When Wall Street Plays God—Everybody Gets Hurt!

A commentary by Howard Davis [February 2008]
United Church of God elder, Portland, Oregon

The world we live in bows to the god of mammon. Pursuit of materialism and money has become the core value of most people the world over.

Obsession with material gain is the organizing motivator that drives the world’s economies. It is also one of the greatest sins of our time. And abundant sin begets abundant curses.

The idea that both God and mammon control the outcome of the world’s financial structures might at first sound confusing.

But it’s true!

God sets the rules for success or failure in every human activity. But the worship of mammon messes up humanity’s potential to enjoy the long term blessings and prosperity that come from applying the principles of God’s laws—such as “You shall not steal” and “You shall not covet …” (Exodus 20:15, 17).

That’s why the sub prime mortgage crisis and its potential to collapse U.S. housing values is a curse that just keeps on giving—exposing the symptoms of a deep, worldwide spiritual crisis. Wrong values and practices of finance infect every nook and cranny of the global economy.

Presently millions of Americans face the threat of being forced out of the homes they purchased under manipulated circumstances. You, your friends, relatives or coworkers may be hurt—perhaps very badly—before the effects of these irresponsible loans come to an end.

The price for playing God

God gives no one the right to rewrite the laws of basic prosperity. Anyone trying to change His rules is playing God—trying to usurp His authority.

Tragically, Wall Street’s barons of banking and investments have been playing God on a mind-boggling scale for the last five years. These few thousands of people control or influence how money flows throughout the world—deciding who gets it, who doesn’t and on what terms.

Bowing to the allure of mammon, many Wall Street bankers, underwriters and promoters—with unsuspecting cooperation from consumers—have for decades promoted the idea that easy credit is the foundation of prosperity.

It is not! That’s the big lie behind the economic crisis of today.

The foolish idea of replacing the ethics of hard work, savings, and sound investment as the foundation of prosperity was wrong. But more than wrong, it is evil to attempt to turn the endless debt extended to relatively poor people into endless supplies of gold for rich people.

Ill gotten gain

After 9-11, Wall Street handlers of trillions of dollars of assets manipulated the reigns of credit markets to lure millions of Americans to take on trillions in mortgage debt under the false promises of rising home values and easy repayment schemes. Investment bankers repackaged and sold these to greedy investors for high returns.

Thousands of executives rejoiced over the legal but outrageously unethical compensation for these massive transactions in fool’s gold. Wall Street investment bankers, traders, specialists, and analysts and their management executives took home over $25 billion Christmas bonuses in 2006 alone.

What was new was the gigantic scale of this foolishness. Banks, investors, and insurance companies, on the grandest scale the world over, bought the notion that Wall Street could change reality itself—and rewrite the biblical principles behind prosperity or depression. Even watchdog agencies that rate debt were obscenely compromised while U.S. political leaders turned a blind eye or bought into the scheme.

The destruction of assets and wealth—millions in mortgages and other financial instruments—is wreaking havoc in the world’s credit and finance structure. Credit markets are in serious recession all over the world. It is threatening meltdown within weeks.

Already U.S. stock markets have erased $3 trillion in equity value. As of February 2008 there’s a $2 trillion loss in home property values, with as much as $5 trillion more to come.

By one measure of averaging, that would equal approximately $60,000 in asset value for each family of 4 in the United States that has been lost already. The possibility of this loss tripling within three years has been suggested by economists from both Goldman Saks and Yale University.

If you are among the majority of Americans who own their own homes, you have experienced a loss of thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of dollars in the value of your house. Some feel they have been robbed. Indeed, you may be among them.

Jesus said, “You cannot serve God and mammon” (Luke 16:13). Eventually, serving mammon brings ruin to those ensnared by its temptations, which proves yet again that when men in power in this world play God everybody gets hurt.

