The World and Everything in It - May 18, 2022

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Good morning!

No doubt you feel the pain of everything costing more. What can the White House and the Federal Reserve do about inflation?

NICK EICHER, HOST: That’s ahead on Washington Wednesday.

Also today, WORLD Tour.

Plus bringing the church to the streets.

And WORLD commentator Janie B. Cheaney.

REICHARD: It’s Wednesday, May 18th. This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Mary Reichard.

EICHER: And I’m Nick Eicher. Good morning!

REICHARD: Now news. Here’s Kent Covington.

KENT COVINGTON, NEWS ANCHOR: Biden meets with grieving families in the wake of Buffalo shooting » President Biden met with grieving families in Buffalo, New York on Tuesday and said the country must reject racial hatred.

BIDEN: In America, evil will not win, I promise you. Hate will not prevail. And white supremacy will not have the last word.

Investigators say the white suspect in Saturday’s shooting, Payton S. Gendron targeted most of his victims because they were black. Ten people died in the massacre at a supermarket.

Biden said he also is not giving up on pushing for tighter gun laws in the United States.

But the 18-year-old suspect purchased the rifle used in the attack in New York, which already has some of the strictest gun laws in the country.

Authorities say Gendron made a threat against his high school last year and was forced to undergo a mental health evaluation. Despite that fact, he was not on the state’s red flag list, which would have barred from legally buying a gun.

White House moves to loosen remittance, flight rules on Cuba » The Biden administration said Monday that it will loosen restrictions on travel to Cuba and lift other Trump-era limits on sending cash to the country. WORLD’s Kristen Flavin has more.

KRISTEN FLAVIN, REPORTER: The State Department said Monday that it will lift the current $1,000-per-quarter limit on family remittances. It will also allow non-family remittances to support independent Cuban business owners.

Additionally, it will move to reinstate the Cuban Family Reunification Parole Program.

That program allows certain U.S. citizens and legal residents to apply to let family members come to the United States sooner than the visa process normally allows.

The United States will also allow scheduled and charter flights to locations beyond Havana.

State Dept. spokesman Ned Price said the measures—quote—“aim to support Cubans’ aspirations for freedom and for greater economic opportunities.”

Critics say the moves will only strengthen the hand of Cuba’s oppressive communist government.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Kristen Flavin.

Ukraine evacuates fighters from Mariupol steel plant » Ukraine’s government said 53 soldiers have been evacuated from a steel plant in the port city of Mariupol. That plant for weeks has been the last Ukrainian stronghold in a city almost entirely occupied—and mostly destroyed—by Russian forces.

Those troops were transported to a hospital in the Russian-controlled town of Novoazovsk, east of Mariupol. Another 211 fighters left through a humanitarian corridor to the town of Olenivka.

Ukrainian officials say they’re working on an exchange plan to get the evacuated soldiers home.

FDA authorizes COVID-19 booster shots for kids ages 5 to 11 » The FDA on Tuesday gave the green light for COVID-19 booster shots for children ages 5 to 11. WORLD’s Anna Johansen Brown has more.

ANNA JOHANSEN BROWN, REPORTER: The FDA’s authorization opens a third shot of Pfizer's vaccine to healthy elementary-age kids—at least five months after their last dose.

That is assuming that the CDC also signs off on the authorization, as expected. The CDC’s board of advisers is scheduled to meet tomorrow.

Everyone 12 and older is already approved for one booster dose.

Pfizer makes the only COVID-19 vaccine available for children of any age in the United States.

The dose for 5-to-11-year-olds is one-third the strength of those given to everyone 12 and older.

Demand for vaccine shots has fallen nationwide, but that could change if new cases continue to rise. Infections have been trending upward since about the first of April. Hospitalizations are also up, but deaths have continued to decline.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Anna Johansen Brown.

I’m Kent Covington. Straight ahead: the Biden administration’s plan to bring down inflation.

Plus, hacking the human psyche.

This is The World and Everything in It.

NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s Tuesday the 18th of May, 2022.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard.

We told you about this yesterday, so a quick reminder right now about our new-donor drive. We have a generous donor who’s offered to match everything that new donors give, but this week only. A little competitive urgency.

EICHER: Right. It’s not a dollar-amount match. It’s a time-limited match. If you’ve never given before and you give today, tomorrow, or Friday, your gift is doubled at WNG.org/newdonor. Time is of the essence: today, tomorrow, Friday. It takes a team to support a team of journalists and we hope you’ll join that team today and make a gift—again, first-time donors only. WNG.org/newdonor.

