Inequality on the Impact of Climate Change

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Everywhere we turn, the issues and impacts of climate change confront us. One of the most serious environmental threats facing the world today, climate change has moved from the minds of scientists and offices of environmentalists to the mainstream. Though the media is dominated by images of polar bears, melting glaciers, flooded lands, and arid desserts, there is a human face to this story as well. Climate change is not only an issue of the environment; it is also an issue of justice and human rights, one that intersects race and class. All over the world people of color, Indigenous Peoples and low-income communities bear disproportionate burdens from climate change itself, from ill-designed policies to prevent it, and from side effects of the energy systems that cause it.

According to many studies conducted by different environmental organizations around the world, there is a fairly direct relationship between income level of various classes of people and the amount of harmful carbon emissions they produced. The higher the income of a family, the more likely it is to produce a significant amount of carbon gasses. And since poorer classes of people are disproportionately concentrated at the lower end of the socio-economic scale, on the average they are producing less of the harmful carbon emissions.

In the global scale, a major roadblock to establishing international standards is the fact that world leaders don’t yet have a clear answer to the question of fairness, that is, the question of “how much should participating countries ask of developing countries as they attempt to deal with global warming?” The simple fact on the global stage is simply that developing countries, regardless of their level of development, are considerably less responsible for the volume of harmful carbon emissions than the large industrialized nations.

If developed industrialized countries are disproportionately responsible for the level of harmful carbon emissions, is it fair to ask poor developing countries, and those disenfranchised minorities around the world to curb their activity on a level similar to rich developed countries?

The poor, you always have with you... [Mrk14:7]

View this movie at cultureunplugged.com

World Hunger and Poverty
by Anup Shah
Global Issues

We often hear about people’s desire to solve world hunger, or to be able to feed the world and help alleviate the suffering associated with it.

However, meaningful long-term alleviation to hunger is rooted in the alleviation of poverty, as poverty leads to hunger. World hunger is a terrible symptom of world poverty. If efforts are only directed at providing food, or improving food production or distribution, then the structural root causes that create hunger, poverty and dependency would still remain. And so while continuous effort, resources and energies are deployed to relieve hunger through these technical measures, the political causes require political solutions as well.

Solving World Hunger Means Solving World Poverty

A common, often altruistic, theme amongst many is to be able to solve world hunger via some method that may produce more food. However, often missed is the relationship between poverty and hunger. Hunger is an effect of poverty and poverty is largely a political issue. (While manifesting itself as an economic issue, conditions causing poverty are political and end up being economic.)

As shown in the Genetically Engineered Food and Human Population sections on this web site, people are hungry not due to lack of availability of food, but because people do not have the ability to purchase food and because distribution of food is not equitable. In addition, there is also a lot of politics influencing how food is produced, who it is produced by (and who benefits), and for what purposes the food is produced (such as exporting rather than for the hungry, feedstuff, etc.)

"Access to food and other resources is not a matter of availability, but rather of ability to pay. Put bluntly, those with the most money command the most resources, whilst those with little or no money go hungry. This inevitably leads to a situation whereby some sections of humanity arguably have too much and other sections little or nothing. Indeed, globally the richest 20 per cent of humanity controls around 85 per cent of all wealth, whilst the poorest 20 per cent control only 1.5 per cent." -- Ross Copeland, The Politics of Hunger, September 2000

Peter Rosset, co-director of the Institute for Food and Development Policy, quoted at the top of this page, highlights some of the wider issues around hunger. He argues that it is not just a challenge of producing more and more food, but there are many political and economic issues underscoring the problems:

"Research carried out by our Institute reveals that since 1996, governments have presided over a set of policies that have conspired to undercut peasant, small and family farmers, and farm cooperatives in nations both North and South. These policies have included runaway trade liberalization, pitting family farmers in the Third World against the subsidized corporate farms in the North (witness the recent U.S. Farm Bill), forcing Third World countries to eliminate price supports and subsidies for food producers, the privatization of credit, the excessive promotion of exports to the detriment of food crops, the patenting of crop genetic resources by corporations who charge farmers for their use, and a bias in agricultural research toward expensive and questionable technologies like genetic engineering while virtually ignoring pro-poor alternatives like organic farming and agroecology." -- Peter Rosset, The World Food Summit: What Went Wrong?, June 4, 2002

Click here to read full text.

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And when you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not wholly reap the corners of your field, neither shall you gather the gleanings of your harvest. And you shall not glean your vineyard, neither shall you gather the fallen fruits of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and for the sojourner: I am the Lord your God. (Leviticus 19:9-10)

There are those who scatter, and yet increase even more. There are those who withhold more than is appropriate, but gain poverty. The liberal soul shall be made fat. He who waters shall be watered also himself. People curse those who withhold grain, but blessing will be on the head of them who release it. (Proverbs 11:24-26)

Attitude check: Unless affected, why bother?

