Taxpayers will be committed today to providing more than £50 billion to bail out high street banks in an attempt to avert a cataclysmic failure of confidence.

Alistair Darling was due to tell the City in an early morning announcement today that the sum will be available for “investment” in banks that have demanded help from the Government. The drastic rescue move is designed to help to reassure savers and to kickstart the paralysed credit markets by encouraging banks to lend to each other again.

After meeting Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England, Downing Street was forced to make the announcement earlier than it had intended because of fears that a second day of hammering for bank shares had made leading institutions vulnerable. HBOS shares slumped by 42 per cent yesterday, Royal Bank of Scotland was down 39 per cent and Lloyds TSB dived 13 per cent in another torrid day for the banks.

Read it all.

Years ago, don’t ask me why, I was drawn into the moderatorship of a panel starring then-colleague Milton Friedman. His main point, iterated in the face of any criticisms or questions by panelists and audience members, was that markets succeed because, “unfettered,” they are the best expression of perfect freedom. They needed no watching or help from other spheres of life. Challenged: “Do you mean, Dr. Friedman, that there is no place where, say, the governments have a part to play in the market world?” “Roads!” The confident, one-word response sounded rehearsed. Roads have to run through private properties, subject to eminent domain. Anything else involving “others” with the “private” world? No, only “roads.”

Of course, not all advocates of “unfettered” and “unregulated” markets were as sure of themselves as Dr. Friedman, who was as informed and skillful a debater as I’ve ever known. Yet for most, governments were not to play any part in regulating or monitoring markets. Today we are hearing from many who are suddenly “born-again” advocates of some measure of regulating agencies and companies and transactions. The various sectors of society do have different interests and can mess each other up, but the headlines and prime time utterances this week indicate that, to give a secular translation of a “body of Christ” theme, “we are members one of another.” We re-learn it again, too late, during this “Worst Crisis Since 1930s,” and hope for healing.

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Less than a week after the federal government offered an $85 billion bailout to insurance giant AIG, the company held a week-long retreat for its executives at the luxury St. Regis Resort in Monarch Beach, Calif., running up a tab of $440,000, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) said today at the the opening of a House committee hearing about the near-failure of the insurance giant.

Showing a photograph of the resort, Waxman said the executives spent $200,000 for rooms, $150,000 for meals and $23,000 for the spa.

“Less than a week after the taxpayers rescued AIG, company executives could be found wining and dining at one of the most exclusive resorts in the nation,” Waxman said. “We will ask whether any of this makes sense. ”

What on earth were they thinking? Makes the heart sick–read it all.

Americans’ retirement plans have lost as much as $2 trillion in the past 15 months, Congress’ top budget analyst estimated Tuesday.

The upheaval that has engulfed the financial industry and sent the stock market plummeting is devastating workers’ savings, forcing people to hold off on major purchases and consider delaying their retirement, said Peter Orszag, the head of the Congressional Budget Office.

Read it all. The collateral damage from this fiasco is simply astounding–makes the heart sad.

A recent uprising of rebel activity in the war-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo has caused Bishop Henri Isingoma and 150 delegates of the Province de L’Eglise Anglicane du Congo to be stranded in Boga following their September 30-October 5 diocesan synod.

Fears of a fresh wave of violence have forced thousands of people in the eastern region of Africa’s third largest country “to run for their dear lives in various directions,” Frederick Ngadjole, liaison officer for the province, said in an October 5 email to the Africa desk of Episcopal Relief and Development (ERD). “Some have gone towards Bunia town, others towards [the] Ugandan border and others are still wandering in the bush trying to find their way out to a safe zone.”

Writing on behalf of Isingoma, Ngadjole said that “an unidentified rebel group with no clear leadership” had risen up in Gety — an area between Bunia and Boga — to oppose the central government and reportedly uproot Ugandan rebel leader Joseph Kony.

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Q: What assumptions guide you in your study of the Bible?

Cardinal Vanhoye: My assumptions are clearly assumptions of faith. The Bible is a text that expresses the faith. To receive it in a serious and profound way it is necessary to be in the current that produced it. So, it is essential to approach the inspired text with an attitude of faith. On the other hand, there is also the conviction that the Bible is a historical book and not simply theoretical. It is a revelation with facts, with events; it is an existential historical reality that must be accepted as such.