REICHARD: Up first: inflation.

​​Costs continue to rise with no end in sight—everything from gas to rent to food.

President Biden says the pandemic, and more recently, Vladimir Putin, are to blame. Republicans say the White House is partly responsible.

EICHER: Of course we know that inflation is too much money chasing too few goods and services. Simple definition, difficult cure. The Federal Reserve is trying to fight inflation by raising interest rates in an effort to cool off the economy—and hoping that will tame rising costs.

So what are the real drivers of inflation? And when might we see some relief?

Joining us now to help tackle those questions is Desmond Lachman. He formerly served as managing director and a top economic strategist at the investment bank Salomon Smith Barney. He also served at the International Monetary Fund.

REICHARD: Desmond, good morning!

DESMOND LACHMAN, GUEST: Good morning!

REICHARD: In the simplest terms possible, how did we get here? Why do we have the highest inflation in four decades?

LACHMAN: Well, there are a number of reasons for it, as the administration and the Federal Reserve have been saying, part of the reason is the pandemic. So what that did is it disrupted supply chains. That meant that we couldn't get things like computer chips to go into our factories for automobiles and appliances and that sent up the prices of those goods. Now, more recently, what we've had is we've had Russia's war in Ukraine. And what that's doing is it’s sending oil prices through the roof. Oil prices are up something like 50%, food prices are up 50%. So those kind of factors that are external to the United States, certainly have played a role. But what has also played a very big role is the massive amount of fiscal stimulus that the economy received. So what President Biden did in March of 2021, is he introduced this American Rescue Plan. It was $1.9 trillion of spending. That's a huge amount. It's about 8% of the size of the economy. And that came on top of $3 trillion in the previous year that was the Trump bipartisan fiscal stimulus. So we were giving as much as $5 trillion in fiscal stimulus. That's a big boost to an economy and ran the risk of getting the economy overheated by the end of 2021, as Larry Summers warned and that's exactly what happened.

To make matters worse is the Federal Reserve was fast asleep at the wheel when all of this public spending was going on, when inflation was picking up, when we had all of these supply-side problems. The Federal Reserve kept its pedal to the metal. So they just kept expanding the money supply and money supply increased by something like 40% over the past two years. They kept interest rates at zero. They kept buying the pretty hundreds of billions of dollars of bonds, pumping up the market. So in the end, it's not very surprising that we now are having inflation running at around about eight and a half percent, something that we haven't seen since 1981. So we've certainly got an inflation problem on our hands. And it's not all due to factors that are beyond our control—pandemic or Russian invasion.. and what the Fed is now trying to do is it's trying to raise interest rates to cool the economy, in the hope that we can can bring inflation down without provoking a recession in the process.

REICHARD: Alright so that’s a lot to unpack there. Aside from politics though, what power does the president have to address it?

LACHMAN: The President has relatively limited power to deal with inflation. So what it can do and what he is doing is, for instance, he's releasing oil from the strategic reserve in the hope that increased supply will bring the oil prices down from where they are. That might be good. You might get lower prices at the pump, but you're not going to get much that way. You know, we've already seen even though he's released all of this oil, international oil prices are still around about $110 a barrel. We’re still paying close to $4.50 at the pump. So that didn't go too far. What they're toying with now is maybe reducing tariffs on China. That might provide a little bit of relief. But these measures are more political. He wants to be seen to be doing something about inflation. He's wanting to project the image that he feels people's pain. But the truth of the matter is that he doesn't have much control. Who does have control right now is the Federal Reserve, that by slamming on the monetary policy brakes, they can bring down inflation. But what they might be doing is when they bring down the inflation that way, they might be provoking a big recession. Part of the reason that one worries about a recession is that as the Fed raises interest rates, what we’re seeing is we seeing the stock market is now swooning. So we're getting the stock market swooning, we're getting credit markets swooning. That means that people feel a lot less wealthy than they did before, as they see their stock prices go down. That is another reason why they begin to restrain their spending. And that's part of the reason why I fear we could be headed into recession. And that would be part of the price that will pay for the big policy mistakes made both by the Federal Reserve and the administration last year when they overheated the economy.

REICHARD: I want to talk about you referenced earlier and that’s the supply chain problems. Both the White House and the Federal Reserve haver said for a while now that’s really what’s mostly driving inflation, saying inflation would be temporary, but the Fed’s changed its tune. It doesn’t look so temporary anymore. Why is that?