What about the Filipinos? Piracy focus seen as hypocritical
By Daniel Wallis
Reuters UK

MOMBASA, Kenya (Reuters) - The international community is showing hypocrisy by suddenly focussing on Somali piracy because of the capture of one American, a regional maritime group said on Saturday.

Sea gangs from the lawless Horn of Africa nation grabbed world headlines this week when they briefly hijacked the U.S. freighter Maersk Alabama. Its 20 crew retook control, but the gunmen took captain Richard Phillips hostage on a lifeboat.

The global media has tracked in great detail each twist and turn of the drama as it unfolds, including a failed attempt to swim to safety by the former Boston taxi driver.

But Andrew Mwangura of the East African Seafarers' Assistance Programme said it was a pity similar attention was not paid to the nearly 250 other hostages -- all from poorer nations -- currently being held by other Somali pirates.

The biggest nationality represented, at 92, is Filipino.

"The media and the international community at large is just demonstrating its hypocrisy," he said in the Kenyan port of Mombasa, where the 17,000-tonne Alabama was due on Saturday.

"Journalists have flooded here from all over the world because of one American captain. What about all the others, from Bangladesh, from Pakistan, from the Philippines, some of whom have been held now for months?" [...]

Click here to read full text.

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Postscript from my old post on 10/20/2008.

"When the rich are significantly affected, the world begins to panic. But when the poor are dying, the world pretends to be as is."

"Most of the world won't change until they themselves would experience for a considerable period of time a significant proportion of what the rest of the world are fully experiencing for a lifetime."

See also my old post on 9/30/2008 concerning this piracy.

The Global Collapse: A Non-orthodox View

By Walden Bello
Afterthoughts - Philippine Daily Inquirer

This is the longer version of an essay by the author released by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) on Feb. 6, 2009.

Week after week, we see the global economy contracting at a pace worse than predicted by the gloomiest analysts. We are now, it is clear, in no ordinary recession but are headed for a global depression that could last for many years.

The fundamental crisis: Overaccumulation

Orthodox economics has long ceased to be of any help in understanding the crisis. Non-orthodox economics, on the other hand, provides extraordinarily powerful insights into the causes and dynamics of the current crisis. From the progressive perspective, what we are seeing is the intensification of one of the central crises or “contradictions” of global capitalism: the crisis of overproduction, also known as overaccumulation or overcapacity. This is the tendency for capitalism to build up, in the context of heightened inter-capitalist competition, tremendous productive capacity that outruns the population’s capacity to consume owing to income inequalities that limit popular purchasing power. The result is an erosion of profitability, leading to an economic downspin.

To understand the current collapse, we must go back in time to the so-called Golden Age of Contemporary Capitalism, the period from 1945 to 1975. This was a period of rapid growth both in the center economies and in the underdeveloped economies — one that was partly triggered by the massive reconstruction of Europe and East Asia after the devastation of the Second World War, and partly by the new socioeconomic arrangements and instruments based on a historic class compromise between Capital and Labor that were institutionalized under the new Keynesian state

But this period of high growth came to an end in the mid-1970s, when the center economies were seized by stagflation, meaning the coexistence of low growth with high inflation, which was not supposed to happen under neoclassical economics.

Stagflation, however, was but a symptom of a deeper cause: the reconstruction of Germany and Japan and the rapid growth of industrializing economies like Brazil, Taiwan, and South Korea added tremendous new productive capacity and increased global competition, while income inequality within countries and between countries limited the growth of purchasing power and demand, thus eroding profitability. This was aggravated by the massive oil price rises of the seventies.

The most painful expression of the crisis of overproduction was global recession of the early 1980s, which was the most serious to overtake the international economy since the Great Depression, that is, before the current crisis.

Capitalism tried three escape routes from the conundrum of overproduction: neoliberal restructuring, globalization, and financialization.

Escape Route # 1: Neoliberal Restructuring

Neoliberal restructuring took the form of Reaganism and Thatcherism in the North and Structural Adjustment in the South. The aim was to invigorate capital accumulation, and this was to be done by 1) removing state constraints on the growth, use, and flow of capital and wealth; and 2) redistributing income from the poor and middle classes to the rich on the theory that the rich would then be motivated to invest and reignite economic growth.

The problem with this formula was that in redistributing income to the rich, you were gutting the incomes of the poor and middle classes, thus restricting demand, while not necessarily inducing the rich to invest more in production. In fact, it could be more profitable to invest in speculation.

