502)
4. “No One Harms Himself” 2 (NPNF: IX:294)
5. “Homilies on 1 Thess.” 10 (NPNF XIII:502)
6. “Homilies on 1 Cor.” 32.11 (NPNF XII: 263)
Sunday, May 27, 2007
Prisoners we are forbidden to Visit
Prisoners we are forbidden to Visit by Paul Grenier
“I was in prison, and you visited Me.” These words from the Gospel remind us that Christianity is not a set of dogmas to be believed, but is a truth to be lived and practiced. Visiting those who are in prison is simply an extension of the foundational Christian practice – loving one’s enemies. The ideologue, by contrast, urges us to hate our enemies. The ideologue is always bent on destroying “once and for all” evils that exist outside his favored group. But Christ was not an ideologue and Christianity is not an ideology.
The New Testament is instead the antidote to ideological perversions of thought, and as such it focuses attention on the struggle against evils inside my own self. Apparently the most certain way of succeeding in this struggle is by practicing forgiveness and charity toward those whom we find repellant – toward those who are, in fact, our enemies, and who for that very reason tend to end up in our prisons.
Today, however, we Christians in America are often not allowed to visit Christ in prison. The Bush administration has declared that there are those in our prisons whom no one may visit, not even a lawyer. It is said that these secret prisoners must not be visited because the “alternative methods of interrogation” being used against them are among the United States’ “most sensitive national security secrets.”
One would think that every American would immediately rise up in indignation against such policies and demand an accounting from those who ever dared initiate them. And yet almost the opposite has happened. For the most part, we go about our lives as if all this was no big deal.
What has happened? It would appear that the following has happened. We have become a nation of security ideologues. We want “national security,” yes, but especially and at all costs we want guarantees of our personal security.
That is why we feel little distress about the millions of men and women who fester in our bulging prisons. And just as we spend more on military systems than any other country – indeed, than all other countries combined – so too we hold more humans in our prison system than any other country.
And yet, the most humane and wise of Christian voices have always held that the first task of a civilization, when it comes to the treatment of its prisoners, is to do its best to restore the moral and intellectual good health of the persons being punished. To be sure, the protection of society is also a crucial function of prisons; but in a Christian civilization, this task is subordinated to the first.
There is no time here to elaborate on this complicated subject. Suffice it to say that a just punishment always serves to increase rather than decrease the dignity of the prisoner. It might be added that, were our society to provide more security to its workers, and give greater emphasis to the moral and intellectual improvement of its children, there would be fewer domestic prisoners in the first place. But that too is a matter for another essay.
What must be addressed first – both in this essay and as a matter of public policy – is the treatment of “enemy combatants” captured during America’s current “war on terrorism.”
The barbarity of such practices as “extraordinary renditions,” and other cruel practices at locations known and unknown, would be just as great if these detainees were all guilty as charged. Yet many are clearly not guilty – or if they are, it is very strange, because many have never even been charged. They are simply being held.What if they are guilty, and truly are our enemies? Such a circumstance should only increase our concern for their welfare. At any rate, that is what Christ said.
And to find out which of these detainees deserve this special measure of Christian concern, it behooves us to insist that our government at long last allow lawyers and courts to thoroughly investigate each of these cases according to a credible system of justice. This will have the additional benefit of allowing those who have been simply picked up by accident to be immediately released.
In the interests of fairness, it must be emphasized that cruelty is far from being an eternal truth about Americans. It is, rather, an alien trait we have acquired by falling prey to a spiritual temptation—the temptation of making security the final goal of our existence.
Indeed, it is this same all-consuming quest for security that induces so many of us to remain silent. With perfect logic we think to ourselves: “If they have treated other defenseless human beings this way, what will keep them from treating me with similar cruelty if I speak out?”
There is only one way to respond to this fear, and no one has formulated it better than the fearless Simone Weil: “To die for God is not a proof of faith in God. To die for an unknown and repulsive convict who is a victim of injustice, that is a proof of faith in God.”
Paul Grenier, a writer and cultural geographer, is the founder of The Common Task – http://www.thecommontask.org. The Common Task is a research center devoted to the humanization of culture, cities and economies. He is a member of St. Nicholas Cathedral parish, Orthodox Church in America, in Washington, DC.
“I was in prison, and you visited Me.” These words from the Gospel remind us that Christianity is not a set of dogmas to be believed, but is a truth to be lived and practiced. Visiting those who are in prison is simply an extension of the foundational Christian practice – loving one’s enemies. The ideologue, by contrast, urges us to hate our enemies. The ideologue is always bent on destroying “once and for all” evils that exist outside his favored group. But Christ was not an ideologue and Christianity is not an ideology.
The New Testament is instead the antidote to ideological perversions of thought, and as such it focuses attention on the struggle against evils inside my own self. Apparently the most certain way of succeeding in this struggle is by practicing forgiveness and charity toward those whom we find repellant – toward those who are, in fact, our enemies, and who for that very reason tend to end up in our prisons.
Today, however, we Christians in America are often not allowed to visit Christ in prison. The Bush administration has declared that there are those in our prisons whom no one may visit, not even a lawyer. It is said that these secret prisoners must not be visited because the “alternative methods of interrogation” being used against them are among the United States’ “most sensitive national security secrets.”
One would think that every American would immediately rise up in indignation against such policies and demand an accounting from those who ever dared initiate them. And yet almost the opposite has happened. For the most part, we go about our lives as if all this was no big deal.
What has happened? It would appear that the following has happened. We have become a nation of security ideologues. We want “national security,” yes, but especially and at all costs we want guarantees of our personal security.
That is why we feel little distress about the millions of men and women who fester in our bulging prisons. And just as we spend more on military systems than any other country – indeed, than all other countries combined – so too we hold more humans in our prison system than any other country.
And yet, the most humane and wise of Christian voices have always held that the first task of a civilization, when it comes to the treatment of its prisoners, is to do its best to restore the moral and intellectual good health of the persons being punished. To be sure, the protection of society is also a crucial function of prisons; but in a Christian civilization, this task is subordinated to the first.
There is no time here to elaborate on this complicated subject. Suffice it to say that a just punishment always serves to increase rather than decrease the dignity of the prisoner. It might be added that, were our society to provide more security to its workers, and give greater emphasis to the moral and intellectual improvement of its children, there would be fewer domestic prisoners in the first place. But that too is a matter for another essay.
What must be addressed first – both in this essay and as a matter of public policy – is the treatment of “enemy combatants” captured during America’s current “war on terrorism.”
The barbarity of such practices as “extraordinary renditions,” and other cruel practices at locations known and unknown, would be just as great if these detainees were all guilty as charged. Yet many are clearly not guilty – or if they are, it is very strange, because many have never even been charged. They are simply being held.What if they are guilty, and truly are our enemies? Such a circumstance should only increase our concern for their welfare. At any rate, that is what Christ said.
And to find out which of these detainees deserve this special measure of Christian concern, it behooves us to insist that our government at long last allow lawyers and courts to thoroughly investigate each of these cases according to a credible system of justice. This will have the additional benefit of allowing those who have been simply picked up by accident to be immediately released.
In the interests of fairness, it must be emphasized that cruelty is far from being an eternal truth about Americans. It is, rather, an alien trait we have acquired by falling prey to a spiritual temptation—the temptation of making security the final goal of our existence.
Indeed, it is this same all-consuming quest for security that induces so many of us to remain silent. With perfect logic we think to ourselves: “If they have treated other defenseless human beings this way, what will keep them from treating me with similar cruelty if I speak out?”
There is only one way to respond to this fear, and no one has formulated it better than the fearless Simone Weil: “To die for God is not a proof of faith in God. To die for an unknown and repulsive convict who is a victim of injustice, that is a proof of faith in God.”
Paul Grenier, a writer and cultural geographer, is the founder of The Common Task – http://www.thecommontask.org. The Common Task is a research center devoted to the humanization of culture, cities and economies. He is a member of St. Nicholas Cathedral parish, Orthodox Church in America, in Washington, DC.
Saturday, January 6, 2007
Quotes For A New Year
A clean conscience makes a soft pillow.
~~~~~~~
A family altar can alter a family.
~~~~~~~
A lot of kneeling will keep you in good standing.
~~~~~~~
Are you wrinkled with burden?Come on into Church for a faith lift!
~~~~~~~
Be ye fishers of men.You catch them and He will clean them.
~~~~~~~
Coincidence is when God chooses to remain anonymous.
~~~~~~~
Do your best and then sleep in peace.God is Awake.
~~~~~~~
Don't put a question mark where God put a period.
~~~~~~~
Don't wait for 6 strong men to take you to church.
~~~~~~~
Exercise daily.Walk with the Lord!
~~~~~~~
Fear knocked.Faith answeredNo one was there.
~~~~~~~
For all you do,His blood's for you!
~~~~~~~
Forbidden fruits create many jams.
~~~~~~~
Give God what's right, not what's left!
~~~~~~~
Give Satan an inch and he'll be a ruler.
~~~~~~~
God doesn't call the qualified,He qualifies the called.
~~~~~~~
God doesn't want shares of your life;He wants controlling interest!
~~~~~~~
God grades on the cross, not the curve.
~~~~~~~
God loves everyone, but probably prefers"fruits of the spirit" over "religious nuts"!
God promises a safe landing, not a calm passage.
~~~~~~~
Having truth decay?Brush up on your Bible!
~~~~~~~
He who angers you, controls you!
~~~~~~~
He who is good at making excuses is seldom good for anything else.
~~~~~~~
He who kneels before God can stand before anyone!
~~~~~~~
If God is your Co-pilot - Swap seats!
~~~~~~~
In the sentence of life the Devil may be a comma, but DO NOT let him be the PERIOD!~~~~~~~
Kindness is difficult to give away because it keeps coming back.
~~~~~~~
Man's way leads to a hopeless end!God's way leads to an endless hope!
~~~~~~~
Most people want to serve God, but only in an advisory capacity.
~~~~~~~
Never give the devil a ride!He will always want to drive!
~~~~~~~
Nothing ruins the truth like stretching it.
~~~~~~~
Plan ahead. It wasn't raining when Noah built the ark.
~~~~~~~
"Pray" is a four letter word that you can say anywhere (except in a public school).
~~~~~~~
Prayer - Don't give God instructions - just report for duty!
~~~~~~~
Read The Bible...It Will Scare The Hell Out Of You!
~~~~~~~
The task ahead of us is never as great as the Power behind us.
~~~~~~~
The Will of God will never take you to where the Grace of God will not protect you.
~~~~~~~
This Church is "Prayer Conditioned"!
~~~~~~~
To be almost saved is to be totally lost.