Q: In all these years of studying the word of God, what has stimulated you the most to continue your research in the face of the various difficulties in the exegetical field and in the work itself? What are your deepest motivations?

Cardinal Vanhoye: Certainly that sacred Scripture is essential for knowing Christ, for conforming to Christ, for investigating all the dimensions of the mystery of Christ. [There is a] close link between exegetical research, in-depth study of the faith and the spiritual life. Because of these things I never hesitated to engage in research, to spend all of my efforts and my abilities in this study that is of fundamental importance for the life of the Church.

Q: What have been the most precious fruits for your priestly life of this contact with the Word?

Cardinal Vanhoye: The word of God nourished my spiritual life in a very deep way. For example, when I was still a student at the Pontifical Biblical Institute I did a study on two phrases in John’s Gospel that express the relation between Jesus’ work and the Father’s work. Jesus was given the gift of works. In two phrases Jesus speaks of the works that the Father has given him. I saw the insistence: “My Father goes on working and so do I” (John 5:17). A very important theme for the deepening of the spiritual life not only in a speculative way but in work itself. As the Father gave his works to Jesus, so Jesus gives us his works.

This is a point that nourishes me: I must always do the work of the Lord with the Lord. And, on the other hand, I understood that in order to do the Lord’s work with the Lord it is essential to be united to the heart of the Lord so that the Lord’s work is not something administrative that can be done with a certain detachment, but is a work of love. This is a beautiful, profound and demanding orientation that continues to guide me. The Lord is the principal author, I am a poor and modest assistant, but one who must be dedicated because what the Lord is doing is important and beautiful. This is the principal example of my relationship with Scripture.

Read it all and do not miss past two either.

In his astonishingly prescient book, “The World Is Curved: Hidden Dangers to the Global Economy,” David M. Smick argues that we have inherited an impressive global economic system. It, with the U.S. as the hub, has produced unprecedented levels of global prosperity. But it has now spun wildly out of control. It can’t be fixed with the shock and awe of a $700 billion rescue package, Smick says. The fundamental architecture needs to be reformed.

It will take, he suggests, a global leadership class that can answer essential questions: How much leverage should be allowed? Can we preserve the development model in which certain nations pile up giant reserves and park them in the U.S.?

Until these and other issues are addressed, the global markets will lack confidence in asset values. Bankers will cower, afraid to lend. America’s role as the global hub will be threatened. Europeans will drift toward nationalization. Neomercantilists will fill the vacuum.

This is the test. This is the problem that will consume the next president. Meanwhile, the two candidates for that office are talking about Bill Ayers and Charles Keating.

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Here is the NPR blurb:

The Most Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori, the first female bishop to preside over the Episcopal Church, has faced a number of crises since she accepted the post in 2006.

At least one diocese has seceded in response to the ordination of the Right Rev. Gene Robinson ”” the denomination’s first openly gay bishop ”” and more congregations may follow.

The events reflect a growing schism within the broader Anglican Communion, and the numerous social and theological pressures on Episcopal congregations.

The segment is just over 40 minutes, listen to it all.

Archbishop Fred Hiltz was feeling right at home during his visit to St. Hilda’s Anglican Church in Bay L’Argent last week.
“Most of my ministry, as a parish priest in Nova Scotia, was in parishes like this ”“ big, multi-point, coastal parishes and I love them.
“So, it’s good for my soul to be here. It really is.”

His visit was also fine spiritual nourishment for members of the Anglican Church in the region, many of whom came from around the Burin Peninsula Sept. 29 for a pre-sermon meal, before then settling in for the St. Michael and All Angels Day service.

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A Hamilton church that voted on the weekend to leave the national Anglican church body and join the small but growing Anglican Network in Canada, says it is not breaking away.

“We are aligning with the worldwide Anglican church,” said Rev. Sandy Copland of the Church of St. Peter in Hamilton, which was part of the Niagara diocese.