In fact, neoliberal restructuring, which was generalized in the North and south during the eighties and nineties, had a poor record in terms of growth: Global growth averaged 1.1 percent in the 1990s and 1.4 percent in the ‘80s, compared with 3.5 percent in the 1960s and 2.4 percent in the ‘70s, when state interventionist policies were dominant. Neoliberal restructuring could not shake off stagnation.

Escape Route # 2: Globalization

The second escape route global capital took to counter stagnation was “extensive accumulation” or globalization, or the rapid integration of semi-capitalist, non-capitalist, or pre-capitalist areas into the global market economy. Rosa Luxemburg, the famous German radical economist, saw this long ago in her classic “The Accumulation of Capital” as necessary to shore up the rate of profit in the metropolitan economies.

How? By gaining access to cheap labor, by gaining new, albeit limited, markets, by gaining new sources of cheap agricultural and raw material products, and by bringing into being new areas for investment in infrastructure. Integration is accomplished via trade liberalization, removing barriers to the mobility of global capital, and abolishing barriers to foreign investment.

China is, of course, the most prominent case of a non-capitalist area to be integrated into the global capitalist economy over the last 25 years.

By the middle of the first decade of the 21st century, roughly 40-50 percent of the profits of US corporations came from their operations and sales abroad, especially in China.

The problem with this escape route from stagnation is that it exacerbates the problem of overproduction because it adds to productive capacity. A tremendous amount of manufacturing capacity has been added in China over the last 25 years, and this has had a depressing effect on prices and profits. Not surprisingly, by around 1997, the profits of US corporations stopped growing. According to one calculation, the profit rate of the Fortune 500 went from 7.15 in 1960-69 to 5.30 in 1980-90 to 2.29 in 1990-99 to 1.32 in 2000-2002. By the end of the 1990s, with excess capacity in almost every industry, the gap between productive capacity and sales was the largest since the Great Depression.

Escape Route # 3: Financialization

Given the limited gains in countering the depressive impact of overproduction via neoliberal restructuring and globalization, the third escape route — financialization — became very critical for maintaining and raising profitability.

With investment in industry and agriculture yielding low profits owing to overcapacity, large amounts of surplus funds have been circulating in or invested and reinvested in the financial sector — that is, the financial sector is turning on itself.

The result is an increased bifurcation between a hyperactive financial economy and a stagnant real economy. As one financial executive noted in the pages of the Financial Times, “there has been an increasing disconnect between the real and financial economies in the last few years. The real economy has grown … but nothing like that of the financial economy — until it imploded.” What this observer does not tell us is that the disconnect between the real and the financial economy is not accidental — that the financial economy exploded precisely to make up for the stagnation owing to overproduction of the real economy

One indicator of the super-profitability of the financial sector is that while profits in the US manufacturing sector came to one percent of US gross domestic product (GDP), profits in the financial sector came to two percent. Another is the fact that 40 percent of the total profits of US financial and non-financial corporations is accounted for by the financial sector although it is responsible for only fiv percent of US gross domestic product (and even that is likely to be an overestimate).

The problem with investing in financial sector operations is that it is tantamount to squeezing value out of already created value. It may create profit, yes, but it does not create new value — only industry, agricultural, trade, and services create new value. Because profit is not based on value that is created, investment operations become very volatile and prices of stocks, bonds, and other forms of investment can depart very radically from their real value — for instance, the stock of Internet startups may keep rising to heights unknown, driven mainly by upwardly spiraling financial valuations.

Profits then depend on taking advantage of upward price departures from the value of commodities, then selling before reality enforces a “correction,” that is a crash back to real values. The radical rise of prices of an asset far beyond real values is what is called the formation of a bubble.

Profitability being dependent on speculative coups, it is not surprising that the finance sector lurches from one bubble to another, or from one speculative mania to another.
Because it is driven by speculative mania, finance driven capitalism has experienced about 100 financial crises since capital markets were deregulated and liberalized in the 1980s, the most serious before the current crisis being the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997.

Dynamics of the Subprime Implosion

The current Wall Street collapse has its roots in the Technology Bubble of the late 1990s, when the price of the stocks of Internet startups skyrocketed, then collapsed, resulting in the loss of $7 trillion worth of assets and the recession of 2001-2002.

The loose money policies of the Fed under Alan Greenspan had encouraged the Technology Bubble, and when it collapsed into a recession, Greenspan, trying to counter a long recession, cut the prime rate to a 45-year low of 1.0 percent in June 2003 and kept it there for over a year. This had the effect of encouraging another bubble — the real estate bubble.

As early as 2002, progressive economists were warning about the real estate bubble. However, as late as 2005, then Council of Economic Advisers Chairman and now Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke attributed the rise in US housing prices to “strong economic fundamentals” instead of speculative activity. Is it any wonder that he was caught completely off guard when the Subprime Crisis broke in the summer of 2007?