~~~~~~~
Wal-Mart isn't the only saving place!
~~~~~~~
WARNING: Exposure to the Son will prevent burning!
~~~~~~~
Watch your step carefully! Everyone else does!
~~~~~~~
We don't change the message, the message changes us.
~~~~~~~
We set the sail; God makes the wind.
~~~~~~~
We're too blessed to be depressed.
~~~~~~~
When God ordains, He sustains.
~~~~~~~
Wisdom has two parts:
1) Having a lot to say.
2) Not saying it.
~~~~~~~
Worry is the darkroom in which "negatives" are developed.
~~~~~~~
You can tell how big a person is by what it takes to discourage him.
Taken from
http://www.Godswork.org/inpoem111.htm
~~~~~~~
A family altar can alter a family.
~~~~~~~
A lot of kneeling will keep you in good standing.
~~~~~~~
Are you wrinkled with burden?Come on into Church for a faith lift!
~~~~~~~
Be ye fishers of men.You catch them and He will clean them.
~~~~~~~
Coincidence is when God chooses to remain anonymous.
~~~~~~~
Do your best and then sleep in peace.God is Awake.
~~~~~~~
Don't put a question mark where God put a period.
~~~~~~~
Don't wait for 6 strong men to take you to church.
~~~~~~~
Exercise daily.Walk with the Lord!
~~~~~~~
Fear knocked.Faith answeredNo one was there.
~~~~~~~
For all you do,His blood's for you!
~~~~~~~
Forbidden fruits create many jams.
~~~~~~~
Give God what's right, not what's left!
~~~~~~~
Give Satan an inch and he'll be a ruler.
~~~~~~~
God doesn't call the qualified,He qualifies the called.
~~~~~~~
God doesn't want shares of your life;He wants controlling interest!
~~~~~~~
God grades on the cross, not the curve.
~~~~~~~
God loves everyone, but probably prefers"fruits of the spirit" over "religious nuts"!
God promises a safe landing, not a calm passage.
~~~~~~~
Having truth decay?Brush up on your Bible!
~~~~~~~
He who angers you, controls you!
~~~~~~~
He who is good at making excuses is seldom good for anything else.
~~~~~~~
He who kneels before God can stand before anyone!
~~~~~~~
If God is your Co-pilot - Swap seats!
~~~~~~~
In the sentence of life the Devil may be a comma, but DO NOT let him be the PERIOD!~~~~~~~
Kindness is difficult to give away because it keeps coming back.
~~~~~~~
Man's way leads to a hopeless end!God's way leads to an endless hope!
~~~~~~~
Most people want to serve God, but only in an advisory capacity.
~~~~~~~
Never give the devil a ride!He will always want to drive!
~~~~~~~
Nothing ruins the truth like stretching it.
~~~~~~~
Plan ahead. It wasn't raining when Noah built the ark.
~~~~~~~
"Pray" is a four letter word that you can say anywhere (except in a public school).
~~~~~~~
Prayer - Don't give God instructions - just report for duty!
~~~~~~~
Read The Bible...It Will Scare The Hell Out Of You!
~~~~~~~
The task ahead of us is never as great as the Power behind us.
~~~~~~~
The Will of God will never take you to where the Grace of God will not protect you.
~~~~~~~
This Church is "Prayer Conditioned"!
~~~~~~~
To be almost saved is to be totally lost.
~~~~~~~
Wal-Mart isn't the only saving place!
~~~~~~~
WARNING: Exposure to the Son will prevent burning!
~~~~~~~
Watch your step carefully! Everyone else does!
~~~~~~~
We don't change the message, the message changes us.
~~~~~~~
We set the sail; God makes the wind.
~~~~~~~
We're too blessed to be depressed.
~~~~~~~
When God ordains, He sustains.
~~~~~~~
Wisdom has two parts:
1) Having a lot to say.
2) Not saying it.
~~~~~~~
Worry is the darkroom in which "negatives" are developed.
~~~~~~~
You can tell how big a person is by what it takes to discourage him.
Taken from
http://www.Godswork.org/inpoem111.htm
Wednesday, January 3, 2007
World Economy at Risk from Chaos of Bush Regime
By Joseph E. Stiglitz29 Dec 2006 at 10:18 AM EST
NEW YORK (Business Day) -- The world survived 2006 without a major economic catastrophe, despite sky-high oil prices and a Middle East spiraling out of control.
But the year produced abundant lessons for the global economy, as well as warning signs concerning its future performance.
Unsurprisingly, it brought another resounding rejection of fundamentalist neo-liberal policies, this time by voters in Nicaragua and Ecuador. In neighboring Venezuela, Hugo Chávez had an overwhelming electoral victory: at least he had brought some education and health care to the poor barrios, which previously had received little of the benefits of the country’s enormous oil wealth.
Perhaps most importantly for the world, voters in the US gave a vote of no-confidence to President George Bush, who will now be held in check by a Democratic congress.
When Bush assumed the presidency in 2001, many hoped he would govern competently from the centre. More pessimistic critics consoled themselves by questioning how much harm a president could do in a few years. We now know the answer: a great deal.
Never has the U.S.’s standing in the world’s eyes been lower. Basic values that Americans regard as central to their identity have been subverted. The unthinkable has occurred: an American president defending the use of torture, using technicalities in interpreting the Geneva Conventions and ignoring the Convention on Torture, which forbids it in any circumstances.
Likewise, whereas Bush was hailed as the first “MBA president”, corruption and incompetence have reigned under his administration, from the botched response to Hurricane Katrina to its conduct of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In fact, we should be careful not to read too much into the 2006 vote: Americans do not like being on the losing side of any war. It was this failure, and the quagmire into which the U.S. had once again so confidently stepped, that led voters to reject Bush.
But the Middle East chaos wrought by the Bush years also represents a central risk to the global economy. Since the Iraq war began in 2003, oil output from the Middle East has not grown as expected to meet rising world demand. Although most forecasts suggest oil prices will remain at, or slightly below, present levels, this is largely due to a perceived moderation of growth in demand, led by a slowing U.S. economy.
Of course, a slowing U.S. economy constitutes another major global risk. At the root of the U.S.’s economic problems are measures adopted early in Bush’s first term. In particular, the administration pushed through a tax cut that largely failed to stimulate the economy because it was designed to benefit mainly the wealthiest taxpayers. The burden of stimulation was placed on the Federal Reserve, which lowered interest rates to unprecedented levels.
While cheap money had little effect on business investment, it fuelled a real estate bubble, which is bursting, jeopardizing households that borrowed against rising home values to sustain consumption.
This economic strategy was not sustainable. Household savings became negative for the first time since the Great Depression, with the country borrowing $3bn a day from foreigners. But households could continue to take money out of their houses only as long as prices continued to rise and interest rates remained low. Thus, higher interest rates and falling house prices do not bode well for the U.S. economy.
According to estimates, roughly 80% of the increase in employment and almost two-thirds of the increase in gross domestic product in recent years stemmed directly or indirectly from real estate.
Making matters worse, unrestrained government spending further buoyed the economy during the Bush years, with fiscal deficits reaching new heights, making it difficult for the government to step in now to shore up economic growth as households curtail consumption.
Many Democrats, having campaigned on a promise to return to fiscal sanity, are likely to demand a reduction in the deficit, which would further dampen growth.
Meanwhile, persistent global imbalances will continue to produce anxiety, especially for those whose lives depend on exchange rates. Though Bush has long sought to blame others, it is clear the U.S.’s unbridled consumption and inability to live within its means is the major cause of these imbalances. Unless that changes, global imbalances will continue to be a source of global instability, regardless of what China or Europe do.
In light of these uncertainties, the mystery is how risk premiums can remain as low as they are.
With the dramatic reduction in the growth of global liquidity as central banks have successively raised interest rates, the prospect of risk premiums returning to more normal levels is itself one of the major risks the world faces today.
Joseph E. Stiglitz is a Nobel laureate in economics and professor of economics at Columbia University.
NEW YORK (Business Day) -- The world survived 2006 without a major economic catastrophe, despite sky-high oil prices and a Middle East spiraling out of control.
But the year produced abundant lessons for the global economy, as well as warning signs concerning its future performance.
Unsurprisingly, it brought another resounding rejection of fundamentalist neo-liberal policies, this time by voters in Nicaragua and Ecuador. In neighboring Venezuela, Hugo Chávez had an overwhelming electoral victory: at least he had brought some education and health care to the poor barrios, which previously had received little of the benefits of the country’s enormous oil wealth.
Perhaps most importantly for the world, voters in the US gave a vote of no-confidence to President George Bush, who will now be held in check by a Democratic congress.
When Bush assumed the presidency in 2001, many hoped he would govern competently from the centre. More pessimistic critics consoled themselves by questioning how much harm a president could do in a few years. We now know the answer: a great deal.
Never has the U.S.’s standing in the world’s eyes been lower. Basic values that Americans regard as central to their identity have been subverted. The unthinkable has occurred: an American president defending the use of torture, using technicalities in interpreting the Geneva Conventions and ignoring the Convention on Torture, which forbids it in any circumstances.
Likewise, whereas Bush was hailed as the first “MBA president”, corruption and incompetence have reigned under his administration, from the botched response to Hurricane Katrina to its conduct of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In fact, we should be careful not to read too much into the 2006 vote: Americans do not like being on the losing side of any war. It was this failure, and the quagmire into which the U.S. had once again so confidently stepped, that led voters to reject Bush.
But the Middle East chaos wrought by the Bush years also represents a central risk to the global economy. Since the Iraq war began in 2003, oil output from the Middle East has not grown as expected to meet rising world demand. Although most forecasts suggest oil prices will remain at, or slightly below, present levels, this is largely due to a perceived moderation of growth in demand, led by a slowing U.S. economy.
Of course, a slowing U.S. economy constitutes another major global risk. At the root of the U.S.’s economic problems are measures adopted early in Bush’s first term. In particular, the administration pushed through a tax cut that largely failed to stimulate the economy because it was designed to benefit mainly the wealthiest taxpayers. The burden of stimulation was placed on the Federal Reserve, which lowered interest rates to unprecedented levels.
While cheap money had little effect on business investment, it fuelled a real estate bubble, which is bursting, jeopardizing households that borrowed against rising home values to sustain consumption.
This economic strategy was not sustainable. Household savings became negative for the first time since the Great Depression, with the country borrowing $3bn a day from foreigners. But households could continue to take money out of their houses only as long as prices continued to rise and interest rates remained low. Thus, higher interest rates and falling house prices do not bode well for the U.S. economy.
According to estimates, roughly 80% of the increase in employment and almost two-thirds of the increase in gross domestic product in recent years stemmed directly or indirectly from real estate.
