In June 2007, EVR published a two-part article series entitled Flying Scrolls and Baskets: A Vision of Today. It is an exposition of Zechariah 5. Amazingly, this short chapter of only 11 verses, contains two separate but important visions of the endtimes. Readers may recall the account of a giant scroll that is levitating in the air (verses 1 to 4). Right after this, the angel speaking to Zechariah shows him another vision. We then see a strange picture of an ephah (measuring basket) being carried by two women with the wings of storks.
We concluded that the false witness (lying) and the stealing being mentioned specifically had to do with the global idolatrous commercialism and corruption of all human life on earth of the last days, depicted in the second vision. Pinpointed were the two sins that are mainly responsible for the filthy idolatry that was shown in the flying ephah—lying and stealing.
Encompassed in these visions, by implication, was everything from the elevation of manipulative and global monetary systems, fiat money, capitalism, competitive globalism based on the vested interest of intertwined world-wide trading systems, accounting shenanigans, corporatism and debt-based wealth to grand larceny All together it represents that heaving mass of Mammonism—a world that has chosen Money over God.
According to the visions, the corrosiveness and imbalances of these systems literally consumed “the timber thereof and the stones thereof” (Zechariah 5:4), this symbolizing the structure of mankind’s globalized foundation. For such systems to prosper—prospering here meaning nothing more than giving the semblance of success, though its underpinnings are deceitful and not sustainable—they depend upon two impulses alone. What are these? To no surprise, the very two sins of stealing and false witness. We invite you to read the entire two-part article which can be found on our website.
We again raise the issues of “lying and stealing” as these continue to become more organized, sophisticated and globalized than ever before in history. Again, this trend we interpret to be aligned with the prophesied conditions that Zechariah foresaw. We next list just a few statistics from around the globe that are emblematic of this state.
- According to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA, and we here quote from a Special Report of the Bank Credit Analyst dated May 24, 2011) margins of overseas business have swung up relatively suddenly. Between 2000 and 2008, profit margins of overseas management companies (most of these just a mail drop on a sub-tropical island somewhere) rose from 25.8% to 57%. These very same management companies only accounted for 0.1% of total overseas revenues! Alternatively, segmenting overseas profits by country, we discover that profit margins in “Other Western Hemisphere” exploded from 37% to 103.7%. That category is a catch-all that includes most tax havens. We are not sure how a profit margin can be greater than 100%. But apparently, this is now possible in the corrupt and weird world of multi-national corporation profits.
- The 2005 UNODC World Drug Report estimated the worldwide drug trade at $320 billion.
- A 2009 study showed that 18 out of 20 psychiatrists who wrote the American Psychiatric Association’s most recent clinical guidelines for treating depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia had financial ties to drug companies. Not surprisingly, in 2008, with over $14 billion in sales, antipsychotic became the single top-selling therapeutic class of prescription drugs in the United States. – Aljazeera.net, July 12, 2011
- In the United States, UNODC estimates that smugglers are paid around $7 billion to bring 2.7 million Latin Americans over the border every year. Though it would seem as though this equates to a $7 billion outflow from developing countries, in fact this amount is more than made up in the $20 billion in remittances which migrants send back to Latin America every year.
- In 2005, TRAFFIC Europe estimated that the total legal trade in wildlife (not including fish and timber which are discussed in separate sections of this report) was worth $22.8 billion. Illegal trade is estimated to be around one-third of the legal trade which would set it at a range between $7.6 and $8.3 billion.
- In January 2011, approximately 300 economists signed a letter urging the American Economic Association, (AEA) the world’s largest association of economists, to adopt an ethics code. The letter cited a study that found that the vast majority of economists did not reveal their private affiliations when writing academic papers on financial regulatory reform or opinion pieces in newspapers. It also cited a Reuters investigation of lack of disclosure of consulting gigs and directorships in congressional testimony. Only a handful of its 18,000 members have bothered to offer any input. – Reuters, July 8, 2011
- The companies whose brands are copied measure counterfeiting according to how much they lose as a result of the practice. In his book, Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers, and Copycats are Hijacking the Global Economy, Moisés Naím cites an Interpol figure that estimates global commercial losses due to counterfeiting at around $500 billion.
- The most recent report by Global Financial Integrity (GFI) report Illicit Financial Flows from Developing Countries,found that illicit outflows have increased to a range of US$1.26 trillion to US$1.44 trillion in 2008 and that, on average, developing countries lost between US$725 billion to US$810 billion per year over the nine-year period 2000-2008. Illicit flows increased in current dollar terms by 18.0 percent per annum from US$369.3 billion at the start of the decade to US$1.26 trillion in 2008. When adjusted for inflation, the real growth of such outflows was 12.7 percent.