The subprime mortgage crisis was not a case of supply outrunning real demand. The “demand” was largely fabricated by speculative mania on the part of developers and financiers that wanted to make great profits from their access to foreign money — most of it Asian and Chinese in origin — that flooded the US in the last decade. Big ticket mortgages were aggressively sold to millions who could not normally afford them by offering low “teaser” interest rates that would later be readjusted to jack up payments from the new homeowners.

How did problematic mortgages become such a massive problem? The reason is that these assets were then “securitized” — that is converted into spectral commodities called “collateralized debt obligations” (CDOs) that enabled speculation on the odds that the mortgage would not be paid. These were then traded by the mortgage originators working with different layers of middlemen who understated risk so as to offload them as quickly as possible to other banks and institutional investors. These institutions in turn offloaded these securities onto other banks and foreign financial institutions.

The idea was to make a sale quickly, get your money upfront and make a tidy profit, while foisting the risk on the suckers down the line — the hundreds of thousands of institutions and individual investors that bought the mortgage-tied securities. This was called “spreading the risk,” and it was actually seen as a good thing because it lightened the balance sheet of financial institutions, enabling them to engage in other lending activities.

When the interest rates were raised on the subprime loans, adjustable mortgage, and other housing loans, the game was up. There are about four million subprime mortgages which will likely go into default in the next two years, and five million more defaults from adjustable rate mortgages and other “flexible loans” that were geared to snag the most reluctant potential homebuyer will occur over the next several years. But securities whose value run into as much as$2 trillion had already been injected, like virus, into the global financial system. Global capitalism’s gigantic circulatory system was fatally infected. And, as with a plague, we don’t know who and how many are fatally infected until they keel over because the whole financial system has become so non-transparent owing to lack of regulation.

For Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Bear Stearns, Bank of America, and Citigroup, the losses represented by these toxic securities simply overwhelmed their reserves. Iceland’s banks and many European financial institutions have since joined the list of victims. Some, like Lehman Brothers, have been allowed to die, but most have been kept alive with massive injections of taxpayers’ cash by governments that want the banks to lend to keep the real economy going.

Collapse of the Real Economy

But instead of performing their primordial task of lending to facilitate productive activity, the banks are holding on to their cash or buying up rivals to strengthen their financial base. Not surprisingly, with global capitalism’s circulatory system seizing up, it was only a matter of time before the real economy would contract, as it has with frightening speed in the last few weeks. Woolworth, a retail icon, has folded in Britain, the US auto industry is on emergency care, and even mighty Toyota has suffered an unprecedented decline in its profits. With American consumer demand plummeting, China and East Asia have seen their goods rotting on the docks, bringing about a sharp contraction of their economies and massive layoffs.

Globalization has ensured that economies that went up together in the boom would also go down together, with unparalleled speed, in the bust, the end of which is nowhere to be discerned.

* * *
Walden Bello is professor at the University of the Philippines, Diliman; senior analyst at Focus on the Global South; and president of the Freedom from Debt Coalition. He can be reached at waldenbello@yahoo.com.

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Postscript from my old post on 10/20/2008.

[...] So much wealth can not just be concentrated in an already rich place and not cause a treasure overload that leads to a breakdown. The day will come when economic geniuses will fully understand the cycle of all the water systems of the earth. Waste dry lands don't merely occur by themselves -- they were once upon a time green, forested, and naturally watered.

Postscript from my old post on 10/09/2008.

[...] Developing economies (like our Philippine economy) are somewhere near the lower portion of the world economic structure. The scenario can be likened to an iceberg. The upper portion of the iceberg are the world's major economies, the lower portion that is submerged comprises the minor economies. When the globe warms up some degrees higher than normal, the top portion of the iceberg melts first because they are most exposed to the warming surface of the ocean. At preliminary stage, the melting process starts slow and almost undetected. It continues for some length of time until the process is recognizable. As the melting process progresses to the secondary stage, there is a point where it suddenly accelerates. The iceberg divides into multiple smaller sizes then later on, at the final stage, breaks down into even smaller chunks and dissolves within a short period of time.

Will this current "meltdown" continue all the way to the final stage, or will it stop at some point ahead? It will only stop when its purposes are completed. [...]

"Do Not Cast Me Off in the Time of Old Age"

By Albert Mohler
Crosswalk.com

"Do not cast me off in the time of old age; do not forsake me when my strength fails." This is the prayer of the Psalmist in Psalm 71:9. Like so many before and after him, the Psalmist fears being forsaken when he is old. In our own times, this concern takes on an entirely new magnitude, as the ranks of the elderly and aged grow at an unprecedented rate.