“It’s the Canadian church or parts of it that have broken away.”

Read the whole article.

When the White House brought out its $700 billion rescue plan two weeks ago, its sheer size was meant to soothe the global financial system, restoring trust and confidence. Three days after the plan was approved, it looks like a pebble tossed into a churning sea.

The crisis that began as a made-in-America subprime lending problem and radiated across the world is now circling back home, where it pummeled stock and credit markets on Monday.

While the Bush administration’s bailout package offers help to foreign banks, it seems to have done little to reassure investors, particularly in Europe, where banks are failing and countries are racing to stave off panicky withdrawals after first playing down the depth of the crisis.

Far from being the cure for the world’s ills, economists said, the rescue plan might end up being a stopgap for the United States alone. With Europe showing few signs of developing a coordinated response to the crisis, there is very little on the horizon to calm rattled investors.

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The nation’s celebrated rags-to-riches story began in the Nineties when free market reforms, fish quota cash and a stock market based on stable pension funds allowed Icelandic entrepreneurs to go out and sweep up international credit. Britain and Denmark were favourite shopping haunts, and in 2004 alone Icelanders spent £894m on shares in British companies. In just five years, the average Icelandic family saw its wealth increase by 45 per cent.

But, as a result of the international banking crisis, the billionaires who own everything from West Ham United football club to the Somerfield supermarket chain, Hamleys toy shops and the House of Fraser, are in trouble and the country is drowning in debt.

Iceland’s cheap labour force, the Poles and Lithuanians, have left already – there’s little point in sending home such a worthless currency, and the tourist season is over. Iceland is on its own.

Read it all.

Tim Fountain has the goods–there are multiple entries to read.

The Yanomami leaders are wading into a politicized debate about how officials react to health care challenges faced by the Yanomami and other Amazonian tribes. In recent interviews here, government officials contended that the Yanomami could be exaggerating their claims to win more resources from the government and undercut its authority in the Amazon.

Meanwhile, the Yanomami claims come amid growing concern in Venezuela over indigenous health care after a scandal erupted in August over a tepid official response to a mystery disease that killed 38 Warao Indians in the country’s northeast.
“This government makes a big show of helping the Yanomami, but rhetoric is one thing and reality another,” said Ramón González, 49, a Yanomami leader from the village of Yajanamateli who traveled recently to Puerto Ayacucho, the capital of Amazonas State, to ask military officials and civilian doctors for improved health care.

“The truth is that Yanomami lives are still considered worthless,” said González, who was converted to Christianity by New Tribes Mission, a Florida group expelled in 2005. “The boats, the planes, the money, it’s all for the criollos, not for us,” he said, using a term for nonindigenous Venezuelans.

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As pressure built in the credit markets and stocks spiraled lower around the world on Monday, the Federal Reserve was considering a radical new plan to jump-start the engine of the financial system.

Under a proposal being discussed with the Treasury Department, the Fed could buy vast amounts of the unsecured short-term debt that companies rely on to finance their day-to-day activities, according to officials familiar with the discussions. If this were to happen, the central bank would come closer than ever to lending directly to businesses.

While the move would put more taxpayer dollars at risk, it underscores the growing sense of urgency felt by policy makers in a climate where lending has virtually dried up.

The plan was being formulated amid cascading losses in global stock markets, as the banking crisis spread across Europe and investors feared dire consequences for the world economy. The Dow Jones industrial average fell as much as 800 points before a late recovery, finishing down 369.88, below 10,000 points for the first time since 2004.

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This shift from a more loving heritage has largely been caused by the rise in evangelical political power of recent decades. In an attempt to achieve a noble vision ”” defend the unborn, apply a moral grid to government policy, assure religious liberty ”” loving, patriotic Christians soon found themselves becoming the religious base of the hard-right wing of U.S. politics. Quickly defined by what they were against rather than the good they hoped to do, evangelicals became increasingly identified as a people of faith-based rage, as haters in the name of Christ. They became more Rush Limbaugh than Billy Graham, more Ayn Rand than the Apostle Paul. They became the Republican Party at prayer.