LACHMAN: Well, it’s very difficult to argue with the facts. So, the Fed at the beginning of last year, even though we had already had problems in the supply chain, the Fed was telling us, don't worry, we're gonna keep inflation below our 2% target. But as month after month went by, and inflation instead of coming down, kept going up, it's very difficult for them to remain in denial. So they've belatedly realized that this isn't a transitory problem. They probably know that they're partly to blame for this. So they've got no alternative but to raise interest rates, stop buying all of these bonds to try to bring inflation under control. Part of their problem, as I've mentioned, is that by keeping monetary policy so loose by pumping so much money into the economy last year, not only did they get an inflation problem, but they got an equity price bubble, a housing price bubble, fueled by these very low interest rates, now that they've got to slam on the monetary policy brakes, raise interest rates to curb the inflation, what they’re also likely to be doing is causing those bubbles to burst. And that is the reason that it's going to be very difficult for them to get the soft landing that they're hoping for.

REICHARD: You’re saying it’s not enough for the Fed to raise interest rates? That’s not going to fix the problem?

LACHMAN: No, I'm saying that by raising interest rates, the Fed is likely to succeed in getting inflation down. But they're gonna succeed in getting inflation down by getting the economy to go into recession by having unemployment rising by having all sorts of slack all over the place. So it's sort of like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. You'll solve the inflation problem, but you'll do it by creating an employment and output problem by creating a deep recession. So that's hardly a comforting thought that we might get inflation going back down next year, but we'll also get the economy in recession.

REICHARD: Desmond Lachman is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Desmond, a pleasure to talk with you. Thank you.

LACHMAN: Well, it's good to talk to you, and it would be great if you sent us the podcast.

REICHARD: Certainly! Will do. Thanks again.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: World Tour. Here’s our reporter in Africa, Onize Ohikere.

ONIZE OHIKERE, REPORTER: Christian student stoned in Nigeria—Today we start with troubling news here in Nigeria.

AUDIO: [Sound of protests]

Muslim students at the Shehu Shagari College of Education attacked and killed a Christian classmate Thursday after she posted a message on social media they found offensive.

The irate mob stoned Deborah Samuel to death and then burned her body. Someone posted videos of the gruesome attack online.

Police arrested two people and used the video to identify others who participated.

On Saturday, hundreds of Muslims protested in Sokoto to demand police free the suspects.

Nigeria’s population is evenly divided between Christians and Muslims. But Sokoto is one of Nigeria’s northern Islamic states that enforces Sharia law.

Sri Lanka runs out of gas, medicine—From a religious crisis in Africa to an economic disaster in South Asia.

AUDIO: [Man speaking Sinhala]

That’s Sri Lanka’s new prime minister in a televised address … announcing the country has run out of gasoline. Three tankers are waiting outside the Colombo harbor to unload shipments of oil. But the cash-strapped government cannot raise enough money to pay for it.

The government has also run out of 14 essential medicines, including drugs to treat heart disease and a rabies vaccine.

The prime minister took office Thursday after weeks of protests over the economic crisis forced his predecessor to resign. The new leader said, “The next couple of months will be the most difficult ones of our lives.”

Sri Lanka is suffering through its worst-ever economic crisis. People are struggling to find food, fuel, and medicines amid record-high inflation and lengthy power blackouts.

India blocks wheat exports—Next to India, where a sudden ban on wheat exports has created chaos at a major port.

AUDIO: [Sound of idling trucks, horns]

About 4,000 trucks are stuck in long lines outside the port in Kandla, waiting to unload. And it’s not clear whether four ships partially filled with 80,000 tonnes of wheat will be allowed to leave.

India is the world's second-largest grower of wheat. Last week, the government ordered traders not to enter into new export deals without prior approval.

Wheat prices surged to a record high on Monday amid shortages caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

India had previously said it would help meet global demand. That helped to ease fears of major shortages. But India’s extreme heatwave has caused fears of a reduced harvest. Government officials now say they need to protect the food supply for their own people.

Chinese students protest COVID lockdowns—And finally, we end today in China, where anger over strict COVID lockdowns boiled over into protests at an elite university in Beijing.

AUDIO: [Sound of heckling]

Students at Peking University shouted down a professor who spoke in support of quarantine measures. They cheered when he agreed to negotiate over a solution.

AUDIO: [Cheering]

University leaders eventually agreed to allow students to move more freely around campus and have groceries delivered.