This is the concern raised by Eric Cohen and Leon R. Kass in their essay, "Cast Me Not Off in Old Age," published in the January 2006 edition of Commentary. Cohen, director of the program in biotechnology and American democracy at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and Kass, the former chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics, have combined to write a most compelling essay on the challenge represented by millions of the aged among us. [...]

Cohen and Kass see a coming "perfect social storm" represented by a fast-growing proportion of the elderly and a shrinking number of younger adults who will be able to care for family members, loved ones, and others. Americans are living longer, but the process of death now often involves an extended period of enfeeblement and, in all too many cases, dementia. The authors cite a recent Rand study that indicated that approximately forty percent of current deaths in the United States are now preceded by a period of physical, and often mental, debility that may last as long as a decade. Of course, this may include the onset of Alzheimer's disease. At present, an estimated four million Americans suffer from Alzheimer's. Cohen and Kass report that the number is expected to rise to over thirteen million by the middle of this century, "all of them requiring many years of extensive, expensive, and exhausting full-time care."

One of the benefits of the analysis offered by Cohen and Kass is the focus on how the rise of a "mass geriatric society" is complicated by the decline of the natural family. Put bluntly, Cohen and Kass recognize that "precisely as the need is rising, the pool of available family caregivers is dwindling. Families are smaller, less stable, and more geographically spread out." Beyond this, most women are now employed outside the home, and there are already shortages of trained medical personnel available to tend to those who can't afford such assistance.

Thus, an explosion in the number of older Americans needing assistance and care comes at the very moment that finds the family weakened by ideological, cultural, economic, and social forces. The problems of old age are now routinely assigned to institutions, nursing homes, hospitals, and other settings – a far cry from when most Americans aged and died at home surrounded and aided by family members. [...]

Click here to read full text.

Click here to read Part 2.

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Forsake not the needy and the elderly; for you know not the pleadings of their heart they lifted up to the Lord.

In The Glen Of Elucidation

Senators reach deal to cut stimulus bill to $780B
Source: Yahoo News

With job losses soaring nationwide, Senate Democrats reached agreement with key Republicans Friday night on an economic stimulus measure at the heart of President Barack Obama's plan for reviving the economy.

"The American people want us to work together. They don't want to see us dividing along partisan lines on the most serious crisis confronting our country," said Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, one of two GOP senators who signaled support for the bill.

Officials put the cost of the measure at $780 billion in tax cuts and new spending combined. No details were immediately available, and there appeared to be some confusion among senators about the price tag.

The agreement capped a tense day of backroom negotiations in which Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, joined by White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, sought to attract the support of enough Republicans to give the measure the needed 60-vote majority.

In addition to Collins, Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., said he would vote for the bill.

Officials said Sen. Edward M. Kennedy's vote would probably be needed for passage, too. The Massachusetts Democrat, battling a brain tumor, has been in Florida in recent days and has not been in the Capitol since suffering a seizure on Inauguration Day more than two weeks ago. The senator's office did not comment.

At $780 billion, the legislation would be smaller than the measure that cleared the House on a party-line vote last week. It also would mean a sharp cut from the bill that has been the subject of Senate debate for a week. That measure stood at $937 billion.

Beyond the numbers, though, any agreement would mark a victory for the new president and would keep Democratic leaders on track to fulfill their promise of delivering him a bill to sign by the end of next week.

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When the time comes, multitudes will gather attracted by something -- like night insects attracted to the light of a lamp. Wherever the object of their attraction has presence, there also will many of them be drawn. Their appearing out will signify the coming of another season.

On that day, many will gather in the glen of elucidation. Libation will flow from mountains, hills will secrete a kind of nourishment, and a spring will flow to water the land of acacias.

See full message.

Exposing the Religion of Scientism

By Chuck Colson
Crosswalk.com

In his inaugural address, President Obama said he would “restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology’s wonders to raise health care’s quality.” By this, many suspect he means to spend taxpayer money on embryonic stem cell research, which destroys humans at the embryonic stage.

Evidently, President Obama has been listening to those who want research funded, some because they are driven by greed but many others driven by a dangerous worldview called scientism.

As Nancy Pearcey and I write in our book, How Now Shall We Live?, scientism has its roots in Darwinism. Tufts University professor Daniel Dennett writes that Darwinism, rightly understood, is a “universal acid” that dissolves away all traditional moral, metaphysical, and religious beliefs. For if humans have evolved by a material, purposeless process, then there is no basis for believing in a God who created us and revealed moral truths, or imposing those moral views in any area of life.

Dennett is using a common tactic—using science as a weapon to shoot down religious faith. The standard assumption is that science is objective knowledge, while religion is an expression of subjective need. Religion, therefore, must subordinate its claims about the world to whatever science decrees.