Now, though, as the 2008 presidential election nears, a new evangelical is emerging. Though he stands on the shoulders of the faithful who have come before, he approaches politics with a new caution, with a new prophetic distance. He has seen the excesses, felt the betrayals, understood the deceptions. He is no longer willing to see either party as the Party of God, to regard either as though it has descended unblemished from heaven. He recognizes that both are flawed, yet that both contend for policies near to the social mandate of Scripture ”” on the left the care for the poor, the cause of the stranger in the land and the plea for social justice, and on the right the defense of the unborn and the protection of the traditional family.

This new evangelical seeks to be more biblical than narrowly political and serves both parties by refusing to align exclusively with any party.

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The problem should be obvious. International legal relationships and jurisdictional claims are already complex enough in an increasingly interdependent world. Using domestic criminal justice systems as a means of achieving foreign policy ends or, even worse, allowing individual magistrates to use their courts on a freelance basis makes global dispute resolution difficult — if not impossible — even when countless innocent lives are very much at stake, as in Darfur.

And, of course, what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

African leaders, evidently unimpressed with Europe’s claims of moral authority, have condemned the indictments, and Rwandan President Paul Kagame (himself a potential target of a future legal action) has suggested that his own country might proceed against Europeans — specifically against French military officers who advised the previous, genocidal Rwandan government — in response to the Spanish and French indictments.

What we are seeing is not the birth of a global rule of law but a type of worldwide judicial anarchy. Spain’s judges should not be driving foreign policy at the United Nations — but they are.

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A new study out of Northwestern University, perhaps without really meaning to, gets at something much more interesting. It starts to provide data and insight that add to our ability to understand what Marx was getting at — not if there is a God and not whether it makes sense that humans should believe, but simply why humans believe….

The study analyzes the results mostly in terms of political divisions. It found that politically conservative Christians described a godless world “as one of incessant conflict and chaos, expressing strong apprehension regarding people’s inability to control their impulses and the attendant breakdown of social relationships and societal institutions.”

Liberal Christians, on the other hand, had a different set of concerns. For them, a world without God would be “barren or lifeless, lacking in color and texture, an empty wasteland that would not sustain them” and in which they would feel lost.

All of the respondents generally imagined life without God as “entailing fear, sadness, interpersonal isolation and loss of meaning and hope.”

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In my view they have received too little attention.

“I told him, ‘You have to do this,’ ” [Charlie] Rose recalled in an interview on Saturday. ” ‘No one has your credibility, and people want to hear what you have to say.’ ”

Buffett agreed to do it, and Rose flew to San Diego, where Buffett would be on Wednesday. The hourlong interview on Wednesday night was vintage Warren Buffett: calm, plain-spoken and wry.

He called the current crisis an economic Pearl Harbor, requiring immediate action. Its biggest single cause, he explained, was the real estate bubble. “Three hundred million Americans, their lending institutions, their government, their media, all believed that house prices were going to go up consistently,” he said. “Lending was done based on it, and everybody did a lot of foolish things.”

As far back as 2003, Buffett had warned that the complex securities at the center of today’s troubles– once so profitable, but now toxic– were “financial weapons of mass destruction.” These securities were engineered by the math quants on Wall Street, and in the interview Buffett expressed his disdain: “Beware of geeks bearing formulas.”

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Has the so-called Prosperity gospel turned its followers into some of the most willing participants ”” and hence, victims ”” of the current financial crisis? That’s what a scholar of the fast-growing brand of Pentecostal Christianity believes. While researching a book on black televangelism, says Jonathan Walton, a religion professor at the University of California at Riverside, he realized that Prosperity’s central promise ”” that God will “make a way” for poor people to enjoy the better things in life ”” had developed an additional, dangerous expression during the subprime-lending boom. Walton says that this encouraged congregants who got dicey mortgages to believe “God caused the bank to ignore my credit score and blessed me with my first house.” The results, he says, “were disastrous, because they pretty much turned parishioners into prey for greedy brokers.”