China is the only major country sticking to a rigid zero-COVID policy. In Beijing, most restaurants and public spaces are closed and millions face daily testing and work-from-home requirements.

That’s this week’s World Tour. Reporting for WORLD, I’m Onize Ohikere in Abuja, Nigeria.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Cleanup on aisle 45! Interstate 45, actually.

Cleanup crews had egg all over them. They spent hours early Monday morning cleaning egg up all westbound lanes of the interstate in Dallas. That after a tractor trailer crashed, spilling a quarter of a million eggs onto the asphalt.

The driver was unharmed, but it created an egg-tremely sticky situation, slippery situation both for commuters who had to find another way to work that morning and for cleanup crews who were scrambling to sweep up the mess.

But they did egg-cellent work, and a few hours later, traffic was sunny side up.

It’s The World and Everything in It.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Wednesday, May 18th. Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

Austin, Texas is known for barbeque and great music. But it’s becoming known for something else: a growing population of homeless people.

REICHARD: More and more tents are popping up on street corners, under bridges, and on walking trails. WORLD’s Caleb Bailey recently visited Austin and discovered one way local churches are meeting physical and spiritual needs on the streets.

CALEB BAILEY, REPORTER: If you happen to get caught in traffic on I-35 in Austin, Texas, on a Sunday morning, you may hear echoes of music. That’s not because you’re in the live music capital of the world.

Under that highway, a church gathers to worship.

Its members might not look like your typical church-goers. Instead of leatherbound Bibles in hand, many are holding cardboard signs. The shade of the bridge is just cool enough to keep the warm sun from driving away worshippers with heavy jackets and shopping carts.

This is Church Under the Bridge, a homeless ministry of Mission Possible Austin. Local churches join together to host this outdoor Sunday service every week. And anyone’s welcome to come, homeless or not.

JJ Plasencio is the city pastor at Austin Oaks Church.

PLASENCIO: The church always says, hey, we want to reach the city for Jesus. Every church will say that very common, but really what you're saying is they have to walk through your doors. So what does it really mean to actually reach the city for Jesus unless you go, right?

Mission Possible began 30 years ago with a weekly service, but today it’s much more.

PLASENCIO: So it has a lifeline pregnancy center, which is located at 12 and Chicago, which is their main campus, and then along there they have one of the most active, what’s called sober house. They’re for people who are suffering from addiction. So they do that as well. There's also a big food group there.

Every Sunday at the bridge between 7th and 8th street, a yellow truck with the Mission Possible logo pulls in at 9 a.m. and begins to set up an outdoor sanctuary. Chairs, a PA system, instruments, tables.

This Sunday, as men and women raise their arms under concrete pillars, the busy street traffic can’t drown out the chorus of “All Our Hope Is In Jesus.”

PLASENCIO: Music is the bridge -it bridges all barriers culturally, even, you know, demographically, and you know even in age so it translates just so much just. I mean music communicates emotion just like language communicates thought right?

At the back of the makeshift venue sits a table with food, coffee, clothes, and reading glasses. But board member Clay Davis says the volunteers are here to offer more than material support.

DAVIS: One of the things that we talk about is getting on the other side of the table. You can serve food and get coffee and clothes and all that's wonderful and people need that. But do that and then get on the other side of the table and just say, How are you doing? How can I pray for you? Tell me your story.

Consistency in this sort of ministry is important. The recurring meeting time helps foster those relationships.

DAVIS: A lot of churches, the people that come through the door and they're more likely to minister to them on a regular basis more likely to develop relationships versus just kind of, if they're just out on the street, just kind of casually meeting people. How am I going to see them again? So I think one of the really great things about church under the bridge is the fact that they're back every single week and be able to see the same people.

This Sunday, one 19-year old visitor is back for the second time.

HOMELESS MAN: Like I feel like this place welcomes me.. you know.. I don't feel like I'm judged here or anything like that.

He didn’t want to share his name … or talk about what drove him to homelessness at such a young age. But he carried burdens the service seemed to relieve.

HOMELESS MAN: I just want to encourage everybody to count their blessings. Count your blessings all the time.

Mike Featherstone is Mission Possible’s street ministry coordinator.

FEATHERSTONE: The whole concept is we're not trying to get anything from you. We're not asking you for anything.

Featherstone makes sure that every Sunday communicates a common theme.

FEATHERSTONE: We're just trying to give to you that gospel of grace. That's the whole purpose of being here.