Making matters worse, unrestrained government spending further buoyed the economy during the Bush years, with fiscal deficits reaching new heights, making it difficult for the government to step in now to shore up economic growth as households curtail consumption.
Many Democrats, having campaigned on a promise to return to fiscal sanity, are likely to demand a reduction in the deficit, which would further dampen growth.
Meanwhile, persistent global imbalances will continue to produce anxiety, especially for those whose lives depend on exchange rates. Though Bush has long sought to blame others, it is clear the U.S.’s unbridled consumption and inability to live within its means is the major cause of these imbalances. Unless that changes, global imbalances will continue to be a source of global instability, regardless of what China or Europe do.
In light of these uncertainties, the mystery is how risk premiums can remain as low as they are.
With the dramatic reduction in the growth of global liquidity as central banks have successively raised interest rates, the prospect of risk premiums returning to more normal levels is itself one of the major risks the world faces today.
Joseph E. Stiglitz is a Nobel laureate in economics and professor of economics at Columbia University.
Wednesday, December 13, 2006
The One Thing Lacking at Christmas
By John Kapsalis
The statistics are numbing. The United Nations Millennium Project estimates that every day 800 million people go hungry, with almost half of them young children. Every 3.6 seconds another human being dies of starvation. Every 30 seconds a child dies in Africa of malaria. Some 1 billion people live on less than one dollar a day, and more than twice that do not have access to basic water sanitation. Over a hundred million children never attend any school and 6,000 people die everyday from HIV/AIDS. The list can go on and on to the point where the numbers become almost surreal and meaningless. Jesus wasn't kidding when He said we would always have the poor with us.
But Jesus Christ also began his ministry saying "the spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor, he has sent me to proclaim release to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed" (Luke 4:18 NASB). So if we're supposed to imitate Christ, what does God expect from us? What exactly are we supposed to do with all these poor?
When the magi came to see the newborn Jesus, they brought rich gifts for the One they knew was the Messiah. Yet Jesus said, "the foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head" (Luke 9:58 NASB). Very quickly we have forgotten and neglected the essential truth of Christ's initial message and the reason for His birth. Paul the apostle writes, "you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though He was rich, yet for your sake He became poor, so that you through His poverty might become rich" (2 Corinthians 8:9 NASB).
Our mission to the poor of this world cannot be a department or a committee of our Church. The poor must define who we are as Christians otherwise we will continue to be ignored or at best tolerated. Christ's mercy and compassion to the poor was so inclusive that it was threatening. We can't live life the way Christ did and we can't believe the way He expects us to if our TV's, SUV's, PDA's and 401K's are blinding us from seeing Christ in the poor.
Christ waits today under the refuse that covers the poor for our best gifts the way He waited for the magi to bring their finest gifts when He was a homeless child so long ago. Unless the Church goes "out at once into the streets and lanes of the city and bring in here the poor and crippled and blind and lame" (Luke 14:21 NASB), the world will see through our greed and hypocrisy and our pews will continue to ring hollow.
When our possessions begin to own us and blind us to the misery that surrounds us, then we are in danger of losing it all because our hording and spending on more and more things for ourselves blocks us from genuinely responding to the gospel that Jesus preached. The strength of our compassion for the poor either reveals or conceals God's kingdom come both now and in the future. Quoting the Roman Emperor Julian, Stephen Neill writes in his book A History of Christian Missions, the epic impact that the early Christians had on the world was "through the loving service rendered to strangers ... [and that they] care not only for their own poor but for ours as well; while those who belong to us look in vain for help that we should render them."
Time and space it seems have eroded the unimaginable sacrifice of Christ accepting to be born in a barn full of animals as a child so that we might live. God wants that sacrifice to be part of everyone He has created. It is a love beyond human credibility. It is a love that Christ freely gives us but also asks of us, that we too learn to love the way He does.
In spite of our selfishness, God not only endures us, He loves us. But it is this merciful love that God shines and rains on everyone, even the undeserving, that must compel us to act the same way. Loving the poor is not just about superficial generosity, but about a generosity saturated in joy.
Giving generously means that it impacts our lifestyle. It has to hurt a little. It means being content with the abundance we have, denying our wants and sometimes even our needs and sharing the rest with the needy.
Leo the Great wrote that "it is not only spiritual wealth and heavenly graces that are received from God's hands; earthly and material riches too flow from His bounty, and therefore it is with justice that He will ask an account of them, since He himself has not so much given them to be possessed as put them in trust to be administered. Justly and wisely, then, must we use the gifts of God, lest the means to good works should become a cause of sin." God has blessed us for this purpose, so that we can give and give more generously:
"God can pour on the blessings in astonishing ways so that you're ready for anything and everything, more than just ready to do what needs to be done. As one psalmist put it, 'He throws caution to the winds, giving to the needy in reckless abandon ...' This most generous God ... is more than extravagant with you. He gives you something you can then give away, which grows into full-formed lives, robust in God, wealthy in every way, so that you can be generous in every way, producing with us great praise to God" (2 Corinthians 9:8-11 MSG).
God's special attention to the poor is not because of their piety but precisely because they are poor, helpless, defenseless and deserving of mercy. This is why John of Kronstadt wrote "Your labours are generously rewarded; be generous to others. They are not rewarded in accordance to their merit; do not give to others in accordance with their merit, but for their need's sake." It is God's special attention to those that are in need of mercy that must make the poor the special attention of our Christian life. We have no choice in the matter. Our very judgment and salvation hang on our outreach and mercy to those in need:
"'When did we ever see you hungry or thirsty or homeless or shivering or sick or in prison and didn't help you?' He will answer them, 'I'm telling the solemn truth: Whenever you failed to do one of these things to someone who was being overlooked or ignored, that was me-you failed to do it to me'" (Matthew 25:44-45 MSG).
Giving generously is not so much about how much you give, but how you give it. Paul the Apostle writes, "You must each decide in your heart how much to give. And don't give reluctantly or in response to pressure. 'For God loves a person who gives cheerfully.' And God will generously provide all you need. Then you will always have everything you need and plenty left over to share with others" (2 Corinthians 9:7-8 NLT). Archimandrite Vasileos of Stavronikita wrote in his wonderful book, Hymn of Entry that the constant giving away of our wealth is what gives us life: "This ceaseless sale is an offering for us to give to the 'poor.' This is how treasure is laid up in heaven; and that treasure is something we must not and cannot sell or give to anyone, because it belongs in its entirety to everyone." Only God can grow the merciful, embracing heart you need to be compassionate and merciful as He is.
Poverty is not only a social and economic problem; rather it has its roots in our spiritual paralysis first as Christians and then as a people. It is our spiritual renewal that will change the life of the poor, one malnourished and diseased face at a time. We are not going to serve the poor beyond our Christmas donation unless we change our lifestyle and begin to live a sacrificial life. A life where it is no longer the accumulation of more things that matters most but living a life that matters to the world, that touches lives, and that holds the bruised hand of God in the flesh and bones of the poor. These are the things that are worthy of lifetime.
John Kapsalis has an M.T.S from Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology.
The statistics are numbing. The United Nations Millennium Project estimates that every day 800 million people go hungry, with almost half of them young children. Every 3.6 seconds another human being dies of starvation. Every 30 seconds a child dies in Africa of malaria. Some 1 billion people live on less than one dollar a day, and more than twice that do not have access to basic water sanitation. Over a hundred million children never attend any school and 6,000 people die everyday from HIV/AIDS. The list can go on and on to the point where the numbers become almost surreal and meaningless. Jesus wasn't kidding when He said we would always have the poor with us.
But Jesus Christ also began his ministry saying "the spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor, he has sent me to proclaim release to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed" (Luke 4:18 NASB). So if we're supposed to imitate Christ, what does God expect from us? What exactly are we supposed to do with all these poor?
When the magi came to see the newborn Jesus, they brought rich gifts for the One they knew was the Messiah. Yet Jesus said, "the foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head" (Luke 9:58 NASB). Very quickly we have forgotten and neglected the essential truth of Christ's initial message and the reason for His birth. Paul the apostle writes, "you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though He was rich, yet for your sake He became poor, so that you through His poverty might become rich" (2 Corinthians 8:9 NASB).
Our mission to the poor of this world cannot be a department or a committee of our Church. The poor must define who we are as Christians otherwise we will continue to be ignored or at best tolerated. Christ's mercy and compassion to the poor was so inclusive that it was threatening. We can't live life the way Christ did and we can't believe the way He expects us to if our TV's, SUV's, PDA's and 401K's are blinding us from seeing Christ in the poor.
Christ waits today under the refuse that covers the poor for our best gifts the way He waited for the magi to bring their finest gifts when He was a homeless child so long ago. Unless the Church goes "out at once into the streets and lanes of the city and bring in here the poor and crippled and blind and lame" (Luke 14:21 NASB), the world will see through our greed and hypocrisy and our pews will continue to ring hollow.
When our possessions begin to own us and blind us to the misery that surrounds us, then we are in danger of losing it all because our hording and spending on more and more things for ourselves blocks us from genuinely responding to the gospel that Jesus preached. The strength of our compassion for the poor either reveals or conceals God's kingdom come both now and in the future. Quoting the Roman Emperor Julian, Stephen Neill writes in his book A History of Christian Missions, the epic impact that the early Christians had on the world was "through the loving service rendered to strangers ... [and that they] care not only for their own poor but for ours as well; while those who belong to us look in vain for help that we should render them."
Time and space it seems have eroded the unimaginable sacrifice of Christ accepting to be born in a barn full of animals as a child so that we might live. God wants that sacrifice to be part of everyone He has created. It is a love beyond human credibility. It is a love that Christ freely gives us but also asks of us, that we too learn to love the way He does.
In spite of our selfishness, God not only endures us, He loves us. But it is this merciful love that God shines and rains on everyone, even the undeserving, that must compel us to act the same way. Loving the poor is not just about superficial generosity, but about a generosity saturated in joy.
Giving generously means that it impacts our lifestyle. It has to hurt a little. It means being content with the abundance we have, denying our wants and sometimes even our needs and sharing the rest with the needy.
Leo the Great wrote that "it is not only spiritual wealth and heavenly graces that are received from God's hands; earthly and material riches too flow from His bounty, and therefore it is with justice that He will ask an account of them, since He himself has not so much given them to be possessed as put them in trust to be administered. Justly and wisely, then, must we use the gifts of God, lest the means to good works should become a cause of sin." God has blessed us for this purpose, so that we can give and give more generously:
"God can pour on the blessings in astonishing ways so that you're ready for anything and everything, more than just ready to do what needs to be done. As one psalmist put it, 'He throws caution to the winds, giving to the needy in reckless abandon ...' This most generous God ... is more than extravagant with you. He gives you something you can then give away, which grows into full-formed lives, robust in God, wealthy in every way, so that you can be generous in every way, producing with us great praise to God" (2 Corinthians 9:8-11 MSG).