Scientism assumes that science is the controlling reality about life, so anything that can be validated scientifically ought to be done. Other things are subjective fantasy—like love, beauty, good, evil, conscience, ethics.

So science, which originally simply meant the study of the natural world, has in this view been conflated with scientific naturalism, a philosophy that the natural world is all that exists.

Humans are reduced to “objects” that can be inspected, experimented on, and ultimately controlled. In 1922, G.K. Chesterton warned that scientism had become a “creed” taking over our institutions, a “system of thought which began with Evolution and has ended in Eugenics.”

C.S. Lewis warned that the rise of scientific naturalism would lead to “the abolition of man,” for it denies the reality of those things central to our humanity: a sense of right and wrong, of purpose, of beauty, of God.

And if we deny the things that make us truly human, by definition we create a culture that is inhuman—a culture that, for example, embraces moral horrors like the killing of humans at the earliest stage of life on the spurious grounds that doing so might cure other people’s diseases. Or cloning. Or medical experiments on humans, as the Nazis conducted.

Our task is to expose the flaws in scientific naturalism—not because we are against science but because we want it to fill its proper role as a means of investigating God’s world and alleviating suffering within ethical boundaries.

And it’s right that we should be doing this because it was a Christian view of reality that led to the scientific method, investigating all the things God has created.

I hope that the President, in using those words, understood the difference between good science and scientism.

From Hero to Human: The Man in the Oval Office

By Ken Connor
Crosswalk.com

"I urge, then, first of all, that requests, prayers, intercession and thanksgiving be made for everyone—for kings and all those in authority, that we may live peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and holiness." (1 Timothy 2:1-2 NIV)

It's official. Barack Obama is the new President of the United States. All of the excitement, angst, and exhaustion of the presidential race is behind us, and we are on the threshold of four years under a new national leader.

Mr. Obama's inauguration was a momentous occasion. As our first African-American President, his election serves as a great encouragement that our country is moving towards a more complete embrace of one of its great founding principles: the equality of all men. As President of our country, Mr. Obama deserves our respect and needs our prayers. But some, in their excitement over the historic nature of his election, appear to offer him their adulation. We would all do well to realize, however, that he is just a man—fallible and flawed like other human beings. President Obama will inevitably stumble, he will not live up to all of his promises, and he will not be able to solve every national crisis. In the midst of the Inauguration hoopla, let us pause to recognize the limitations of his humanity and his post.

In reality, no one man can save a nation. A number of voters who placed such great hopes in an Obama Presidency have already been disappointed—and he has only just taken office. His decisions during the Presidential transition period raised many questions and much commentary, but one thing is clear: even before he took office, people's illusions about Obama were fading. He left many of his most fervent supporters wondering why he appeared to be waffling on his campaign promises.

Realism is the grease of the gears of politics, so it should not surprise us that President Obama has already been qualifying his previous campaign promises and dampening the hopes of his supporters. Regardless of their political stripe, no politician ever fulfills every campaign promise. The wheels of Washington grind much too fine for that. Those who put their dreams in the hands of politicians inevitably will be disappointed.

We would do well to remember that President Obama is merely a civil servant. He operates in the political realm. Having just taken office, he is confronted with an array of national problems, including disintegrating families, an ailing economy, a two front war, and a bubbling cauldron in the Middle East. Many of these problems have roots that extend far beyond the political realm. They involve cultural, moral, and spiritual issues. As the nation's top political leader, Mr. Obama will not be able to address the root causes of many of our problems. To the extent that these problems have political dimensions, our new President can and should address them. But beyond the civil realm, other cultural institutions (church, family, local communities, etc.) must take the lead.

Click here to read full text.

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There are things that make or break a leader, among them are; the people he is trying to lead, the circumstances and conditions of the time of his leadership, his abilities and capacities, and most of all, the hands of the Lord.

In the hands of the Master, the heart of the king is like the windings of the waterways. The Lord can turn it whichever direction His plan for a nation will go.

Being Tested With "Unforeseen" Change?

Change We Never Imagined
By J. Matt Barber
GOPUSA

Well, the high-sheen veneer and cult-of-personality euphoria surrounding America's new oratory endowed president looks to be dissolving rather quickly. While millions had hoped for a political "messiah," it's fast becoming evident that, instead, we've stuck ourselves with an extreme leftist ideologue whose brand of "change we can believe in" is, in fact, "change we never imagined." (Sorry to burst the Barack bandwagon bubble, but I say it like I see it.)

The examples are piling up in terms of the radical pro-abortion polices he's planning to implement, the many-times-failed Marxist fiscal policies he's promised to test yet again, and -- relative to his national security goals -- the noxiously naive peacenik policies that have Mahmoud and Osama giggling themselves to sleep at night.

