The Occupy Wall Street movement is growing across America and has even spread to other nations. Some will attempt to usurp the phenomenon, but I believe its true spirit is relevant to topics touched upon on this blog. The US government, during the Financial Crisis of 2008, literally gave billions of dollars to Wall Street and that money went directly into the pockets of the New York investment bankers in the form of bonus payments. Yes, the government ‘loaned’ money to those institutions and that was repaid (this ‘loan’ and how it represented free money to the banks is another discussion), but the government literally gave billions of dollars to AIG and AIG immediately paid most of that money to Goldman Sachs (among other Wall Street banks). In turn, because of that massive payment, Goldman Sachs was able to pay billions of dollars in bonuses to its top leaders. This type of transfer of wealth from regular taxpayers to the wealthy has been an ongoing policy of the US government.
Economic theory tells us that two nations are better off, in total, when there is free trade. We will not argue that point. However, economic theory stops there. It does not comment on the distribution of the benefits of freer trade. In the U.S., as in other developed countries, ‘globalization’/free trade has meant job destruction of the working class and profit for large corporations. The US government then counters that job destruction with deficit spending — basically borrowing money from the children of the working class to cause temporary relief for their parents. In today’s news, this is so ironically illustrated. On one hand, President Obama pronounces the approval of free trade agreements with Korea, Columbia, and Panama by Congress as a victory for the American worker, and in the same breath, continues to ask Congress to approve another major deficit spending bill to help create more temporary jobs (temporary in that they are dependent on continued deficit spending by the US government). It shows that money politics still does not get it — the era of creating false prosperity through borrowing is near an end for America.
In Europe, weaker nations have already reached that point. In Greece and other countries, false prosperity was created through massive government deficit spending — and ultimately it has been the workers that are suffering as those temporary support measures are taken away. It will be the same in the US when local, State, and Federal governments are no longer able to freely borrow money to compensate for the loss of American jobs. One US town actually declared bankruptcy this week — though state officials are moving to counter that. If it were not for the federal government using stimulus money to give additional monies to state governments, we would see at least 1-2 of them declaring themselves bankrupt.
On a business TV show last night (CNBC), a representative from Roubini Economics went on record as saying that they expect Greece to withdraw from the EU within the next 12 months. Should this occur, it would serve as a tremendous catalyst to push the remaining EU members to move to a full political union. According to our interpretation of Revelations, during that process, 6 more nations will decline to join the that unholy political union and the creation of the Unholy 10 will occur. It has been said that the creation of a politically unified EU would take decades due to the legal process required for the new agreements to be ratified by the individual nations, but should the EU and the world be thrown into economic chaos due to the withdrawal of one or more countries from the EU, well we have seen that it can cause hastily made poor decisions to be made in panic (e.g. the bailout of Wall Street banks). In my own heart, it feels that everything is happening too quickly, but even should the Unholy 10 confederation be made next year, it does not mean that the Beast will rise up immediately to take control…..but I would guess he will not be far in the coming.
I was reading through some science articles when I noticed one about asteroids. It claimed that they have been 5 massive extinctions on Earth due to asteroid strikes, the last one being the reason for the extinction of the dinosaur. Revelations foretells the falling of stars that will cause suffering in the world (e.g. one that will poison 1/3 of the water in the world). I have always assumed the falling of stars to be symbolic of the real event, but am now wondering if the fulfillment of Revelations prophesy will be achieved by literally having meteors strike the Earth. Given in earlier posts we have speculated that the Media will categorize the Rapture as a massive alien abduction event, falling meteors would actually fall in line to make the Return of Christ some Spielberg-esqe movie (actually, it would not be surprising if Spielberg were to come out with a movie that more directly makes the Return of Christ into some kind of alien invasion — and Armageddon the climatic battle between the good earthlings and the evil aliens).
No one knows when Christ will return, but the signs around us tell us that His return may not be very far off. Be faithful and make good use of the time He has given us.