Feb. 3, 2006 - At the heart of the religious view of the world there is a heart. At the heart of the globalists’ view of the world there is a pump. The pump pumps capital around he world, or it doesn’t pump capital. It all depends on whether you obey the rules of the pumpmasters, whom I met at Davos, Switzerland, as they tweaked the pump that pumps the capital that runs the world, the world that I tell my congregants runs on love and mercy and goodness and compassion. Someone does not understand the world, either the pumpmasters or me, and after a week in Davos, I fear it may be me.
The day I arrived in at the World Economic Forum gathering in Davos, I gave a speech to assorted billionaires on the nature of happiness, and that is when it first hit me. I have never felt so stupid and irrelevant in my life. Whenever I speak to Jim Watson about DNA, I feel stupid, and whenever I talk to teenage girls, I feel irrelevant. However, until I was invited to Davos, I have never felt both stupid and irrelevant. What the 800 CEOs and heads of state, Bono and other assorted glitterati know and care about has absolutely nothing to do with what I know and with what I care about. That’s OK because the same thing is true of plumbers except that plumbers don’t rule the world.
The laws of the pump don’t even come close to intersecting with the laws of faith. I believe that every person is made in the image of God and is thus a sacred being. They believe that every person is a statistic--a unit of labor cost--and is thus a number on some balance sheet. It is not that the pumpmasters are heartless or cruel. They will gladly defend the laws of the pump and tell you that free markets, low labor costs, stable political climates, increasing jobs and wealth and GDP growth gives all people a better life. They will proudly defend the accomplishments of the pump and show you how it destroyed Soviet communism and mostly destroyed Chinese communism and turned around Japan and India and Ireland and Brazil and Poland and ... then they will show you how global capitalism leads inexorably to freedom and how freedom leads to more faith, or more golf, whichever you prefer on Saturday or Sunday morning. They will remind you that countries that forbid capitalism also forbid religion. However, what is missing from all these glowing panegyrics is even a shred of compassion or empathy for workers who must leave their families to find work at a pump station in another country, or workers who lose their jobs to workers in the Third World who will work for a dollar a day. The pump is heartless to the suffering it causes as it turns on and turns off the economic futures of people around the world. Marx wrote that the suffering of individuals is simply outside the noisy din of world history. It is also outside the noisy din of the pump. It may be the only thing Marx got right.
I heard an Australian labor unionist scream at the pumpmasters in a BBC roundtable discussion on jobs, “This is all so unfair! It is unfair to ask workers to work for $5 dollars a day!” The pumpmasters just stared blankly at her, but you could read their thoughts, “Listen up. We didn’t make the pump rules. Labor is a commodity just like steel, and as the pumpmasters we will always buy labor at the lowest possible price. And by the way, if those workers you care about so much were paid $100 a day, when you go to the store to buy sneakers for your kids, you are going to have to pay $200 a pair instead of $29.99 a pair. What helps you hurts them. Then an African leader said, “My people were making $5 a month and now they are making $5 a day so who are you to stop our progress out of poverty?” The rules of the pump are simple. Everything else is very complicated.
Hamas was elected during the conference and nobody much cared about it or spoke about it. They all knew that very soon one of the pumpmasters would be calling up Hamas and telling them something like this, “Your people are broke and eating dirt, and we don’t care if they eat dirt for another 100 years. If you want the pump to pump you some capital, you have to renounce terror, recognize Israel, end corruption, set up a court system, create political stability and then we will open the pump for you. If not, your people can eat dirt.” For this same reason Klaus Schwab, who runs the WEF, moved swiftly and forthrightly to remove from the shelves and fire the publisher of the organization’s magazine, Global Agenda, which had included an article about boycotting Israel because Zionism is racism. In the globalist village, there may be no room for heartbreak, but there is also no room for xenophobia, racism and terror. It is all just bad business for the pump.
The card hanging around his neck identified him as William Gates III, chairman of Microsoft, USA. The card hanging around my neck read, Marc Gellman, Senior Rabbi, Temple Beth Torah, USA. That just about tells the whole story of my week at the WEF. I was standing around one day waiting to hear some other billionaires opine, and suddenly a friend of mine and golfing buddy who publishes a brilliant weekly magazine came up behind me and shouted, “What fairway are we on?” I’m still not sure.
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