One of our great faculty members in the Department of Theology at St. Thomas, William T. Cavanaugh, was recently interviewed by The Other Journal. Check out the interview here.
Supposing that the members of a local community wanted their community to cohere, to flourish, and to last, they would:(1) Always ask of any proposed change or innovation: What will this do to our community? How will this affect our common wealth?
(2) Always include local nature - the land, the water, the air, the native creatures - within the membership of the community.
(3) Always ask how local needs might be supplied from local sources, including the mutual help of neighbours.
(4) Always supply local needs first. (And only then think of exporting their products, first to nearby cities, and then to others.)
(5) The community must understand the ultimate unsoundness of the industrial doctrine of ‘labour saving’ if that implies poor work, unemployment, or any kind of pollution or contamination.
(6) If it is not to be merely a colony of the national or the global economy, the community must develop appropriately scaled value-adding industries for local products.
(7) It must also develop small-scale industries and businesses to support the local farm or forest economy.
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It must strive to produce as much of its own energy as possible.
(9) It must strive to increase earnings (in whatever form) within the community, and decrease expenditures outside the community.
(10) Money paid into the local economy should circulate within the community for as long as possible before it is paid out.
(11) If it is to last, a community must be able to afford to invest in itself: it must maintain its properties, keep itself clean (without dirtying some other place), care for its old people, teach its children.
(12) The old and the young must take care of one another. The young must learn from the old, not necessarily and not always in school. There must be no institutionalised ‘child care’ and ‘homes for the aged’. The community knows and remembers itself by the association of old and young.
(13) Costs now conventionally hidden or ‘externalised’ must be accounted for. Whenever possible they must be debited against monetary income.
(14) Community members must look into the possible uses of local currency, community-funded loan programmes, systems of barter, and the like.
(15) They should always be aware of the economic value of neighbourliness - as help, insurance, and so on. They must realise that in our time the costs of living are greatly increased by the loss of neighbourhood, leaving people to face their calamities alone.
(16) A rural community should always be acquainted with, and complexly connected with, community-minded people in nearby towns and cities.
(17) A sustainable rural economy will be dependent on urban consumers loyal to local products. Therefore, we are talking about an economy that will always be more co-operative than competitive.
Summarised from an article entitled ‘Conserving Communities’ in Resurgence magazine (May ‘95, Resurgence, Ford House, Hartland, Bideford, Devon
Let’s face it, the institution of economic sanctions is an act of war. It is estimated that over 500,000 Iraqi children died as a direct result of U.S. sanctions since 1991. In fact, the deaths from the sanctions were far greater than Iraqi deaths at the hands of the U.S. military during the Gulf War.
In the past few decades, the institution of economic sanctions has become a widely used method of international governance. Under Article 16 of the the UN Charter, the UN Security Council is able to use economic coercion to address “threats of aggression” and “breaches of peace.” On only two occasions, from 1945 to 1990 did the UN only approve economic sanctions. However, since 1990 the Security Council has imposed sanctions on eleven nation-states, including Libya, Somalia, Haiti, and Liberia. In the last sixty years, the United States has unilaterally or with other nations imposed over forty sanctions on various countries. Of course, recent sanctions against Palestine for democratically electing the “terrorist” Hamas party have been particularly painful for civilians and, according to many international human rights organizations, has led to a “humanitarian disaster.”
What is strange and dangerous about economic warfare is that it is politically safe. In other words, many people seem to think that sanctions are simply a mild form of punishment, an act to persuade without going to war. The majority of the U.S. public supports sanctions against Iran, while opposing a military invasion of Iran. Indeed, economic sanctions is a financially better option for the United States and it is questionable whether a military option is even possible at this point.
What is particularly sad about all of this is that the Democratic Presidential hopefuls are in favour of further economic sanctions against Iran. In February Clinton said that “We need to use every tool at our disposal, including diplomatic and economic in addition to the threat and use of military force.” Obama advocates that the US go before the UN Security Council in order to put more pressure on Iran. He suggests that the international community should use further economic sanctions on Iran. In case this appears to weak, Obama has assured us that he would consider missle attacks and the military option.
Canadian journalist Naomi Klein is known for her bestselling book No Logo. I had the opportunity to hear her speak a few years back at the University of Minnesota. She spoke on the attempt of transnational-corporate hawks to seize control of the Iraqi market directly following the US invasion. In this presentation she argued that the corporations largely failed in securing Iraqi markets because the area was so plagued with violence. Naomi Klein is a powerful voice in North American journalism, a critic of US involvement in Latin America, and especially the forced economic reforms in countries such as Argentina. Along with her new book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism she has directed a short film. It is well done, but be warned, it is quite disturbing.