God's special attention to the poor is not because of their piety but precisely because they are poor, helpless, defenseless and deserving of mercy. This is why John of Kronstadt wrote "Your labours are generously rewarded; be generous to others. They are not rewarded in accordance to their merit; do not give to others in accordance with their merit, but for their need's sake." It is God's special attention to those that are in need of mercy that must make the poor the special attention of our Christian life. We have no choice in the matter. Our very judgment and salvation hang on our outreach and mercy to those in need:
"'When did we ever see you hungry or thirsty or homeless or shivering or sick or in prison and didn't help you?' He will answer them, 'I'm telling the solemn truth: Whenever you failed to do one of these things to someone who was being overlooked or ignored, that was me-you failed to do it to me'" (Matthew 25:44-45 MSG).
Giving generously is not so much about how much you give, but how you give it. Paul the Apostle writes, "You must each decide in your heart how much to give. And don't give reluctantly or in response to pressure. 'For God loves a person who gives cheerfully.' And God will generously provide all you need. Then you will always have everything you need and plenty left over to share with others" (2 Corinthians 9:7-8 NLT). Archimandrite Vasileos of Stavronikita wrote in his wonderful book, Hymn of Entry that the constant giving away of our wealth is what gives us life: "This ceaseless sale is an offering for us to give to the 'poor.' This is how treasure is laid up in heaven; and that treasure is something we must not and cannot sell or give to anyone, because it belongs in its entirety to everyone." Only God can grow the merciful, embracing heart you need to be compassionate and merciful as He is.
Poverty is not only a social and economic problem; rather it has its roots in our spiritual paralysis first as Christians and then as a people. It is our spiritual renewal that will change the life of the poor, one malnourished and diseased face at a time. We are not going to serve the poor beyond our Christmas donation unless we change our lifestyle and begin to live a sacrificial life. A life where it is no longer the accumulation of more things that matters most but living a life that matters to the world, that touches lives, and that holds the bruised hand of God in the flesh and bones of the poor. These are the things that are worthy of lifetime.
John Kapsalis has an M.T.S from Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology.
Saturday, December 2, 2006
The World's Mastermind: The Hidden Face of Globalization
The World's Mastermind: The Hidden Face of Globalization
A view from Argentina
by Adrian Salbuchi
This article is a summary of the key points set forth in the Author’s book published in , “El Cerebro del Mundo: la cara oculta de la Globalización ” (Ediciones del Copista, Córdoba, Argentina, 4th Edition, 2003, 470 pages. and Editorial Solar, Bogotá, Colombia, 2004).
“Those who do not learn from history are condemned to re-live it” - George Santayana
As we now have it, globalization can be defined as an ideology that identifies the Sovereign Nation-State as its key enemy, basically because the State's main function is (or should be) to prioritize the interests of the Many - i.e., "the People" - over the interests of the Few. Accordingly, the forces of globalization seek to weaken, dissolve and eventually destroy the very foundations of the Nation-State as a basic social institution, in order to replace it with new supra-national worldwide social, political, economic, financial and military management structures. Such structures tie in with the political objectives and economic interests of a small number of highly concentrated and very powerful groups and organizations which today drive and steer the globalization process in a very specific direction. These power groups consist of private interests which have succeeded in achieving something that is unprecedented in all of human history, and which we describe as the privatization of power on a global scale. "Globalization" is actually a hypocritical understatement or euphemism of what former US presidents Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman and George H.W. Bush - each at different times in modern history - described as the “New World Order”. A New World Order! Clearly, when former president George Bush Sr. unabashedly used that term on 11th September 1991, the Establishment quickly moved to ensure that it should not be commonly used, and in its place coined the much more neutral and seemingly harmless sounding idea of “globalization” which, nevertheless, today still has one main meaning: US-UK-Israeli Imperialism on a planetary and all-encompassing scale. This, at least, is how a growing number of people in Argentina and in our region see things today.
Who are they? What do they want?
The process we have described is in no way anonymous - much less, secret - because the power groups promoting and driving the New World Order are doing so in full public view: i.e., multinational corporations (e.g., the Fortune Global 500s accounting for over 80% of US economic activity); the global financial infrastructure (which includes banks, investment funds, stock exchanges and commodity market operators); multimedia monopolies; major Ivy League universities; international multilateral organizations (such as the World Bank, the IMF/International Monetary Fund, the IADB/Inter-American Development Bank, the BIS/Bank of International Settlements, the UN/United Nations and the WTO/World Trade Organization) and, most important, key government posts in the United States, Israel, the United Kingdom and other industrialized nations. So, we definitely do not have something that can be explained away as a "conspiracy theory".
What we have are the inner trappings and logic behind the way Power is built and managed. What is not immediately visible is the fact that all of these players form who are part of a "Wheel of Global Power" have one thing in common: their key managers, financiers, bankers, government officers, academics, strategists, shareholders and other fundamental players all belong to the same inter-twining network of think-tanks and lobbying organizations. This network forms a common hub that steers the wheel of world power on its present destructive course.
Among these key think-tanks - which should actually be described as geopolitical planning centers -, the role of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the Trilateral Commission (TC), the Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA), the Brookings Institution, the RAND Corporation, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the American Israeli Political Action Committee (AIPAC), and the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS), amongst others, are of vital importance.
A Historical Perspective
To properly understand today’s world, one needs to look back on yesterday’s world, in order to see how this whole situation came about. It was back in 1919 when a small group of influential bankers, lawyers, politicians and academics – who were taking part in the Paris Peace negotiations between the victorious Allies and the vanquished Central Powers right after World War I – met in the Parisian Hotel Majestic and reached a transcendental agreement: they decided to create a network of “think tanks” - a sort of exclusive club or lodge - from which they would design the kind of “New World Order” which would properly address and accomodate the imperial worldwide interests and objectives of the Anglo-US Alliance.
In London , that think tank would take on the name of Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA), whilst in the United States it would become known as the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) based in New York City . Both organizations had the unmistakeable mark of the social strategy of gradually imposing a socialist (i.e., formally "democratic" but in reality increasingly authoritarian) political order as a means of mass control of the population. At that time, that was promoted by such masonic fronts as the Fabian Society financed by the Round Table Group which was in turn created, controlled and financed by South African magnate Cecil Rhodes, the international financial dynasty of the Rothschilds, various UK-based Ancient Rite Masonic Lodges, and the British Crown.
The CFR got its initial support from the most wealthy, powerful and influential families in the United States, such as Rockefeller, Mellon, Harriman, Morgan, Schiff, Kahn, Warburg, Loeb and Carnegie (the latter, in particular, through its own front organization founded in 1910: the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace).
In order to express and thus propagate its influence amongst elite circles, one of the first measures of the CFR consisted in publishing its own journal which still remains the world’s premier mouthpiece on geopolitics and political science: Foreign Affairs. Amongst the CFR´s first directors, was Allan Welsh Dulles, a key figure in the US intelligence community who would later consolidate the covert spying structure of the CIA leading to the NSA; journalist Walter Lippmann, director and founder of The New Republic; a host of J.P. Morgan corporate lawyers; bankers Otto H. Kahn, and Paul Moritz Warburg,[1] the latter a wealthy German emigrée who emigrated to the United States and in 1913 designed and promoted legislation leading to the creation of the Federal Reserve Bank – the basically private central bank of the US which since then controls the financial structure of the United States (and, through it, of a good part of the world). When World War II ended in 1945, the Federal Reserve Bank was supplemented by the International Monetary Fund and The World Bank, both of which were masterminded, planned and designed by CFR planners at the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944.
Another member of the CFR and one of its first directors, was geographer and president of the American Geographical Society, Isaiah Bowman, who in 1919 would lead the team of experts re-drawing the map of Central Europe after the World War I, thus ushering in times of grave turmoil in Europe which would actually lead to World War II in 1939. It was CFR lawyers Owen D. Young (president of General Electric) and Charles Dawes (a top J P Morgan Bank lawyer), who in the twenties designed and promoted the “debt refinancing” plans for Germany ’s war reparations debt imposed by the Treaty of Versailles. It was top Federal Reserve Bank directors and CFR members who would generate the monetary distortions leading to the 1929 financial crisis and ensuing Depression. It was CFR directors who through the powerful media under their control such as the NBC, ABC and CBS radio networks and newspapers like the The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune and The New York Times, would coax and press public opinion to break US isolationist neutrality and embark that nation on another European war in 1939, which they themselves had been seeking since the early thirties.
The Second World War
At the very start of that terrible European civil war in which The United States would only formally take part in 1941, CFR members set up the War & Peace Studies Group which literally became a part of the State Department and designed its major foreign policies towards Germany, Italy, Japan and their allies. Later, they began preparing for yet another post-war “New World Order” after the then forseeable Allied victory. In this manner, the CFR designed and promoted the creation of the United Nations to manage world politics and US hegemony in the Nuclear Age, and some of its key economic agencies such as the IMF and the World Bank, through members like Alger Hiss, John J. McCloy, W. Averell Harriman, Harry Dexter White, Henry Kissinger and many others.
Once the war ended, US President Harry S. Truman would establish the far-reaching national security doctrine which was based on the doctrine of "containment" of Soviet expansionism proposed by yet another CFR member, who at that time was US Ambassador to Moscow: George Kennan,[2] who described his ideas in a famous seminal 1947 Foreign Affairs article which he signed with the pseudonym “X”. Similarly, the so-called “Marshall Plan” presented to the world by US Army General George C. Marshall, was in fact designed by a CFR task force and implemented by W. Averell Harriman.[3]
Elite Power Structures
Although it is little known among public opinion, the CFR is very powerful and has grown in influence, prestige and breadth of activities. So much so, that today we can say without a doubt that it operates as the “World’s Mastermind”, silently directing the course of many complex and highly volatile social, politicial, financial, military and economic processes throughout the world. There are no peoples, regions or aspects of human life which are not affected by CFR influence – whether we realize this or not – and the very fact that it has been able to remain “behind the scenes” makes the CFR exceptionally powerful and elusive, even amongst US public opinion.
Today, the CFR is a discreet organization counting among its more than 4.500 members, the best, most capable and brightest minds, operating together with very powerful anbd influential individuals wielding great influence in their respective professions, corporations, institutions, governmental posts and social environments. In this way, the CFR brings together top corporate officers from financial institutions, industrial giants, the media, research organizations, academics, top military officers, government leaders, university deans, trade union leaders and study center investigators. Their fundamental objectives consist in identifying and assessing a wide range of political, economic, financial, social, cultural and military factors spanning every imaginable aspect of public and private life in the United States , its key allies and the rest of the world. Today, thanks to the enormous power wielded by the US , the CFR's breadth of activities literally spans the whole planet.