But on issues involving marriage, family and sexual morality, Obama's been even more brazen than some of his most ardent detractors could have expected. Literally within minutes after he took the oath of office, the official White House webpage was updated -- under the heading of "The Agenda: Civil Rights" -- to detail his wholesale "support for the LGBT (homosexual activist) community." His stated plans include the following:

- Defeating all state and federal constitutional efforts to defend the millennia-old definition of natural marriage from attacks by "gay marriage" activists.

- Repealing the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) signed into law by Bill Clinton in 1996. This is the only line of defense keeping all 50 states from being forced to recognize so-called "same-sex marriages" from extremely liberal states like Massachusetts and Connecticut.

- Repealing the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy despite the fact that the vast majority of military commanders and personnel say it will dangerously disrupt unit cohesion and troop morale.

- Passing constitutionally dubious and discriminatory "hate crimes" legislation, granting homosexuals and cross-dressers exclusive rights -- denied other Americans -- based on sexual behaviors that are deviant, changeable, and widely regarded both here and around the world as immoral.

- Passing the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) which would force business owners (religious and otherwise) to abandon traditional values relative to sexual morality under penalty of law.

- Creating intentionally motherless and fatherless homes and sexually confusing untold thousands of children by expanding "gay adoption."

The gravity of this situation cannot be overstated. Right out of the chute, Obama has told the world that he is signing off, without exception, on every demand of the extremist homosexual and transsexual lobbies.

The radical homosexual agenda and religious/free-speech liberties cannot occupy the same space. It's a zero-sum game. When 1-2 percent of the population is granted exclusive rights based on the aforementioned deviant sexual proclivities and changeable sexual behaviors -- to the detriment of everyone else -- that's called tyranny of the minority.

Obama recently said, "I don't want to pit Red America against Blue America. I want to be President of the United States of America."

Well, Mr. President, remember that whole "actions versus words" cliche Your words ring hollow and your actions speak volumes. Every policy you promise to implement does exactly what you've denounced. Both your actions and your words very much pit Red America against Blue America.

For all the talk of "hope," "change," and "coming together," it's becoming abundantly clear that Barack Obama's administration will be the most leftist, divisive and discriminatory in recent memory. I suspect the immediate, stark and in-your-face revisions he's made to the White House website are a metaphor for what we can expect, in terms of broader policy, from his administration.

Obama said in an August 19, 2008 speech: "Change doesn't come from Washington. Change comes to Washington." Well, radical change in the form of Barack Obama has certainly come to Washington. Not just in terms of the man's skin color -- which is historic and most encouraging -- but in terms of his exceptionally extreme and demonstrably dangerous liberal policies (not so encouraging).

So it would seem that change does in fact "come from Washington." Change more radical than our nation has ever seen. Change our founders could have never imagined.

People of faith, conservatives, and those of you with traditional values: hold on to your hats -- it's going to be a bumpy four years.

Matt Barber is an attorney concentrating in constitutional law. He serves as Director of Cultural Affairs with both Liberty Counsel and Liberty Alliance Action. Send comments to Matt at jmattbarber@comcast.net. (This information is provided for identification purposes only.)

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Man-made policies may control the actions of the body, but nothing can restrain the spirit other than free will.

Enduring the struggle for righteousness is won not primarily by the establishment of human laws, but rather by God's words being written in the hearts of people. No matter how much man-made laws there are established, yet if in the hearts of people no Words of the Lord are treasured and obeyed, jails and prison cells will only be overflowing.

Consider, for instance, abortion. No amount of anti-abortion laws will prevent a non-obedient soul from the intention to abort her baby while having an unwanted pregnancy. Similarly, no amount of pro-abortion laws will compel a God-obedient soul to commit abortion even if her pregnancy may be the result of a rape.

A new leader with his change of policies may indeed be a big test for some groups of people. How we see things is itself a test of our own convictions.

The Lord is an equal opportunity giver. Everyday is an opportunity, so let us take each day and use it in striving to write God's Words in the hearts of people so that we may endure and sustain the struggle for righteousness till He comes again one glorious day -- patiently, even if we may be doing it just one soul at a time (though slowly it may be, but yet surely like no man-made laws can accomplish).

Recession: Will the U.A.E. Withstand the Storm?

A Forwarded Email

Here is recession explained in simple terms. I found it in a local website.

It seems like a lot of people have forgotten what happens in a recession. There are some historical facts to look at but a lot boils down to a chain reaction of what people do in every recession.

Therefore, here is a short explanation of what happens in a recession:

When you are in recession is determined by the country’s potential negative growth. How a government actually determine you are in a recession is different in different parts of the world. In Europe , the general clause is you have two quarters (6 months) with negative growth. The US government itself decides after some time if it is in a recession or not, and have last week announced the U.S. has been in a recession since Nov. 2007.