Tax Dollars funding a pathetic ethnic group that murders in the name of God and most of them do not have an iota of desire to ever cherish and embrace life … life is just a fleeting moment for them while it last before they annihilate themselves. They are a sad, miserable, pitiful and unproductive sect of people, life seems invaluable in their eyes. So, if from birth itself, all they ever want is death; what’s the purpose of being born at all??? Gaza was flourishing under the care of Israel but under forced hands and pressure to “give it back” to the Palestinians; it has regrettably and unfortunately become a Wasteland and a base for Terrorists.

Your Tax Dollars at Work in Gaza
By Jonathan Tobin at http://www.JewishWorlReview.com

The confusing and complex campaign for aid to a pro-terror Palestinian Authority

Last week, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported that American officials are again pressing Congress to open up the U.S. aid pipeline to the Palestinian Authority.

If the plea sounds familiar, it ought to. Since the 1993 Oslo Accords, Americans have been subsidizing the activities of the P.A. to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars per year.

Today, as in the past, the arguments in favor of this policy are urgent. We are told by both administration officials who are friends of Israel and by some Israelis that unless we help fund the training and the payment of Palestinian security forces, the P.A. will have no way to cope with terrorists who want to sink any chance of a two-state solution which would enable Israel to live side-by-side with a peaceful Palestinian partner.

THE ONLY OPTION?
With Hamas in control of Gaza, the P.A., under the current leadership of Mahmoud Abbas, is, we are informed, the only address for creating a moderate force that will work for peace. Given the alternative of the Iranian-backed Hamas or the equally unpalatable choices of either Israel reoccupying the territories or an international peacekeeping force doing so, reinforcing the P.A. seems to make sense.

But does it really?

Doubts about the wisdom of the policy have led Rep. Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.) and Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-N.Y.) — respectively, the chair and the ranking minority member of the House Foreign Operations Subcommittee — to place a hold on a request of another $150 million in direct assistance to the P.A. Thwarted on that front, the administration now wants the committee to okay an additional $25 million in indirect funding for the military training program.

Both Lowey and Ros-Lehtinen rightly worry about the commitment of Abbas and his Fatah Party to peace. They cite recent statements by Abbas in which he would not rule out a return to “armed resistance” against Israel. The support by the P.A. media for attacks against Israelis, such as the slaughter of eight students at a Jerusalem yeshiva this month, as well as the ongoing blitz of southern Israel by Hamas missiles, is also reason to doubt the P.A.’s sincerity.

The P.A. also continues to honor the memory of slain terrorists as “martyrs” and, as The Jerusalem Post reported this week, plans to celebrate Israel’s 60th birthday by having Arab refugees to rush Israel’s borders to promote a “right of return,” which is synonymous with the destruction of the Jewish State.

Supporters of aid respond that these statements do not reflect Abbas’ real goals. Yet, they ignore the fact that what the P.A. has done for the past 15 years is to legitimize a Palestinian culture in which political plaudits are won only by killing Jews. Indeed, via its control of broadcast outlets, newspapers and the schools, the P.A. has solidified a mindset of hate.

Just as bad is the history of attempts to create a P.A. security force. The Oslo agreements called for the creation of a Palestinian police force that would combat terrorists. But Arafat had other ideas.

While most of the billions that came his way via aid from the European Union and the United States went into the pockets or Swiss bank accounts of Fatah officials, some of it was used to create a byzantine web of Palestinian “security” agencies whose purposes were anything but peaceful. When push came to shove as Arafat blew up the peace after the Camp David summit in 2000, it was these P.A. forces (including some who’d been trained by the Philadelphia Police Department) who committed terrorist acts against Israelis.

Adding to that sorry tale was the fiasco in Gaza in 2006 when Fatah thugs, aided and equipped by foreign sources at the specific instigation of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, sought to maintain Abbas’ control of the area, even after the Hamas election victory.

As detailed in an investigative report published in the April issue of Vanity Fair magazine, the concerns voiced by some Israelis and skeptical members of Congress over that particular venture in bolstering Abbas were prophetic.