Its research and investigations are carried out by different task forces and study groups which identify Opportunities and Threats, assess Strengths and Weaknesses, and design far-reaching strategies to promote its interests worldwide, each with their respective tactical and operational plans. Although such intensive and far-reaching tasks are made inside the CFR, the key issue to understand its enormous success lies in the fact that the CFR per se never actually does anything under its own name. Rather, it is its individual members who do so. And they do this from their formal posts as chairmen, CEO’s and directors of major corporations, financial institutions, international multilateral institutions, media, and key posts in government, universities, the armed forces, and trade unions, never invoking or even referring to the CFR as their main seat of planning and coordination.[4]
Indeed, today we can find CFR members in many powerful and decisive posts. To name but a handful of the more than 4.500 CFR members, we find David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger, Bill Clinton, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Samuel Huntington, Francis Fukuyama, Paul Wolfowitz, Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice, Richard Perle, Robert Gates, James Baker III, Stephen Hadley, Douglas Feith, L. Paul Bremer III, John Bolton, John Negroponte, former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, international rogue financier George Soros, supreme court judge Stephen Breyer, Lowes/CBS CEO Laurence A. Tisch, former General Electric Co. CEO Jack Welsh, CNN CEO W. Thomas Johnson, former chairman and CEO of The Washington Post / Newsweek / International Herald Tribune Katherine Graham (and today her successor son), US vice
presidente, former secretary of defence, and former Halliburton CEO Richard Cheney, former president George H.W. Bush, former national security advisor to president Clinton Samuel “Sandy” Berger, former CIA directors John M. Deutch and George Tenet, Federal Reserve Bank former governor Alan Greenspan and present governor Benjamin Shalom Bernanke, former World Bank president James D. Wolfensohn, CS First Boston Bank CEO and former Federal Reserve Bank governor Paul Volcker, reporters Mike Wallace, Barbara Walters, Wolf Blitzer, top CitiGroup directors John Reed, William Rhodes, Stanford Weill, and Stanley Fischer (in turn formerly No. 2 at the IMF), economists Jeffrey Sachs and Lester Thurow, former treasury secretary, Goldman Sachs CEO and CitiGroup director Robert E. Rubin, former secretary of state and “mediator” during the the Falkland/Malvinas Islands War between Argentina and Britain Gral. Alexander Haig, “mediator” in the Balcan conflict Richard Holbrooke, IBM CEO Louis V. Gerstner, democratic senator George J. Mitchell, former republican representative Newt Gingrich, former Bush Sr. national sercurity advisor Air Force General Brent Scowcroft, Kenneth Lay (recently deseased member of the Trilateral Commission and Enron CEO), amongst many, many others.[5]
In the business world, top Fortune 500 corporations all have senior directors who are CFR members. These corporations together have a combined market value equivalent to almost twice the gross domestic product of the United States and concentrate the better part of the wealth and power of that country, controlling key resources and technologies around the world. Together, they employ over 25 million people in the US alone and account for over 80% of its GDP. In short, they wield gigantic power, leverage and influence in the US and beyond.
We thus find here the key to the CFR’s enormous effectiveness and power: its decisions and plans are drafted out and agreed in closed meetings, study groups, conferences and task forces. But when the time comes to execute those plans, they are then carried out by its different members, each from his or her formal post in different powerful organizations, both public and private. And what powerful posts and organizations these are!
If, for example, a plan has been drafted and agreed regarding how globalisation of the economy and the financial system is to evolve, or which countries are to enjoy peace and prosperity and which are to be ravished by war, invasion and famine, then the coordinated action of personalities like the president of the United States, his secretaries of state, defense, commerce and treasury, CIA, NSA and FBI directors, key international bankers and financiers, Fortune 500 CEO's, media owners and moguls, reporters and writers, military officers and academics, heads of the IMF, World Bank and World Trade Organization, are all brought together at the right time, in the proper sequence and on a myriad of specific matters. In this way, they are able to coordinate concrete, effective and almost irrestistible action, anytime and anywhere.
This is how it has worked for more than eighty years.
Real Power and Formal Power
In order to understand how the world really works, we must first understand the difference that exists between Formal Power and Real Power. What the media propagate with a very high public profile every day in their television and radio newscasts, and in the press are basically the concrete and visible results of the actions carried out by Formal Power structures, especially those of national governments and the technological, financial and corporate infrastructures. However, Real Power levers that actually make things happen are far less visible. They are the ones which plan out what will occur in the world, when it will occur, where it will take place and who shall carry it out.
Formal Power operates short-term and with a high public profile. Real Power operates within a long-term framework and has almost no public profile. Nowadays, Formal Power is mostly “public” – Real Power is fundamentally “private”. This reflects the fact that the institutions of the Nation-State (the prime public Formal Power entity) has become subordinate to private interests (i.e., Real Power driven by money interests).
Since the United States is today’s sole superpower, it is reasonable to conclude that this world power structure – that is what it really is – provisionally manages this veritable World Government from the territory, the political and economic structures of the United States. This, however, by no means implies that the majority of the people of the United States necessarily form part of that scheme of things, much less that the people of the US are "enemies" of any other peoples (rarely are the People of any country an "enemy"; rather, it is their elite establishments that become adversarial through excessive concentration of power).
We are thus speaking of power groups which operate from within the United States (as they also do from within the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, Israel and, through their local agents, also in countries like Spain, Argentina, Brasil and Korea), but that are not necessaily identified with the people of the United States.
To better understand the true nature of the United States – especially in what refers to US Foreign Policy – one does well to keep in mind that the US “Administration” as they so aptly call their Government - i.e., Formal Power - is based in Washington DC. However, Real Power structures in the US are mainly located in New York City and some New England states. In other words, the Administration of the United States is done from Washington DC, whilst the country is actually governed from New York City .
Once we grasp this concept, then many other things automatically fall into place. Additionally, the world's real power center resides not in New York City but, more likely, in London … Understanding this complex and subtle process automatically pre-empts any simplistic identification of the “enemy” as the United States or England or any other peoples . More often than not, in times of turmoil the people of the United States are victims – even bloody ones as fallen US citizens in Vietnam , Afghanistan , Iraq and the World Trade Center attest to – of this very process. Nevertheless, the fact that most people in the US ignore this fact, does not make them less responsible or accountable for the genocidal strategies the New World Order power structures operating from US territory perpetrate upon the rest of the world through the use and abuse of US military and economic might to achieve their goals.
That this should be so is understandable when one considers that exercising Real Power requires complying with a set of rules and conditions such as, for example, operational continuity spanning many decades in order to achieve far-reaching goals and carrying out complex strategies which, in turn, span the entire planet, its nations and resources. This requires long-term planning: twenty, thirty and fifty years into the future.
Ironically, the New World Order power elites know full well that there is no greater threat to political continuity and consistency in the design and execution of such long-term global strategies, than to have them subjected to a democratic process that imposes high public profiles on its leaders who must (or should!) heed the "voice of the People" at every step they take, coupled with recurrent power interruptions which all democratic electoral processes entail.
How much better it is to be able to operate discreetly, from what can only be describes as a gentlemen’s club such as the CFR, in which powerful and influential men and women can be officers, directors and chairmen for decades at a time without ever having to be accountable to anybody but their own peers. In this manner, 4.500 powerful individuals can exert tremendous policital, economic, financial and media clout over countless hundreds of millions of people throughout the entire planet.
It goes without saying that one of the main tasks of the global media monopolies is to impose “political correctness”, normally expressed through the "Two-Party System" – Democrats and Republicans in the US, Labour and Conservative in the UK, CDU or SPD in Germany, Radicals and Justicialists in Argentina – all of which are mere variations of the same basic politically correct tenets, and of each other. Stable Western democracies have all conformed to what is, in practice, a One-Party System with slightly different internal factions. People think they may “choose”, but the "options" are just not there: it's sort of like "choosing" between Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola – no matter what they want you to believe, the truth is that they are both basically the same thing.
What we are describing is, in fact, the central hub of a veritable network of powerful people, considering that the CFR is, in turn, supplemented by a myriad of similar institutions both inside and outside of the United States .
All of these think tanks bring together the most intelligent, best prepared, creative and ambitous men and women in a wide range of fields and disciplines. They are paid and rewarded very handsomely - both economically and socially - as long as they clearly and uncompromisingly align themselves to the basic tenets of the CFR’s political objectives. These are nothing less than the creation of a Private World Government; the systematic erosion of the structures of all sovereign Nation-States (though, naturally, not all of them in the same way, at the same speed, nor at the same time); the (sub)standardization of cultural values and social norms; the spreading of a globalized financial system based on gross speculation and usury; and the management of a Global War System in order to maintain the necessary social cohesion of its own masses by permanent coaxing and alignment against real or imagined enemies of “democracy”, “human rights”, “freedom” and “peace”; i.e., against "terrorism".[6]
Since 2003, we saw first-hand how inexistent Iraqui “Weapons of Mass Destruction” turned out to be nothing but Weapons of Mass DISTRACTION, generating enormous suffering, pain and hardship for untold millions of people. The invasion of Irak and Afghanistan are just two examples of the double-standards and double-talk "Newspeak" on which this entire system thrives.
Thus, in order to better understand today's world, one needs to read and assess what the CFR – or rather, its individual members - say and propagate, as many of its activities though discreet are not actually secret. Any person visiting CFR headquarters on fashionable Park Avenue and 68th Street in New York City, as I have done many times in recent years, can easily get all sorts of information including a free copy of their latest Annual Report describing the Institution’s main activities and the full alphabetical list of its 4.500 members. All the information on these organizations is readily available for those who want to see it. It is, then however up to each of us to cross-check all that data on CFR members with what each really does in their professional, corporate, academic and government activities and capacities.
One need also look back on modern history and assess the exceptional leverage which the CFR has had throughout the twentieth century, both on its own, as well as in conjunction with its sister organizations. They have triggered and influenced ideologies, public events, wars, military alliances, political crimes, covert actions, mass psychological warfare, economic and financial crises, promotion and destruction of political and business personalities, and other high-impact events – many of them clearly difficult or impossible for them to admit or confess. All have, however, marked the course of humanity in these stormy modern times.
The technique used is to keep us all far too busy and fascinated as pasive spectators of this whirlwind of events taking place every day in the world. This ensures that almost no one ever thinks of looking elsewhere for suitable explanations to today’s grave crises, because that would then enable us to identify, not so much the effects and shocking results of many of these political decisions and covert actions, but rather their real and concrete originators, organizers and objectives.