Others think he may be right. Says Anthea Butler, an expert in Pentecostalism at the University of Rochester in New York: “The pastor’s not gonna say, ‘Go down to Wachovia and get a loan,’ but I have heard, ‘Even if you have a poor credit rating, God can still bless you ”” if you put some faith out there [that is, make a big donation to the church], you’ll get that house or that car or that apartment.’ ” Adds J. Lee Grady, editor of the magazine Charisma: “It definitely goes on, that a preacher might say, ‘If you give this offering, God will give you a house.’ And if they did get the house, people did think that it was an answer to prayer, when in fact it was really bad banking policy.” If so, the situation offers a look at how a native-born faith built partially on American economic optimism entered into a toxic symbiosis with a pathological market.

Can we please not blame God but instead this awful theology? Read it all.

This we will speak about, learn about, and engage together in the coming days, months, and years. As you know, the Vestry of St. Andrew’s has expressed with clarity that our parish will continue as a parish within the Episcopal Church, and will not recognize or participate in the organization of the “realigned diocese.”

On leaving St. Martin’s this afternoon canonically resident Pittsburgh clergy were asked to take certificates licensing them as deacons or priests of the Diocese of Pittsburgh in the Southern Cone Province, and I declined to receive the one with my name on it. As I have indicated to you, I will remain a priest of the Episcopal Church, U.S.A.

Again: much sadness, and a sense of profound loss. I personally have expressed my deep respect and love for many dear friends and colleagues who have chosen today to walk in a different direction–and my hope and prayer that in many ways the spirit of friendship and shared ministry that we have known in the past may be able to continue. But of course there will be changes, and it will be necessary to move forward to the new challenges that await us without being overly-encumbered by what lies in our past. We’ll have to figure that out as we go on.

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Cowed by the financial crisis, American consumers are pulling back on their spending, all but guaranteeing that the economic situation will get worse before it gets better.

In response to the falling value of their homes and high gasoline prices, Americans have become more frugal all year. But in recent weeks, as the financial crisis reverberated from Wall Street to Washington, consumers appear to have cut back sharply. Even with the government beginning a giant bailout of the financial system, their confidence may have been too shaken for them to resume their free-spending ways any time soon.

Recent figures from companies, and interviews across the country, show that automobile sales are plummeting, airline traffic is dropping, restaurant chains are struggling to fill tables, customers are sparse in stores.

When the final tally is in, consumer spending for the quarter just ended will almost certainly shrink, the first quarterly decline in nearly two decades. Many economists, who began the third quarter expecting modest growth, now believe the cutbacks are so severe that the overall economy did not expand either, and they warn that a consumer-led recession could be more severe than the relatively mild one earlier this decade.

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AMERICA’S financial landscape is changing before our eyes. The absorption of major Wall Street investment banks by commercial banks threatens to create colossal universal banks that are too big to fail and might need to be bailed out in the future. Meanwhile, the structure of public and private finance in the United States chronically fails to address four problems: the almost 10 percent of Americans without a bank account; the concerns of all Americans about the security of their savings; the growing indebtedness of the country to foreign governments and financial institutions; and underinvestment in public assets like sewer systems and bridges.

These four problems may seem unrelated. But they can be addressed in the United States, as they have been in similar countries, by a single institution that is at once new and old: the postal savings bank.

Britain created the first postal savings bank in 1861, and by the early 20th century many other nations had postal savings bank systems. The details vary among countries, but the idea is simple: use the one government institution that can be found in most neighborhoods and rural areas ”” the post office ”” to encourage small savings and a habit of thrift.

Well, we don’t do things that way in America, you might object. On the contrary ”” we did! In 1910, Congress created a postal savings system. The Post Office offered small savings accounts to individual Americans. The system boomed during the Depression and World War II, with a balance of more than $3 billion in 1947 ”” almost $30 billion in today’s dollars.

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The charges against Duncan were initiated by Pittsburgh Episcopalians who feared he would lead the diocese into secession and take church property with him.

Duncan “has rejected numerous opportunities and warnings to reconsider and change course,” said the Progressive Episcopalians of Pittsburgh in a statement. “Instead, he has continued to resolutely pursue a course of action designed to remove this diocese and many unwilling Episcopalians from the Episcopal Church.”