While Fatah goons tortured and kidnapped some of their rivals, neither they nor their leader Abbas had the stomach to face down Hamas, despite promises to do so. In the end, Abbas’ men wouldn’t fight, and the more popular Hamas seized control of Gaza. As David Rose writes in Vanity Fair, “The exact thing both Israel and the U.S. Congress warned against came to pass when Hamas captured most of Fatah’s arms and ammunition — including the Egyptian guns supplied under the covert U.S.-Arab aid program.”

For 15 years, critics of such expenditures have been labeled as “anti-peace,” but that tag just served as an excuse for whitewashes of misbehavior by first Arafat and now Abbas.

An anonymous U.S. official told JTA that the 1,100 P.A. gunmen currently in Jordan, at American expense as well as with Israeli permission, are being schooled in such things as “training in riot control, human rights, and effective arrests and defensive shooting.” But so were their predecessors. Left unanswered in this account is why reasonable people should think this group will behave any differently.

PAINTED INTO A CORNER
The alternatives to Abbas are frightful. He is both weak and probably not much less ill-intentioned than Hamas, but he and his loyalists are seen as a counterforce to Iran’s allies.

Should American supporters of Israel therefore feel obligated to support the continued flow of funds to P.A. sources?

The problem is, the peace processors have painted themselves into a corner. Having coronated first Arafat and now Abbas, they are forced to ignore or suppress the truth about them in order to maintain American support for a two-state solution.

At the same time, Israel’s government takes the position that it needs a Palestinian partner who at least pays lip service to peace, as Abbas does. And no one here wants to do anything that would help create a greater “Hamasistan.”

Yet experience shows that the realpolitik strategy of propping up Fatah has not undermined Hamas, nor promoted peace. Perhaps the beginning of wisdom is the recognition that it’s time to stop reinforcing failure.

America’s attempts to create a Palestinian peace partner have failed. No amount of money will buy us a moderate state that will accept peace with Israel if the Palestinians don’t want one. If the president and the secretary of state aren’t honest enough to admit this, then perhaps it’s appropriate to ask Congress to turn off the spigot that sends more of our tax dollars down a Palestinian drain.

A very interesting piece of article from FrontPageMagazine.com

The long-suffering Tibetans have been in the news. This happens perhaps once or twice a decade. In a more moral world, however, public opinion would be far more preoccupied with Tibetans than with Palestinians, would be as harsh on China as it is on Israel, and would be as fawning on Israel as it now is on China.

But, alas, the world is, as it has always been, a largely mean-spirited and morally insensitive place, where might is far more highly regarded than right.

Consider the facts: Tibet, at least 1,400 years old, is one of the world’s oldest nations, has its own language, its own religion and even its own ethnicity. Over 1 million of its people have been killed by the Chinese, its culture has been systematically obliterated, 6,000 of its 6,200 monasteries have been looted and destroyed, and most of its monks have been tortured, murdered or exiled.

Palestinians have none of these characteristics. There has never been a Palestinian country, never been a Palestinian language, never been a Palestinian ethnicity, never been a Palestinian religion in any way distinct from Islam elsewhere. Indeed, “Palestinian” had always meant any individual living in the geographic area called Palestine. For most of the first half of the 20th century, “Palestinian” and “Palestine” almost always referred to the Jews of Palestine. The United Jewish Appeal, the worldwide Jewish charity that provided the nascent Jewish state with much of its money, was actually known as the United Palestine Appeal. Compared to Tibetans, few Palestinians have been killed, its culture has not been destroyed nor its mosques looted or plundered, and Palestinians have received billions of dollars from the international community. Unlike the dying Tibetan nation, there are far more Palestinians today than when Israel was created.

None of this means that a distinct Palestinian national identity does not now exist. Since Israel’s creation such an identity has arisen and does indeed exist. Nor does any of this deny that many Palestinians suffered as a result of the creation of the third Jewish state in the area, known — since the Romans renamed Judea — as “Palestine.”