In order for this gigantic mass psychological warfare – for that is what it really is - to succeed, the mass media play a vital role which cannot be underestimated. For they are the instruments whose goal it is to undermine and neutralise the capacity of independent thought among the world’s population. That is the key role of global mass media like CNN, CBS, NBC, The New York Times, The Daily Telegraph, Le Figaró, FoxNews, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, Corrieri della Sera, Le Monde, Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, US News & World Report, Business Week, Reuters, and their respective local outlets in all countries, all of which are directed by key people belonging to the CFR and/or its sister organizations in the US and elsewhere.
And the worst part of it all is that, in spite of all the enormous friction, wars, violence and destruction it generates, the New World Order just does not work. You cannot build a world empire only based on billions of dollars, B1 bombers, F16 fighters, Tomahawk missiles, CNN and gross lying and hipocrasy at the top. Historically, Rome , France , Spain and even Britain knew that only deeper cultural values can consolidate a true empire that will endure even after the colonizing power is long gone, as has happened even to this very day throughout South America where Spanish, Potuguese (and British) influence are ubiquitous . These key cultural factors seem to be very much lacking in the United States that was once described by former French premier George Clemenceau as “that complex political and social process running from barbarity to civilization without going through the necessary stage of culture…”
Implications for Argentina and our Region
Within this context, we can say that the local media in Argentina , our educational system and local mainstream politicians are all basically aligned to the New World Order process – independently of whether they are aware of this or not. In this respect, this System of Domination has three key objectives:
To hide from public opinion how the world really works, knowing that if we cannot properly understand and diagnose the source of our problems and weaknesses, then we can hardly expect to find the proper solutions to them. We are thus (mis)led into believing that we are at “peace”, when in actual fact a veritable and violent total war is being waged against Argentina since more than half a century on the political, economic, financial, media, educational, technological and environmental fronts. Primarily, this is a Psychological War.
To make us all believe that although we are in a difficult situation, “things will improve”, as long as we reach yet another "agreement" with international bankers and speculators, privatize more State interests, reform our federal and provincial governments to the World Bank’s liking, reform our labour, educational and social legislation, and do all necessary so that “international investors” will smile upon us. The truth is that to say we are in a “difficult situation” is an absurd understatement: Argentina is in a terminal situation and if we do not awaken to this reality, in a few more years – a decade at most – we shall cease to exist as a country altogether.[7] Clearly, Argentina has only two options: either we accept living with all the problems and crises we have and take no action to resolve them, trying to merely manage their consequences as best we can or, we confront these problems and crises and decide to do something about them. Naturally, the second option is more difficult and risk laden. Our Governments over the past thirty years have all chosen the former option of living with these problems, which has led us to our present predicament.
3. To make us believe that, whether we like it or not, there is nothing we can do to stop “globalization”. The truth, however, is that there are myriads of things that we can do to neutralise the adverse effects of globalization. But they all require that we first recover sovereign Nation-State institutions that will achieve its basic and fundamental functions of:
· integrating internal conflicting social forces (i.e., promote the Common Good),
· foreseeing all possible threats and opportunities from without and within (i.e., defending the National Interest), and
· leading the Nation on a political course geared on defending its national interest (i.e., leading the country to its Destiny).
These functions require the existence of a Sovereign Nation-state which Argentina today no longer has. We have become a colony, so we must first promote a true Second Declaration of Independence in order to found a Second Argentine Republic. The implications and inspiration for our region and even further afield of such a revolutionary act would be truly momentous.[8]
Additionally – and this is beyond the scope of this brief article –, the global financial infrastructure is on the brink of what can only be described as a controlled worldwide collapse, something that the CFR has been carefully planning through various projects such as the so-called Financial Vulnerabilities Project and New International Financial Architecture programmes. When this occurs it will spell out unimagined new opportunities for Argentina and our region.
As we become aware of these realities, the road which we need to tread becomes increasingly clear too. In truth, things then do not appear as complex as we once thought. It is all basically a question of thinking with our own minds and not with the minds of our adversaries; of starting to assess and defend our National Interest, which implies having our own view of world events, interests and forces, and then taking intelligent measures that respond to our needs, real possibilities and idiosincracy. In this sense, we have an advantage because we do not need not “reinvent the wheel”, as the CFR gives us a brilliant and highly successful blueprint for political, economic, financial and social planning and management of national power. Why not learn from them? Why not form our own network of think-tanks, bringing together a wide range of local, regional and like-minded interests, players and thinkers from different fields? Why not put them all to work on promoting the National Interests of Argentina and its neighbours, so as to recover sovereignty and self-determination for our peoples in a consistent and coherent manner, irrespective of what the world power players try to impose upon us?
But to do this we must first understand what globalization really is: an immensely large range of threats which we need to avoid, and opportunities which we should take advantage of. Regarding every subject having potential impact on us, we need to understand which are our relative strengths and weaknesses in order to be able to successfully confront them; if not today, then certainly in the future. That requires proper planning. Medium and long-term planning. That requires trying to always be one step ahead of the Adversary, achieving and keeping an edge and an advantage over coming events.
No doubt this will lead us to designing the right policies that are consistent with our National Interest, which in many instances will certainly not coincide with the interests of today's global power brokers. To this end, we need to seek and work closely with nations and organizations in Central and South America, Africa, Asia, and Europe, with which we share the common goal of neutralising the negative effects of global imperial domination. In truth, this all means that we need to found a New Argentina . We have many of the necessary tools already at hand; we have millions of countrymen ready to accept the challenge if we but explain to them clearly and forcefully the odds which are at stake; and there are millions of others beyond our borders with whom we can work arm-in-arm towards such a common Cause.
In short, it is really a question of understanding that in Politics there are two kinds of people: those who are active players in the political arena and those who merely and passively look on. The Council on Foreign Relations is clearly a key active player in the global political arenat. Isn't it time that we started doing the same in our own country?
Adrian Salbuchi is a researcher, author and speaker; host of the Buenos Aires talk-show “El Traductor Radial” and founder of the Argentine Second Republic Movement (Movimiento por la Segunda República Argentina) www.eltraductorradial.com.ar. He is author of “El Cerebro del Mundo: la cara oculta de la Globalización”, (“The World’s Mastermind: the Hidden Face of Globalization”) and “Bienvenidos a la Jungla: Dominio y Supervivencia en el Nuevo Orden Mundial”. Contact info. salbuchi@fibertel.com.ar www.eltraductorradial.com.ar www.m2ra.com
A view from Argentina
by Adrian Salbuchi
This article is a summary of the key points set forth in the Author’s book published in , “El Cerebro del Mundo: la cara oculta de la Globalización ” (Ediciones del Copista, Córdoba, Argentina, 4th Edition, 2003, 470 pages. and Editorial Solar, Bogotá, Colombia, 2004).
“Those who do not learn from history are condemned to re-live it” - George Santayana
As we now have it, globalization can be defined as an ideology that identifies the Sovereign Nation-State as its key enemy, basically because the State's main function is (or should be) to prioritize the interests of the Many - i.e., "the People" - over the interests of the Few. Accordingly, the forces of globalization seek to weaken, dissolve and eventually destroy the very foundations of the Nation-State as a basic social institution, in order to replace it with new supra-national worldwide social, political, economic, financial and military management structures. Such structures tie in with the political objectives and economic interests of a small number of highly concentrated and very powerful groups and organizations which today drive and steer the globalization process in a very specific direction. These power groups consist of private interests which have succeeded in achieving something that is unprecedented in all of human history, and which we describe as the privatization of power on a global scale. "Globalization" is actually a hypocritical understatement or euphemism of what former US presidents Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman and George H.W. Bush - each at different times in modern history - described as the “New World Order”. A New World Order! Clearly, when former president George Bush Sr. unabashedly used that term on 11th September 1991, the Establishment quickly moved to ensure that it should not be commonly used, and in its place coined the much more neutral and seemingly harmless sounding idea of “globalization” which, nevertheless, today still has one main meaning: US-UK-Israeli Imperialism on a planetary and all-encompassing scale. This, at least, is how a growing number of people in Argentina and in our region see things today.
Who are they? What do they want?
The process we have described is in no way anonymous - much less, secret - because the power groups promoting and driving the New World Order are doing so in full public view: i.e., multinational corporations (e.g., the Fortune Global 500s accounting for over 80% of US economic activity); the global financial infrastructure (which includes banks, investment funds, stock exchanges and commodity market operators); multimedia monopolies; major Ivy League universities; international multilateral organizations (such as the World Bank, the IMF/International Monetary Fund, the IADB/Inter-American Development Bank, the BIS/Bank of International Settlements, the UN/United Nations and the WTO/World Trade Organization) and, most important, key government posts in the United States, Israel, the United Kingdom and other industrialized nations. So, we definitely do not have something that can be explained away as a "conspiracy theory".
What we have are the inner trappings and logic behind the way Power is built and managed. What is not immediately visible is the fact that all of these players form who are part of a "Wheel of Global Power" have one thing in common: their key managers, financiers, bankers, government officers, academics, strategists, shareholders and other fundamental players all belong to the same inter-twining network of think-tanks and lobbying organizations. This network forms a common hub that steers the wheel of world power on its present destructive course.
Among these key think-tanks - which should actually be described as geopolitical planning centers -, the role of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the Trilateral Commission (TC), the Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA), the Brookings Institution, the RAND Corporation, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the American Israeli Political Action Committee (AIPAC), and the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS), amongst others, are of vital importance.
A Historical Perspective
To properly understand today’s world, one needs to look back on yesterday’s world, in order to see how this whole situation came about. It was back in 1919 when a small group of influential bankers, lawyers, politicians and academics – who were taking part in the Paris Peace negotiations between the victorious Allies and the vanquished Central Powers right after World War I – met in the Parisian Hotel Majestic and reached a transcendental agreement: they decided to create a network of “think tanks” - a sort of exclusive club or lodge - from which they would design the kind of “New World Order” which would properly address and accomodate the imperial worldwide interests and objectives of the Anglo-US Alliance.
In London , that think tank would take on the name of Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA), whilst in the United States it would become known as the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) based in New York City . Both organizations had the unmistakeable mark of the social strategy of gradually imposing a socialist (i.e., formally "democratic" but in reality increasingly authoritarian) political order as a means of mass control of the population. At that time, that was promoted by such masonic fronts as the Fabian Society financed by the Round Table Group which was in turn created, controlled and financed by South African magnate Cecil Rhodes, the international financial dynasty of the Rothschilds, various UK-based Ancient Rite Masonic Lodges, and the British Crown.