When speaking of economics, one usually thinks in terms of the distribution of money. Questions like how should money be distributed or redistributed on either a local or global level are commonly raised. In any Christian critique of global capitalism the question of economic justice must be raised. However, when the Christian speaks of economic injustice it tends to be based on a secular view of economics, one that is primarily based on the unequal distribution of money. Perhaps, this is a problem. Perhaps, we have focused too much on money as a promise to end poverty and hunger. Does money end hunger? Or does enough healthy food and access to clean drinking water end hunger? I’m just not sure if money ought to be seen as the vehicle by which the poor and hungry are truly fed. I am not simply talking in terms of spiritual hunger and spiritual food, for although this is important, it does not resolve the issue of physical hunger that Jesus commands us to relieve. Broadly speaking, I am thinking of a redefinition of the Christian view of economics and how a Christian ought to engage secular economic thinking. Indeed, Christianity is both an internal and external religion - both private and public - both spiritual and physical. Christianity does not simply seek the end of poverty and hunger, but seeks a full conversion of the hearts of all toward the true God. This seems to make sense actually. How else could 2/3 of the world be lifted out of poverty without the conversion of the other 1/3 who maintain the wealth and food. Trade regulations between rich and poor countries could help this, but it does not resolve this issue, for it does not convert. In its criticism of liberation theology, the Catholic church speaks of the tendency for Latin American Catholics to want social change without spiritual change - or in other words, they want physical food, rather than spiritual food. The Catholic church then goes on to show that this is not the complete picture - it is not a holistic theology, for it doesn’t address the heart. Of course, this is easy to say from the Vatican, but much more difficult to say from the standpoint of those who are actually hungry in very physical ways. For, the Vatican cannot fathom the hunger of the people. However, all of this is not to say that the Vatican is wrong in their criticism. They just simply have no place to say such things, and therefore, they have not and will not be heard by the hungry liberationists. When someone asks you for a glass of water…don’t give her a spiritual glass of water, give her something to drink. How then, do we understand economic injustice? What is the Christian understanding of economy? It seems to me it is more about feeding the hungry, than it is about giving money to the hungry. But is the latter necessary? Or is conversion necessary? Is money necessary in this situation? Or is food?
I am trying to get at our view of money as a neutral vehicle of fulfillment - I’m talking about physical and spiritual fulfillment here. Is money neutral in the same way food is neutral? Or does money inherently carry greed and selfishness?
Just some questions.
Published on The Progressive (http://progressive.org)
IMF Occupies Iraq, Riots Follow
By Matthew Rothschild
January 3, 2006
Bad enough that the U.S. military is occupying Iraq.
Now the IMF is occupying the country.
In December, the International Monetary Fund, in exchange for giving a loan of $685 million to the Iraqi government, insisted that the Iraqis lift subsidies on the price of oil and open the economy to more private investment.
As the IMF said in a press release of December 23 [1], the Iraqi government must be committed to “controlling the wage and pensions bill, reducing subsidies on petroleum products, and expanding the participation of the private sector in the domestic market for petroleum products.”
The impact of the IMF extortion was swift and brutal.
“Since the Dec. 15 parliamentary election, fuel prices have increased five-fold, mostly because the outgoing government of Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari has cut subsidies as part of a debt-forgiveness deal it signed with the International Monetary Fund,” the Los Angeles Times [2] reported on December 28.
“The move has shocked Iraqis long accustomed to hefty subsidies of gasoline, kerosene, cooking gas, and other fuels.”
Iraqis are getting a nasty taste of the IMF’s medicine. “Over the summer, gas was selling for about five cents a gallon,” the LA Times noted. “Now it’s about 65 cents, and at the end of the price increases, gasoline will cost about the same in Iraq as it does in other countries in the Persian Gulf, about $1 per gallon. The prices of kerosene, diesel, and cooking gas have seen similar or steeper increases.” The price of public transportation has also gone up significantly.
Not surprisingly, these enormous price hikes have led to riots around the country, with police firing on 3,000 protesters in Nassiryeh, according to an account on Daily Kos. www.dailykos.com/story/2005/12/20/11119/029,
Iraq’s oil minister quit to protest the government’s capitulation to the IMF. According to Daily Kos, Oil Minister Ibrahim Bahr al-Uloum asked, “Is this how we repay the Iraq citizens who risked their lives to participate in the elections, by raising fuel prices in this way?”
The indestructible Ahmad Chalabi, a longtime favorite of Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, replaced al-Uloum.
The Bush Administration is four-square behind the IMF deal.
“This arrangement will underpin economic stability and help lay the foundation for an open and prosperous economy in Iraq,” said U.S. Treasury Secretary John Snow.
What it is actually underpinning is economic instability. “It’s crazy, socially and politically,” Robert Mabro, former chairman of the Oxford Institute of Energy Studies, told the LA Times.
Even the Pentagon’s “National Strategy for Victory in Iraq” recognized the need for “balancing the need for economic reform—particularly of bloated fuel and food subsidies—with political realities.”
But “political realities” on the ground—such as inciting riots and increasing discontent—don’t appear to concern Bush.
For the Bush Administration, the endorsement of the IMF price increase represents a schizophrenia that’s almost clinical.
Bush is desperate to rescue his floundering Iraq policy, and yet backing the IMF plan is like throwing a drowning patient both ends of a lifeline.
The Iraqi people are sick and tired of the U.S. occupation already, to put it mildly.
Now that they are seeing their standard of living plummet, thanks to the IMF, they are going to be even more irate at the United States, which they know controls the IMF.
Caught between deciding whether to try to win hearts and minds or whether to cling to free market fantasies, Bush has once again chosen to live in fantasyland.