But it does mean that of all the causes the world could have adopted, the Palestinians’ deserved to be near the bottom and the Tibetans’ near the top. This is especially so since the Palestinians could have had a state of their own from 1947 on, and they have caused great suffering in the world, while the far more persecuted Tibetans have been characterized by a morally rigorous doctrine of nonviolence.

So, the question is, why? Why have the Palestinians received such undeserved attention and support, and the far more aggrieved and persecuted and moral Tibetans given virtually no support or attention?

The first reason is terror. Some time ago, the Palestinian leadership decided, with the overwhelming support of the Palestinian people, that murdering as many innocent people — first Jews, and then anyone else — was the fastest way to garner world attention. They were right. On the other hand, as The Economist notes in its March 28, 2008 issue, “Tibetan nationalists have hardly ever resorted to terrorist tactics…” It is interesting to speculate how the world would have reacted had Tibetans hijacked international flights, slaughtered Chinese citizens in Chinese restaurants and temples, on Chinese buses and trains, and massacred Chinese schoolchildren.

The second reason is oil and support from powerful fellow Arabs. The Palestinians have rich friends who control the world’s most needed commodity, oil. The Palestinians have the unqualified support of all Middle Eastern oil-producing nations and the support of the Muslim world beyond the Middle East. The Tibetans are poor and have the support of no nations, let alone oil-producing ones.

The third reason is Israel. To deny that pro-Palestinian activism in the world is sometimes related to hostility toward Jews is to deny the obvious. It is not possible that the unearned preoccupation with the Palestinians is unrelated to the fact that their enemy is the one Jewish state in the world. Israel’s Jewishness is a major part of the Muslim world’s hatred of Israel. It is also part of Europe’s hostility toward Israel: Portraying Israel as oppressors assuages some of Europe’s guilt about the Holocaust — “see, the Jews act no better than we did.” Hence the ubiquitous comparisons of Israel to Nazis.

A fourth reason is China. If Tibet had been crushed by a white European nation, the Tibetans would have elicited far more sympathy. But, alas, their near-genocidal oppressor is not white. And the world does not take mass murder committed by non-whites nearly as seriously as it takes anything done by Westerners against non-Westerners. Furthermore, China is far more powerful and frightening than Israel. Israel has a great army and nuclear weapons, but it is pro-West, it is a free and democratic society, and it has seven million people in a piece of land as small as Belize. China has nuclear weapons, has a trillion U.S. dollars, an increasingly mighty army and navy, is neither free nor democratic, is anti-Western, and has 1.2 billion people in a country that dominates the Asian continent.

A fifth reason is the world’s Left. As a general rule, the Left demonizes Israel and has loved China since it became Communist in 1948. And given the power of the Left in the world’s media, in the political life of so many nations, and in the universities and the arts, it is no wonder vicious China has been idolized and humane Israel demonized.

The sixth reason is the United Nations, where Israel has been condemned in more General Assembly and Security Council resolutions than any other country in the world. At the same time, the UN has voted China onto its Security Council and has never condemned it. China’s sponsoring of Sudan and its genocidal acts against its non-Arab black population, as in Darfur, goes largely unremarked on at the UN, let alone condemned, just as is the case with its cultural genocide, ethnic cleansing and military occupation of Tibet.

The seventh reason is television news, the primary source of news for much of mankind. Aside from its leftist tilt, television news reports only what it can video. And almost no country is televised as much as Israel, while video reports in Tibet are forbidden, as they are almost anywhere in China except where strictly monitored by the Chinese authorities. No video, no TV news. And no TV, no concern. So while grieving Palestinians and the accidental killings of Palestinians during morally necessary Israeli retaliations against terrorists are routinely televised, the slaughter of over a million Tibetans and the extinguishing of Tibetan Buddhism and culture are non-events as far as television news is concerned.

The world is unfair, unjust and morally twisted. And rarely more so than in its support for the Palestinians — no matter how many innocents they target for murder and no matter how much Nazi-like anti-Semitism permeates their media — and its neglect of the cruelly treated, humane Tibetans.