The CFR got its initial support from the most wealthy, powerful and influential families in the United States, such as Rockefeller, Mellon, Harriman, Morgan, Schiff, Kahn, Warburg, Loeb and Carnegie (the latter, in particular, through its own front organization founded in 1910: the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace).
In order to express and thus propagate its influence amongst elite circles, one of the first measures of the CFR consisted in publishing its own journal which still remains the world’s premier mouthpiece on geopolitics and political science: Foreign Affairs. Amongst the CFR´s first directors, was Allan Welsh Dulles, a key figure in the US intelligence community who would later consolidate the covert spying structure of the CIA leading to the NSA; journalist Walter Lippmann, director and founder of The New Republic; a host of J.P. Morgan corporate lawyers; bankers Otto H. Kahn, and Paul Moritz Warburg,[1] the latter a wealthy German emigrée who emigrated to the United States and in 1913 designed and promoted legislation leading to the creation of the Federal Reserve Bank – the basically private central bank of the US which since then controls the financial structure of the United States (and, through it, of a good part of the world). When World War II ended in 1945, the Federal Reserve Bank was supplemented by the International Monetary Fund and The World Bank, both of which were masterminded, planned and designed by CFR planners at the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944.
Another member of the CFR and one of its first directors, was geographer and president of the American Geographical Society, Isaiah Bowman, who in 1919 would lead the team of experts re-drawing the map of Central Europe after the World War I, thus ushering in times of grave turmoil in Europe which would actually lead to World War II in 1939. It was CFR lawyers Owen D. Young (president of General Electric) and Charles Dawes (a top J P Morgan Bank lawyer), who in the twenties designed and promoted the “debt refinancing” plans for Germany ’s war reparations debt imposed by the Treaty of Versailles. It was top Federal Reserve Bank directors and CFR members who would generate the monetary distortions leading to the 1929 financial crisis and ensuing Depression. It was CFR directors who through the powerful media under their control such as the NBC, ABC and CBS radio networks and newspapers like the The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune and The New York Times, would coax and press public opinion to break US isolationist neutrality and embark that nation on another European war in 1939, which they themselves had been seeking since the early thirties.
The Second World War
At the very start of that terrible European civil war in which The United States would only formally take part in 1941, CFR members set up the War & Peace Studies Group which literally became a part of the State Department and designed its major foreign policies towards Germany, Italy, Japan and their allies. Later, they began preparing for yet another post-war “New World Order” after the then forseeable Allied victory. In this manner, the CFR designed and promoted the creation of the United Nations to manage world politics and US hegemony in the Nuclear Age, and some of its key economic agencies such as the IMF and the World Bank, through members like Alger Hiss, John J. McCloy, W. Averell Harriman, Harry Dexter White, Henry Kissinger and many others.
Once the war ended, US President Harry S. Truman would establish the far-reaching national security doctrine which was based on the doctrine of "containment" of Soviet expansionism proposed by yet another CFR member, who at that time was US Ambassador to Moscow: George Kennan,[2] who described his ideas in a famous seminal 1947 Foreign Affairs article which he signed with the pseudonym “X”. Similarly, the so-called “Marshall Plan” presented to the world by US Army General George C. Marshall, was in fact designed by a CFR task force and implemented by W. Averell Harriman.[3]
Elite Power Structures
Although it is little known among public opinion, the CFR is very powerful and has grown in influence, prestige and breadth of activities. So much so, that today we can say without a doubt that it operates as the “World’s Mastermind”, silently directing the course of many complex and highly volatile social, politicial, financial, military and economic processes throughout the world. There are no peoples, regions or aspects of human life which are not affected by CFR influence – whether we realize this or not – and the very fact that it has been able to remain “behind the scenes” makes the CFR exceptionally powerful and elusive, even amongst US public opinion.
Today, the CFR is a discreet organization counting among its more than 4.500 members, the best, most capable and brightest minds, operating together with very powerful anbd influential individuals wielding great influence in their respective professions, corporations, institutions, governmental posts and social environments. In this way, the CFR brings together top corporate officers from financial institutions, industrial giants, the media, research organizations, academics, top military officers, government leaders, university deans, trade union leaders and study center investigators. Their fundamental objectives consist in identifying and assessing a wide range of political, economic, financial, social, cultural and military factors spanning every imaginable aspect of public and private life in the United States , its key allies and the rest of the world. Today, thanks to the enormous power wielded by the US , the CFR's breadth of activities literally spans the whole planet.
Its research and investigations are carried out by different task forces and study groups which identify Opportunities and Threats, assess Strengths and Weaknesses, and design far-reaching strategies to promote its interests worldwide, each with their respective tactical and operational plans. Although such intensive and far-reaching tasks are made inside the CFR, the key issue to understand its enormous success lies in the fact that the CFR per se never actually does anything under its own name. Rather, it is its individual members who do so. And they do this from their formal posts as chairmen, CEO’s and directors of major corporations, financial institutions, international multilateral institutions, media, and key posts in government, universities, the armed forces, and trade unions, never invoking or even referring to the CFR as their main seat of planning and coordination.[4]
Indeed, today we can find CFR members in many powerful and decisive posts. To name but a handful of the more than 4.500 CFR members, we find David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger, Bill Clinton, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Samuel Huntington, Francis Fukuyama, Paul Wolfowitz, Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice, Richard Perle, Robert Gates, James Baker III, Stephen Hadley, Douglas Feith, L. Paul Bremer III, John Bolton, John Negroponte, former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, international rogue financier George Soros, supreme court judge Stephen Breyer, Lowes/CBS CEO Laurence A. Tisch, former General Electric Co. CEO Jack Welsh, CNN CEO W. Thomas Johnson, former chairman and CEO of The Washington Post / Newsweek / International Herald Tribune Katherine Graham (and today her successor son), US vice
presidente, former secretary of defence, and former Halliburton CEO Richard Cheney, former president George H.W. Bush, former national security advisor to president Clinton Samuel “Sandy” Berger, former CIA directors John M. Deutch and George Tenet, Federal Reserve Bank former governor Alan Greenspan and present governor Benjamin Shalom Bernanke, former World Bank president James D. Wolfensohn, CS First Boston Bank CEO and former Federal Reserve Bank governor Paul Volcker, reporters Mike Wallace, Barbara Walters, Wolf Blitzer, top CitiGroup directors John Reed, William Rhodes, Stanford Weill, and Stanley Fischer (in turn formerly No. 2 at the IMF), economists Jeffrey Sachs and Lester Thurow, former treasury secretary, Goldman Sachs CEO and CitiGroup director Robert E. Rubin, former secretary of state and “mediator” during the the Falkland/Malvinas Islands War between Argentina and Britain Gral. Alexander Haig, “mediator” in the Balcan conflict Richard Holbrooke, IBM CEO Louis V. Gerstner, democratic senator George J. Mitchell, former republican representative Newt Gingrich, former Bush Sr. national sercurity advisor Air Force General Brent Scowcroft, Kenneth Lay (recently deseased member of the Trilateral Commission and Enron CEO), amongst many, many others.[5]
In the business world, top Fortune 500 corporations all have senior directors who are CFR members. These corporations together have a combined market value equivalent to almost twice the gross domestic product of the United States and concentrate the better part of the wealth and power of that country, controlling key resources and technologies around the world. Together, they employ over 25 million people in the US alone and account for over 80% of its GDP. In short, they wield gigantic power, leverage and influence in the US and beyond.
We thus find here the key to the CFR’s enormous effectiveness and power: its decisions and plans are drafted out and agreed in closed meetings, study groups, conferences and task forces. But when the time comes to execute those plans, they are then carried out by its different members, each from his or her formal post in different powerful organizations, both public and private. And what powerful posts and organizations these are!
If, for example, a plan has been drafted and agreed regarding how globalisation of the economy and the financial system is to evolve, or which countries are to enjoy peace and prosperity and which are to be ravished by war, invasion and famine, then the coordinated action of personalities like the president of the United States, his secretaries of state, defense, commerce and treasury, CIA, NSA and FBI directors, key international bankers and financiers, Fortune 500 CEO's, media owners and moguls, reporters and writers, military officers and academics, heads of the IMF, World Bank and World Trade Organization, are all brought together at the right time, in the proper sequence and on a myriad of specific matters. In this way, they are able to coordinate concrete, effective and almost irrestistible action, anytime and anywhere.
This is how it has worked for more than eighty years.
Real Power and Formal Power
In order to understand how the world really works, we must first understand the difference that exists between Formal Power and Real Power. What the media propagate with a very high public profile every day in their television and radio newscasts, and in the press are basically the concrete and visible results of the actions carried out by Formal Power structures, especially those of national governments and the technological, financial and corporate infrastructures. However, Real Power levers that actually make things happen are far less visible. They are the ones which plan out what will occur in the world, when it will occur, where it will take place and who shall carry it out.
Formal Power operates short-term and with a high public profile. Real Power operates within a long-term framework and has almost no public profile. Nowadays, Formal Power is mostly “public” – Real Power is fundamentally “private”. This reflects the fact that the institutions of the Nation-State (the prime public Formal Power entity) has become subordinate to private interests (i.e., Real Power driven by money interests).
Since the United States is today’s sole superpower, it is reasonable to conclude that this world power structure – that is what it really is – provisionally manages this veritable World Government from the territory, the political and economic structures of the United States. This, however, by no means implies that the majority of the people of the United States necessarily form part of that scheme of things, much less that the people of the US are "enemies" of any other peoples (rarely are the People of any country an "enemy"; rather, it is their elite establishments that become adversarial through excessive concentration of power).
We are thus speaking of power groups which operate from within the United States (as they also do from within the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, Israel and, through their local agents, also in countries like Spain, Argentina, Brasil and Korea), but that are not necessaily identified with the people of the United States.
To better understand the true nature of the United States – especially in what refers to US Foreign Policy – one does well to keep in mind that the US “Administration” as they so aptly call their Government - i.e., Formal Power - is based in Washington DC. However, Real Power structures in the US are mainly located in New York City and some New England states. In other words, the Administration of the United States is done from Washington DC, whilst the country is actually governed from New York City .
Once we grasp this concept, then many other things automatically fall into place. Additionally, the world's real power center resides not in New York City but, more likely, in London … Understanding this complex and subtle process automatically pre-empts any simplistic identification of the “enemy” as the United States or England or any other peoples . More often than not, in times of turmoil the people of the United States are victims – even bloody ones as fallen US citizens in Vietnam , Afghanistan , Iraq and the World Trade Center attest to – of this very process. Nevertheless, the fact that most people in the US ignore this fact, does not make them less responsible or accountable for the genocidal strategies the New World Order power structures operating from US territory perpetrate upon the rest of the world through the use and abuse of US military and economic might to achieve their goals.
