FInancial crisis boosts European suicide rates, especially in Greece, Ireland
Suicides rates rose sharply in Europe in 2007 to 2009 as the financial crisis drove unemployment up and squeezed incomes, with the worst hit countries like Greece and Ireland seeing the most dramatic increases, researchers said on Friday. Rates of road deaths in the region fell during the same period, possibly because higher numbers of jobless people led to lower car use, according to an initial analysis of data from 10 European Union (EU) countries.
“Even though we’re starting to see signs of a financial recovery, what we’re now also seeing is a human crisis. There’s likely to be a long tail of human suffering following the downturn,” said David Stuckler, a sociologist at Britain’s Cambridge University, who worked on the analysis.
Stuckler said he feared the social and health costs of the recent global economic downturn would turn out to be high. “We can already see that the countries facing the most severe financial reversals of fortune, such as Greece and Ireland, had greater rises in suicides,” he said. “And suicides are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of mental health problems. Suicide itself is a relatively rare event, but wherever you see a rise in suicides there is also a rise in failed suicide attempts and in new cases of depression.”
Analyzing data available so far, Stuckler and colleagues found that suicide rates were up 17 percent in Greece and 13 percent in Ireland. Unemployment increased by 2.6 percentage points — a 35 percent relative increase — between 2007 and 2009 across the EU as a whole, they said.
“The steady downward trend in suicide rates, seen…before 2007, reversed at once,” the researchers wrote.
.
Excerpts from Pope Benedict’s speech to British society
Pope Benedict addressed British society on Friday in a speech in Westminster Hall and argued that faith and reason are not in conflict.
Here are excerpts from the pope’s speech:
“…I recall the figure of Saint Thomas More, the great English scholar and statesman, who is admired by believers and non-believers alike for the integrity with which he followed his conscience, even at the cost of displeasing the sovereign whose “good servant” he was, because he chose to serve God first. The dilemma which faced More in those difficult times, the perennial question of the relationship between what is owed to Caesar and what is owed to God, allows me the opportunity to reflect with you briefly on the proper place of religious belief within the political process…
“…Britain has emerged as a pluralist democracy which places great value on freedom of speech, freedom of political affiliation and respect for the rule of law, with a strong sense of the individual’s rights and duties, and of the equality of all citizens before the law. While couched in different language, Catholic social teaching has much in common with this approach, in its overriding concern to safeguard the unique dignity of every human person, created in the image and likeness of God, and in its emphasis on the duty of civil authority to foster the common good.
“And yet the fundamental questions at stake in Thomas More’s trial continue to present themselves in ever-changing terms as new social conditions emerge. Each generation, as it seeks to advance the common good, must ask anew: what are the requirements that governments may reasonably impose upon citizens, and how far do they extend? By appeal to what authority can moral dilemmas be resolved? These questions take us directly to the ethical foundations of civil discourse. If the moral principles underpinning the democratic process are themselves determined by nothing more solid than social consensus, then the fragility of the process becomes all too evident – herein lies the real challenge for democracy.
“The inadequacy of pragmatic, short-term solutions to complex social and ethical problems has been illustrated all too clearly by the recent global financial crisis. There is widespread agreement that the lack of a solid ethical foundation for economic activity has contributed to the grave difficulties now being experienced by millions of people throughout the world. Just as “every economic decision has a moral consequence”, so too in the political field, the ethical dimension of policy has far-reaching consequences that no government can afford to ignore…
This a very important speech .it touches to the issue of reinserting morality in the secular wold of today.This is one question modernity has to address if we want to preserve liberty and avoid the peril of social anarchy this question was explored in depth by Susan Neiman a remarkable german philosopher i recently discovered.Society does not need Faith but it surely needs what Susan calls Moral Clarity and reason alone too often fail to bring moral clarity to human actions.
Crises plague centuries-old German passion play
Every 10 years, a mountain village cradled in the German Catholic stronghold of Bavaria nails Jesus Christ to a cross and charges spectators to watch. However, add a financial crisis, a wide-ranging scandal in the Roman Catholic Church and a cloud of volcanic ash to the mix, and suddenly enthusiasm for a 376-year-old Passion Play can begin to ebb.
“I don’t think the world has got the message yet. During the last passion play, people were suddenly knocking at my door looking for rooms and a ticket,” Renate Frank, owner of Gasthof zur Rose, a popular Oberammergau guesthouse told Reuters. Today her lodgings are only half booked for the show. By this time 10 years ago, she was fully booked.
“Now we have the economic crisis,” Frank added, just days before the May 15th premiere of the 41st staging of the passion play in the Alpine village of Oberammergau.