Elected bishop of the 20,000-member diocese 11 years ago, Duncan has been a prominent voice for conservative Episcopalians distraught over the liberal drift of the church on biblical interpretation and sexual ethics. He leads the Anglican Communion Network, a conservative network that claims some ten dioceses and 900 congregations in North America.

Duncan is the second Episcopal bishop removed from active ministry this year. In January, Fresno bishop John-David Schofield was deposed for leading the San Joaquin diocese to secede.

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When people think of religion on YouTube, most probably flash to “gotcha” videos of Sarah Palin’s old church or Barack Obama’s old pastor. But the video-sharing site is also being used by a wildly diverse collection of pastors, rabbis, imams, gurus, and pious laypeople ”” like Roman Catholic Steve Silvia, who made the video above ”” to celebrate and explain their creeds. These aren’t glitzy televangelists. In keeping with the YouTube ethos, many simply fire up camcorder and go. But low cost and infinite range, plus the mini-video’s ascent as one of the culture’s preferred ways of imbibing information, means vastly increased exposure for clerics who would otherwise have tiny flocks. “For years, people in my business talked about how the Internet was going to revolutionize religion the way the printing press helped create Protestantism, but it didn’t happen,” says Steve Waldman, founder of the multi-faith website Beliefnet. But with the rise of YouTube, he thinks the unassuming, grass-roots religion clips like the ones that follow “could be the beginning of that kind of transformation.”

Read it all.

The iJET is a new type of solar cell that’s cheap and easy to make, requiring not much more than a pizza oven, some nail polish remover, and a common inkjet printer. Australian scientist Nicole Kuepper describes her invention.

Listen to it all and note carefully HOW she made the discovery.

Judging from tales about the rise and fall of empires, there is always a point when things are going so well that the emperors doubt that anything could ever go wrong. “THRIFT,” warned Nero’s adviser Seneca, “comes too late when you find it at the bottom of your purse.” In the Old World, nations grew fat and then lazy, until they collapsed under their own weight. But that was not to be our story. American greatness–the vision of the founders, the courage of the pioneers, the industry of the nation builders–reflected a mighty faith in the power of sacrifice as a muscle that made young nations strong. Banks were like gyms for the soul: the first savings banks in Boston and New York were organized as charities, where “humble journeymen” could exercise good judgment, store their money and not be tempted to waste it on drink. Architect Louis Sullivan carved the word THRIFT over the door of his “jewel box” bank nearly a century ago, for it was private virtue that made public prosperity possible.

That virtue died with the baby boom, but it had been ailing ever since the Depression, argues cultural historian David Tucker in The Decline of THRIFT in America. That crisis, he writes, invited economists to recast THRIFT as “the contemptible vice which threw sand in the gears of our consumer economy.” A White House report in 1931 urged parents to let children pick out their own clothes and furniture, thereby creating in the child “a sense of personal as well as family pride in ownership, and eventually teaching him that his personality can be expressed through things.” These days you can buy your baby daughter a BORN TO SHOP onesie with little pink purses on it.

Somewhere along the way, THRIFT did not just stop being a value; it became a folly. Saving was for suckers; you’d miss the ride, die leaving money on the table when you could have lived it up. There are no pockets in a shroud, as the saying goes. We once saved about 15% of our income. By the roaring ’80s the rate was 4%; now we’re in negative numbers. Bob Hope liked to joke that “a bank is a place that will lend you money if you can prove that you don’t need it.” But that too changed as easy credit bloomed and usury became another of those vices that had somehow lost its juice. The average American has nine credit cards with a total $17,000 balance. We borrow against our houses and pensions to live in a way that dares us to actually grow old.

Read it all.

Take a look

The BBC blurb says:

As a severely disabled woman in Britain goes to court to clarify the law on assisted suicide, could there be a duty to die so you don’t become a burden on your loved ones?

Featured are Debbie Purdy, the disabled woman just mentioned above,John Hardwig of the Philosophy Department of the University of Tennessee, and Professor Hank Jacomsen from a private institute for medical ethics in the Netherlands.

It starts at about 8:40 and the segment runs approximately 9 1/2 minutes.