What can happen?

1. Interest rates falls as governments try to improve available money in the market. The access to money is a key factor in recession management. This has an adverse effect on the currency, since people do not want their money in a country with low interest rates, so they “sell” their Dollars and move into another currency that offers higher Interest rates (and seems stable) Many has seen Swiss Francs as a safe haven, so very often downturns, you will see the Swiss Franc increase.

2. People get scared and move their money from the stock markets into government bonds or metals and some even under their pillow.

3. Share prices starts to drop, on expected lower earnings from companies. If you monitor companies P/E (Price/Earning) values, you will see P/E going towards 10 and below, but that is because the E (earnings) part of P/E is expected to lower dramatically. However, when you look at P/E – the Earnings is a HISTORICAL figure, not a future figure. Therefore, future “E” will be a lower number, resulting in a HIGHER P/E value again. So don’t just buy a share because P/E seems low.

4. Real estate markets plummet – both for rentals and for sales properties. People lose their jobs and can no longer afford the property they are in. They will move to smaller properties if possible, putting very high pressure on “High End properties” for middle income families.

5. Unemployment will start to increase. First at a slow rate, then later at rush rates.

6. People and companies will start saving money and not spend as much.

a. That fuels P/E rates upwards – due to lower earnings for companies

b. It makes even more people unemployed

c. People will not buy as much gasoline or oil – resulting in lower oil prices.

d. People will move to cheaper residences either because they have less available income.

e. Governments won’t get as much money in sales taxes and other consumption based taxes.

So all in all a vicious cycle, that is self-amplifying. The more consumers save up their money and the fewer products they buy, the more the economy will suffer.

Will U.A.E Weather the Storm?

So how does a typical recession scenario compare to Dubai and the U.A.E.? And what can the U.A.E. do to minimize the impact?

1. Interest rates in the U.A.E. have sky-rocketed as banks have seen loans and mortgages as high risk – making LESS funds available to the consumers and companies, fueling the risk of recession in the U.A.E. – and stopping the real estate market. This reaction is hurting the market a lot.

When a bank sees a loan as high risk, they increase the Interest rate. When Banks can see low risk, they have lower Interest rates. Banks also increase the “spread” between what you get when you deposit money in the bank and what you can borrow money for. A low spread between deposit interest and loan interest is equal to a secure market. The larger the spread, the more the Banks are scared of the future.

So the U.A.E. needs to get the Interest rate down not to amplify the risk of recession here and make money available for the consumers and real estate market.

2. People travel less in a recession. Since 17-22% of Dubai GDP is based on tourism, the impact here will be harder than in a country where only 5-10% of GDP is based on tourism. Tourist based economies are some of the hardest hit in a recession.

Tourist destinations must change their approach to get people to the U.A.E. Lower prices, better offers, more “value” is essential for attracting the visitors who now have a smaller budget to travel for.

3. When people lose their jobs, they spend less. But in the U.A.E. when people lose their jobs, they also risk losing their visa, forcing them to leave the country within 30 days of visa cancellation. So hardly enough time to find a new job in a market downturn. So in the U.A.E. spending from unemployed will not just be less – the spending will completely disappear, leading to more people losing their jobs.

So losing your job in the U.A.E. and not being able to find a new one before visa cancellation leads to:

1. You have to get out of your flat/house. If you paid 12 months up front for a rental property, you don’t might not get any money back. You might have to sell your house if it did not come with a residence visa and you can’t afford to keep it without a job.

2. You need to sell your U.A.E. possessions, like cars, TV, boats, furniture etc.

3. You need to settle credit card bills, Electricity and Water, Phone lines, TV, Internet, and all other bills you might have BEFORE you check out of the U.A.E.

The above will lead to even lower prices on property, lower prices on 2nd hand cars, lower prices on all other 2nd hand items.

And since you are under hard time pressure to get rid of your assets – you will be forced to sell at any available price you can get.

People with cash are kings in a recession.

So in short – losing your job in the U.A.E. can be a disaster for your personal life and can leave you with a lot of debt. But it will also impact the U.A.E. in a bad way.

And since an estimated 15% of tourists to the U.A.E. are relatives and friends coming to visit YOU – and spending money in the U.A.E. economy, these visitors might be lost, impacting even more.

So this is an even more vicious cycle than a “normal” recession and if nothing is done the potential recession can hit the U.A.E. harder than the western markets, despite the government having plenty of money.

To stop the outflow of people and local revenue, the visa rules need to be changed in the U.A.E. or we can face very hard consequences for the local economy.

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There shall be downfalls, but they won't destroy totally...

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