Greek Orthodox Church gears up to provide relief for crisis victims
The Greek Orthodox Church is gearing up to provide relief supplies and psychological help when the country’s financial crisis really hits ordinary people after the summer, a senior churchman has said.
Greece plans draconian budget cuts to tackle a debt crisis threatening to spread across Europe. Some 50,000 Greeks marched against the austerity programme in Athens on Wednesday in a protest that saw three people killed in a fire-bombed bank.
“We know that the consequences of the measures will be more strongly felt after the summer, so we are getting ready (and) training parish priests to deal with the crisis,” Rev. Gabriel Papanicolaou told the World Council of Churches news service on Thursday.
Papanicolaou, who spoke in Geneva while attending a WCC meeting, said churches had to bring hope to their followers.
“But we are also preparing to supply food, clothes and other relief items, as well as to care for the needs of the people who lose their jobs (and) assist them with pastoral and psychological attention,” he said.
The cleric said the Orthodox Church, which officially represents more than 90 percent of Greece’s 11 million population, believed consumerism and greed had pushed people to spend without limits.
“This isn’t just an economic or financial crisis, but also a crisis of values,” he said. “We need to recover the spirit of humbleness.”
Tax dispute flairs between Cyprus gov’t and Orthodox Church
A furious dispute has erupted in Cyprus after the ruling communists set their sights on the island’s wealthy Orthodox Church of Cyprus to help plug a runaway deficit. The island’s government says it wants to start a dialogue with the Church regarding the millions it says the church owes in unpaid taxes.
The church says it does not owe a penny.
“We are not tax dodgers,” said Archbishop Chrysostomos, the prelate of the ancient church which traces its roots to some of the earliest followers of Jesus. The church has broad business interests ranging from a bank to a brewery.
This echoes recent moves in Greece, where the government has decided to tax bequests and revenues from the Greek Orthodox Church’s property to help tackle a 300 billion euro ($409.9 billion) debt pile. The Church, in Greece as in Cyprus one of the country’s biggest owners of prime real estate, has until now been largely exempt from taxes even though the state pays priests’ salaries.
Sharia boards face scrutiny amid financial crisis
Sharia boards face increased scrutiny and criticism as high-profile corporate defaults and cautionary comments from respected scholars cast a harsh light on the fast growth of financial products touted as Islamic.
Experts say rapid growth in the industry, which some estimates value at around $1 trillion, has put more pressure on scholars to sign off on increasingly complicated structures, wrapped in sharia packaging.
“In areas that have to do with capital guarantees, fixed income and derivatives … 40 to 50 percent of what’s being sent out is form over substance,” said Jawad Ali, managing partner at Dubai-based law firm King & Spalding. “Mistakes do happen when a sharia board focuses on the instrument being presented … and there is little scrutiny on how the structures are being implemented.”
Influential scholar Sheikh Taqi Usmani rocked the industry last year when he said many structures presenting themselves as Islamic didn’t meet the definition of true sharia compliance, raising concerns in the industry that some deals could be deemed un-Islamic after investors had bought them. Those concerns increased when Kuwait’s Investment Dar — which defaulted on a $100 million sukuk last May — presented a legal defense in the British High Court that one of its wakala, or agency deals, wasn’t sharia compliant.
Ethics angle missing in financial crisis debate
In the ongoing financial crisis debate, many people think that unrestricted subprime loans, credit default swaps, astronomical bonuses, huge bank bailouts and other aspects of today’s economy are somehow unfair or wrong. This issue is not only economic or political, it’s also about ethics and morality, these people think. But that view doesn’t get traction in our political discourse. Asking the big question about what is right/fair or wrong/unfair is not really debated. Sure, there are contrary views on this and any debate would be long and lively. But it doesn’t really happen.
Some moral issues do get traction in politics. Look at abortion or same-sex marriage. The forces on both sides of this argument have considerable clout (at varying levels, depending on the country). They hold heated debates over ethical principles such as the sanctity of human life, the freedom of individual choice or the principle of equality. But those are questions that are not primarily about the economy. When money gets thrown into the equation, there is much more of a tendency to let the market decide. What’s not illegal can’t be unethical, this view seems to argue.
So it was refreshing to find the Citizens Ethics Network in London standing up and asking why we’re not asking these questions. I’ve just run an article on this which starts as follows:
The debate about fixing the financial crisis seems to be missing a key factor — a broad ethical discussion of what is the right and wrong thing to do in a modern economy.