That this should be so is understandable when one considers that exercising Real Power requires complying with a set of rules and conditions such as, for example, operational continuity spanning many decades in order to achieve far-reaching goals and carrying out complex strategies which, in turn, span the entire planet, its nations and resources. This requires long-term planning: twenty, thirty and fifty years into the future.
Ironically, the New World Order power elites know full well that there is no greater threat to political continuity and consistency in the design and execution of such long-term global strategies, than to have them subjected to a democratic process that imposes high public profiles on its leaders who must (or should!) heed the "voice of the People" at every step they take, coupled with recurrent power interruptions which all democratic electoral processes entail.
How much better it is to be able to operate discreetly, from what can only be describes as a gentlemen’s club such as the CFR, in which powerful and influential men and women can be officers, directors and chairmen for decades at a time without ever having to be accountable to anybody but their own peers. In this manner, 4.500 powerful individuals can exert tremendous policital, economic, financial and media clout over countless hundreds of millions of people throughout the entire planet.
It goes without saying that one of the main tasks of the global media monopolies is to impose “political correctness”, normally expressed through the "Two-Party System" – Democrats and Republicans in the US, Labour and Conservative in the UK, CDU or SPD in Germany, Radicals and Justicialists in Argentina – all of which are mere variations of the same basic politically correct tenets, and of each other. Stable Western democracies have all conformed to what is, in practice, a One-Party System with slightly different internal factions. People think they may “choose”, but the "options" are just not there: it's sort of like "choosing" between Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola – no matter what they want you to believe, the truth is that they are both basically the same thing.
What we are describing is, in fact, the central hub of a veritable network of powerful people, considering that the CFR is, in turn, supplemented by a myriad of similar institutions both inside and outside of the United States .
All of these think tanks bring together the most intelligent, best prepared, creative and ambitous men and women in a wide range of fields and disciplines. They are paid and rewarded very handsomely - both economically and socially - as long as they clearly and uncompromisingly align themselves to the basic tenets of the CFR’s political objectives. These are nothing less than the creation of a Private World Government; the systematic erosion of the structures of all sovereign Nation-States (though, naturally, not all of them in the same way, at the same speed, nor at the same time); the (sub)standardization of cultural values and social norms; the spreading of a globalized financial system based on gross speculation and usury; and the management of a Global War System in order to maintain the necessary social cohesion of its own masses by permanent coaxing and alignment against real or imagined enemies of “democracy”, “human rights”, “freedom” and “peace”; i.e., against "terrorism".[6]
Since 2003, we saw first-hand how inexistent Iraqui “Weapons of Mass Destruction” turned out to be nothing but Weapons of Mass DISTRACTION, generating enormous suffering, pain and hardship for untold millions of people. The invasion of Irak and Afghanistan are just two examples of the double-standards and double-talk "Newspeak" on which this entire system thrives.
Thus, in order to better understand today's world, one needs to read and assess what the CFR – or rather, its individual members - say and propagate, as many of its activities though discreet are not actually secret. Any person visiting CFR headquarters on fashionable Park Avenue and 68th Street in New York City, as I have done many times in recent years, can easily get all sorts of information including a free copy of their latest Annual Report describing the Institution’s main activities and the full alphabetical list of its 4.500 members. All the information on these organizations is readily available for those who want to see it. It is, then however up to each of us to cross-check all that data on CFR members with what each really does in their professional, corporate, academic and government activities and capacities.
One need also look back on modern history and assess the exceptional leverage which the CFR has had throughout the twentieth century, both on its own, as well as in conjunction with its sister organizations. They have triggered and influenced ideologies, public events, wars, military alliances, political crimes, covert actions, mass psychological warfare, economic and financial crises, promotion and destruction of political and business personalities, and other high-impact events – many of them clearly difficult or impossible for them to admit or confess. All have, however, marked the course of humanity in these stormy modern times.
The technique used is to keep us all far too busy and fascinated as pasive spectators of this whirlwind of events taking place every day in the world. This ensures that almost no one ever thinks of looking elsewhere for suitable explanations to today’s grave crises, because that would then enable us to identify, not so much the effects and shocking results of many of these political decisions and covert actions, but rather their real and concrete originators, organizers and objectives.
In order for this gigantic mass psychological warfare – for that is what it really is - to succeed, the mass media play a vital role which cannot be underestimated. For they are the instruments whose goal it is to undermine and neutralise the capacity of independent thought among the world’s population. That is the key role of global mass media like CNN, CBS, NBC, The New York Times, The Daily Telegraph, Le Figaró, FoxNews, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, Corrieri della Sera, Le Monde, Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, US News & World Report, Business Week, Reuters, and their respective local outlets in all countries, all of which are directed by key people belonging to the CFR and/or its sister organizations in the US and elsewhere.
And the worst part of it all is that, in spite of all the enormous friction, wars, violence and destruction it generates, the New World Order just does not work. You cannot build a world empire only based on billions of dollars, B1 bombers, F16 fighters, Tomahawk missiles, CNN and gross lying and hipocrasy at the top. Historically, Rome , France , Spain and even Britain knew that only deeper cultural values can consolidate a true empire that will endure even after the colonizing power is long gone, as has happened even to this very day throughout South America where Spanish, Potuguese (and British) influence are ubiquitous . These key cultural factors seem to be very much lacking in the United States that was once described by former French premier George Clemenceau as “that complex political and social process running from barbarity to civilization without going through the necessary stage of culture…”
Implications for Argentina and our Region
Within this context, we can say that the local media in Argentina , our educational system and local mainstream politicians are all basically aligned to the New World Order process – independently of whether they are aware of this or not. In this respect, this System of Domination has three key objectives:
To hide from public opinion how the world really works, knowing that if we cannot properly understand and diagnose the source of our problems and weaknesses, then we can hardly expect to find the proper solutions to them. We are thus (mis)led into believing that we are at “peace”, when in actual fact a veritable and violent total war is being waged against Argentina since more than half a century on the political, economic, financial, media, educational, technological and environmental fronts. Primarily, this is a Psychological War.
To make us all believe that although we are in a difficult situation, “things will improve”, as long as we reach yet another "agreement" with international bankers and speculators, privatize more State interests, reform our federal and provincial governments to the World Bank’s liking, reform our labour, educational and social legislation, and do all necessary so that “international investors” will smile upon us. The truth is that to say we are in a “difficult situation” is an absurd understatement: Argentina is in a terminal situation and if we do not awaken to this reality, in a few more years – a decade at most – we shall cease to exist as a country altogether.[7] Clearly, Argentina has only two options: either we accept living with all the problems and crises we have and take no action to resolve them, trying to merely manage their consequences as best we can or, we confront these problems and crises and decide to do something about them. Naturally, the second option is more difficult and risk laden. Our Governments over the past thirty years have all chosen the former option of living with these problems, which has led us to our present predicament.
3. To make us believe that, whether we like it or not, there is nothing we can do to stop “globalization”. The truth, however, is that there are myriads of things that we can do to neutralise the adverse effects of globalization. But they all require that we first recover sovereign Nation-State institutions that will achieve its basic and fundamental functions of:
· integrating internal conflicting social forces (i.e., promote the Common Good),
· foreseeing all possible threats and opportunities from without and within (i.e., defending the National Interest), and
· leading the Nation on a political course geared on defending its national interest (i.e., leading the country to its Destiny).
These functions require the existence of a Sovereign Nation-state which Argentina today no longer has. We have become a colony, so we must first promote a true Second Declaration of Independence in order to found a Second Argentine Republic. The implications and inspiration for our region and even further afield of such a revolutionary act would be truly momentous.[8]
Additionally – and this is beyond the scope of this brief article –, the global financial infrastructure is on the brink of what can only be described as a controlled worldwide collapse, something that the CFR has been carefully planning through various projects such as the so-called Financial Vulnerabilities Project and New International Financial Architecture programmes. When this occurs it will spell out unimagined new opportunities for Argentina and our region.
As we become aware of these realities, the road which we need to tread becomes increasingly clear too. In truth, things then do not appear as complex as we once thought. It is all basically a question of thinking with our own minds and not with the minds of our adversaries; of starting to assess and defend our National Interest, which implies having our own view of world events, interests and forces, and then taking intelligent measures that respond to our needs, real possibilities and idiosincracy. In this sense, we have an advantage because we do not need not “reinvent the wheel”, as the CFR gives us a brilliant and highly successful blueprint for political, economic, financial and social planning and management of national power. Why not learn from them? Why not form our own network of think-tanks, bringing together a wide range of local, regional and like-minded interests, players and thinkers from different fields? Why not put them all to work on promoting the National Interests of Argentina and its neighbours, so as to recover sovereignty and self-determination for our peoples in a consistent and coherent manner, irrespective of what the world power players try to impose upon us?
But to do this we must first understand what globalization really is: an immensely large range of threats which we need to avoid, and opportunities which we should take advantage of. Regarding every subject having potential impact on us, we need to understand which are our relative strengths and weaknesses in order to be able to successfully confront them; if not today, then certainly in the future. That requires proper planning. Medium and long-term planning. That requires trying to always be one step ahead of the Adversary, achieving and keeping an edge and an advantage over coming events.
No doubt this will lead us to designing the right policies that are consistent with our National Interest, which in many instances will certainly not coincide with the interests of today's global power brokers. To this end, we need to seek and work closely with nations and organizations in Central and South America, Africa, Asia, and Europe, with which we share the common goal of neutralising the negative effects of global imperial domination. In truth, this all means that we need to found a New Argentina . We have many of the necessary tools already at hand; we have millions of countrymen ready to accept the challenge if we but explain to them clearly and forcefully the odds which are at stake; and there are millions of others beyond our borders with whom we can work arm-in-arm towards such a common Cause.
In short, it is really a question of understanding that in Politics there are two kinds of people: those who are active players in the political arena and those who merely and passively look on. The Council on Foreign Relations is clearly a key active player in the global political arenat. Isn't it time that we started doing the same in our own country?
Adrian Salbuchi is a researcher, author and speaker; host of the Buenos Aires talk-show “El Traductor Radial” and founder of the Argentine Second Republic Movement (Movimiento por la Segunda República Argentina) www.eltraductorradial.com.ar. He is author of “El Cerebro del Mundo: la cara oculta de la Globalización”, (“The World’s Mastermind: the Hidden Face of Globalization”) and “Bienvenidos a la Jungla: Dominio y Supervivencia en el Nuevo Orden Mundial”. Contact info. salbuchi@fibertel.com.ar www.eltraductorradial.com.ar www.m2ra.com
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