He says pure and simple, the gospel is the priority.

FEATHERSTONE: Religion is man's attempt to get to God. I’ll say Christianity, is God getting to man. That's the whole concept of what we do. It's not by works. It's about what he did, not what you're gonna do.

Coffee, conversation, and clothing are all practical ways to point people to food and garments that won’t wear out over time.

FEATHERSTONE: You know, a couple of weeks ago, we were talking about the great banquet, the wedding banquet, and our job here as believers… it was the Great Commission it wasn't called to great suggestion…. Our job is to make sure people are clothed for that banquet. And the clothing that we wear, our wedding garments, is not some fancy clothing, our wedding garment is the blood of Jesus Christ.

Featherstone says the message preached under the bridge every Sunday applies to all churches, whether their members have homes or not.

FEATHERSTONE: In the midst of downtown Austin City that’s known for a lot of wild things in modern times keeping up with all this keeping up with all that there's only ever been two choices. The devil wants to make you think there's multiple choices. There’s not. There’s two. With God or without God, simple as that.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Caleb Bailey in Austin, Texas.

REICHARD: Caleb produced a video version of this story for World Watch. We’ve included a link to that in today’s transcript.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Wednesday, May 18th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. Here’s WORLD commentator Janie B. Cheaney.

JANIE B. CHEANEY, COMMENTATOR: Just as Leviticus is the graveyard of many a Bible reading plan, That Hideous Strength is the Waterloo of many a C. S. Lewis fan. “I can’t get through it!” they say. I get it; the last volume of Lewis’s Space Trilogy takes longer than it needs to connect the dots and start building tension, in my opinion it’s worth the effort. Lewis foresaw the corruption of the university, the rise of the expert class, and the marriage of science and politics.

But some of his narrative devices seemed far-fetched when I reread it in the early 1980s. The university where the story is set becomes host to the National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments (acronym NICE), whose ultimate goal is to basically eradicate organic life and replace it with something cleaner, leaner, and more manageable. If anything, American culture in the 80s reveled in organic life, especially where blood and guts and sex were concerned. But subtle forces were at work then that are oozing out of the many cracks in our social order now.

The scientists of Nice believe they have created a functioning brain that thinks and speaks. It’s their first step toward, quote, “taking charge of our destiny.”

Not so farfetched after all, when today’s “science” foresees unprecedented power around the nearest corner. Just ask Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari, who writes, “History began when humans invented gods, and will end when humans become gods.” Harari predicts that within 200 years the species we call “human” will be unrecognizable. Humans will become the product of Intelligent Design—not God’s, but ours.

He builds that forecast on neuroscience, which he believes will master the human brain in a few decades, reaping an unimaginable wealth of data. With this information, supercomputers will know more about us than we know about ourselves, predicting—and eventually controlling—what we think, how we feel, and what we do.

Harari calls this “hacking humans,” and admits it makes him uneasy. Who will own the data? When pressed to give an answer at the 2018 World Economic Forum, Harari had to say, “I don’t know.” Which may be the only response to the problem as he saw it.

Harari, and the fictional scientists of the N.I.C.E, make one huge assumption: that matter in motion explains everything. To them, things that seem immaterial, such as human consciousness, are really the invisible products of synapses in the brain. But there is no direct evidence for this. It’s a prior assumption. Given humanity’s spotted record, no thinking materialist could be confident about its power to hack the human psyche.

Assumptions are necessary for thought, but they’re not equally valid. Here's another prior for your consideration: that the deterministic future predicted by Harari is in the hands of One who laughs at its presumptions. And He has the final say.

I’m Janie B. Cheaney.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Tomorrow: gun kits, what they are and why the government’s moving to regulate them.

And, making flour. We’ll meet a man who wasn’t satisfied with the options on the grocery store shelf.

That and more tomorrow.

I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard.

The World and Everything in It comes to you from WORLD Radio.

WORLD’s mission is biblically objective journalism that informs, educates, and inspires.

A reminder that May is our new-donor drive. If you’re a regular listener but a never-donor … would you consider this month becoming a first-time donor? A generous offer sweetens the deal now through Friday to double whatever you can give. Give $50, it turns into $100. Every dollar counts to keep Christian journalism in the marketplace of ideas. WNG.org/newdonor.

My favorite verse from the Psalms about the Creator:

“Be still, and know that I am God.” (Psalm 46:10 ESV)

Go now in grace and peace.

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.