This omission stands out at a time when a survey by the World Economic Forum, host of the glittering annual Davos summits of the rich and powerful, says two-thirds of those queried think the crunch is also a crisis of ethics and values.
Voters in western countries may have a gut feeling that huge bonuses and bank bailouts are somehow unfair, but politicians seem unable to come up with a solid response that reflects it, according to a group trying to kickstart an ethics debate.
“People have strong emotions about right and wrong – that sense of justice is hard-wired into the way we view the world,” Madeleine Bunting, one of three founders of the Citizen Ethics Network launched in London last week, told Reuters.
“Our politics have lost the capacity to connect with that kind of emotion,” said Bunting, associate editor of Britain’s Guardian newspaper. “Politics has become very technocratic and managerial, all about who’s going to deliver more economic growth.”
In our phone conversation, Bunting said some would surely take this initiative as a disguised bid to bring religion back into a highly secularised society. It was not, she said, but morality and churches have been linked for so long that many immediately thought of religion when they heard the words morality or ethics. And they promptly think they’re being preached at, and turn off the message. But avoiding these issues is what got us into the muddle we now have, Bunting argued. “You can’t dodge these questions,” she said.
“For 20 years or so, the language of market efficiency was supposed to resolve everything. That was the only question that was asked,” she said. When asked about the fairness of certain economic policies, those defending them dismiss the question as “emotionalism” or “the politics of envy.” This leads to what Bunting calls “an abdication of debate” about ethical issues in the economic policy sphere.
This Network doesn’t want to promote specific policies as much as get a serious debate going. “The only way we can work out what the muddle is that we’ve got ourselves into over the last 25-30 years is to go back to the really fundamental questions of political and moral philosophy and start the argument again,” Bunting said. “That argument is not solved by the market, nor is it solved by socialism. This is about getting back to some arguments that have been central to most human societies. Aristotle would have recognized all these problems.”
POLL: Is Goldman Sachs “doing God’s work”? Its CEO thinks so
Check out the headline at the bottom left of the Sunday Times front page. The man the London paper calls the most powerful banker on Earth says he is “just a banker ‘doing God’s work’” .
The report says Goldman Sachs chief executive Lloyd Blankfein“proudly pays himself more in a year than most of us could ever dream of — $68m in 2007 alone, a record for any Wall Street CEO, to add to the more than $500m of Goldman stock he owns” .
Goldman Sachs looks set to pay about $20 billion in bonuses for its top traders this year, at a time when the fallout from last year’s financial crisis is still being felt and the United States unemployment rate has hit 10.2 percent, a 26-1/2-year high.
In his defence, Blankfein said in the interview: “We help companies to grow by helping them to raise capital. Companies that grow create wealth. This, in turn, allows people to have jobs that create more growth and more wealth. It’s a virtuous cycle … We have a social purpose.”
If your god’s name is satan, yeah they are doing a great job making people miserable , breaking up families , putting people on the street.Shame on you Esau’s children!!The time of Jacob’s trouble is almost over so enjoy making misery while you can!
Italian Muslims approve pope’s encyclical Caritas in Veritate
When Pope Benedict issued his encyclical Caritas in Veritate (Love in Truth) in July, he addressed it to “the bishops, priests and deacons, men and women religious, the lay faithful and all people of good will”. That list puts Catholics first, but it gets around to a wider audience by the end. Maybe because of that sequence, most of the discussion about the document has been in Catholic circles.
But in the pope’s back yard, i.e. in Italy, the message has attracted a wider audience. In a rare reaction from a non-Christian organisation, the Italian Muslim association Comunità Religiosa Islamica (CO.RE.IS.) Italiana has welcomed the encyclical and drawn parallels between its outlook and that of Islamic economic and social thinking. CO.RE.IS presented its reaction on the occasion of the Ecumenical Day of Christian-Islamic Dialogue in Italy on Tuesday. Following are some excerpts:
“The recent financial crisis, that witnessed an almost worldwide economic crash, should constitute a further confirmation of the impossibility of establishing a presumed society of wellbeing only upon market rules, excluding any transcendence, any metaphysical and religious perspective, as the pontiff has well expressed it … Just like the market cannot find in itself the meta-principles that would discipline it according to nature and to the function that God has entrusted to man on earth, money and capital cannot constitute a value in themselves, regardless of the finality of actions and of the realities that underlie their use…
“Islamic ethics, from its origins, develops the common principles of the Abrahamic civilisation as a whole aimed at providing ‘joint satisfaction in material and spiritual needs’. For example, the Islamic ban on loans with interest (ribâ) also existed in ancient Christianity. As early as the 4th and 5th centuries, the Fathers of the Church, both Greeks and Latins, ardently opposed it based on both the Old Testament and the Gospel… “In the centuries that have passed, the West has wished to forget the economic principles present in religions, basically considering them to be, in modern times, a heritage of archaic thought. However, it is not about ‘turning back’ to some anachronistic and ideal restoration, but to consider, as Benedict XVI has done in his appeal, the real contribution that a religious sensibility can concretely offer in fields such as the economy.”
CO.RE.IS says it is not using Caritas in Veritate to call for Islamic law in Western countries, but for an appreciation of religious views also inherent in Islam:
“Rather than implement parts of the sharîa within the current economic order, it is actually a matter of asking legislators to consider with due attention the contribution that economists, financial experts, technical advisors and those knowledgeable in Islam could give for a wider vision of the problems connected to the process of globalisation and governance. It is, therefore, not a matter of inserting Islamic rules into a world that could never entirely be Muslim but to benefit also from the knowledge found in the Islamic perspective on the economy.”
The document argued that an Islam understood according to its true principles and not through the extreme versions often presented by radicals had a contribution to make to the current economic discussion.
The old biblical message – do unto others as you would have them do to you – is not only a moral statement but also is a pragmatic solution in economics too. The value of work and workers has been deflated in recent years and this is a real value we have to back up our money systems. Our paper money systems require alot of questionable manipulations to grow value.
The first question to ask by all is this: Who said we had to compete like this with each other on a global basis? In the answer, we will find a way to restore the common good among all workers in the world. See http://tapsearch.com/pope-benedict-econo mic-encylical
U.S. Catholic CEO responds to Benedict’s economic encyclical
Pope Benedict’s encyclical “Charity in Truth” proposed a sweeping reform of the world economic system from one based on the profit motive to one based on solidarity and concern for the common good. Like other such documents in the Roman Catholic Church’s social teaching tradition, the encyclical delivers a strong critique of unbridled capitalism. This can be uncomfortable for Catholics who champion free enterprise and some conservative Catholic writers reacted quickly and critically. One of them, George Weigel, wrote the encyclical “resembles a duck-billed platypus.”
We wanted to hear the views of a Catholic executive, one who’s involved in business rather than reacting from the sidelines. So I called Frank Keating, president and chief executive officer of the American Council of Life Insurers (ACLI). The former Republican governor of Oklahoma (1995-2003) is a former chairman of the National Catholic Review Board, which he said “sought to identify and correct the horror of sexual abuse on the part of the clergy.” He is a Knight of Malta and a Knight of the Holy Sepulchre.
DB: What’s your overall reaction to the encyclical?
FK:“I haven’t read the 30,000 words but I think what the pope is proposing is not inconsistent with other papal messages. The common denominator to all of them is the worth of the individual, the dignity of every human person. So Benedict XVI focuses on the right to life, he speaks against euthanasia, he speaks against the evil of abortion, he speaks against cloning. But at the same time he talks about duties and responsibilities to the vulnerable because the vulnerable are dignified human beings as well as those who are rich and powerful.
“So to exploit someone in a capitalist society is, according to Benedict, inapropriate and contrary to Catholic moral teaching. But for me as a free market capitalist, I see in this statement also the right for me to determine my destiny. In other words, if I wish to work for the state I should be able to do so. If I wish to found a small business, I should be able to do so. A dignified, independent mortal soul, a caring individual should be able to determine their own destiny.
“There is a little bit for the left, support for unions, support for protection of the globe against waste, but there is also something I think for the free market advocates in the Church, because if you are an independent creature with a unique personality based upon, obviously, the immortality of your soul, you should be able to work or not work as your decision. I think there is a little bit for everyone.” DB: What do you think about Benedict’s call for a “world political authority” to manage the global economy?
FK: “I think it is impractical to suggest that sovereign nations will surrender on the one hand a free market economy or on the other hand a socialist economy or completely managed or disintigrating economy as you would have for example in a place like Zimbabwe, or places like that which are utterly dysfunctional. I don’t think he would suggest that those economies that work surrender what works to those that don’t work and be managed by some supernational group that would impoverish everybody. I think what he’s talking about.
As governor of Oklahoma, Keating was notoriously anti-union. He was the head cheerleader for ‘right to work’ which passed in 2001.for the New Mexico Conference of Churches statement on why RTW is wrong see: http://www.nmchurches.org/node/47also to read Guthrie’s thesis: ‘Labor Unions – Champions of Social Justice, seehttp://www.guthriefamilyfoundation.or g
-
Resident FaithWorld Expert
-
