I’ve been thinking a hell of a lot about money lately, both as a symbol for the exchange of value and as an actual object. The idea first struck me a few months ago when I was looking at a $10 bill and realized: I have no idea if this is counterfeit.
The image of the dollar was, at one point, totally iconic, totally unmistakeable. Then they started tinkering with its appearance, giving it a face-lift in an effort to - supposedly - thwart counterfeiters. But by changing around our bills and adding in all kinds of colors and weird little widgets into it, it no longer has that “ZAZ!” for me that it once had - just from a strictly visual standpoint.
I would be interested in seeing a chart of relative values of the US dollar over history as they have made modifications to various denominations’ designs. I don’t know necessarily what it would prove, but it would make for a cool informational graphic.
While we’re on the subject of branding/marketing and the dollar though, this seems like a good opportunity to broaden the conversation with some potential talking points:
- What do you see as the advantages and disadvantages of using US currency, if any? Have you ever thought about it before this?
- Do you have faith in what US currency is based on? What is it backed by?
- Are you worried that the dollar is losing value and that this could have disastrous consequences for the economy? Why or why not? If so, how could this dollar drop be slowed, reversed, or otherwise avoided?
This is also amazing, and from an amazing movie, Network:
- END -
ASSOCIATED CONTENT @TMBCHR (Auto-Generated)
- This is what lies behind the devaluation of the dollar.
- MONEY EXPERIMENT. Dwindling Dollar
- Other Peoples’ Money
- Legality of Local & Complementary Currencies
- God Brand
13 Comments
Wow, great clip.
I think a really important part of the dollar brand comes from the Fed. They’ve sold this idea that the forces that control the dollar transcend the government, and thus the Fed is not part of the government proper…this protects the dollar somewhat from perceived incompetance from government.
In reality, it is like in the clip. You’ve got international finance on one hand, and the idea of nation-states on the other. Chompksy says the success of nations depends on strong nation state policies and identity, and I am sure he is right. Nation states are like unions, they help the people in them, but to some extent they are artificial constructs which keep market forces from acting within. Its like this whole thing where we can fly to India and live for 2 months off $200. Why is our money (labor) worth so much more than theirs? Its not market forces, we are not that much more innately productive than indians, its an artificial construct not based on market forces.
This is what lies behind the devaluation of the dollar. The forces that have been in control in America have been working to strategically weaken the American Nation-state on several fronts: Creating economic dependence on China for goods, sending jobs overseas, keeping borders open to promote widescale cultural integration with Mexico and reduce national identity, aquiring mass debt with China to bind the dollar to their production, and strategically losing a war in Iraq to devalue the brand of the American military, and doing this by sending military funds en masse to private corporations (security contractors) which are actually working to destablize the region, as has been shown through many, many incidents from random murders to selling arms to insurgents, something of which the Iraqi government is now well aware:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,,-7021382,00.html
The funniest part of it all is how they are using nationalism to gain support for it all. Take fox news with its pundits screaming about “America haters” being owned and tightly controlled by Australian Rupert Murdoch. I can’t wait for them to use that term to describe opponents of Arnie when they push to ammend the constitution so foriegn born citizens can be prez. “Real Americans have austrian accents too, only a RACIST couldn’t see that!” hee hee. It will be fun.
Anyway the bottom line is that the dollar is coming down in the long term, that’s my take. The current excuse why they are happy about it is that it helps reduce the burden of the trade deficit, but I believe its part of a much larger plan which has nothing to do with mom and pop “liberals” or “conservatives”, and it will continue under Clinton II under the guise of the pro NAFTA pro WTO “neo-liberalism” that characterized Clinton I, rather than the “neo-conservatism” that Characterized Bush I and II…But it will continue.
And it just is what it is. We will lose the spectacular priviledge that we enjoyed for a long time as Americans, but it may be good for much poorer nations, as we will be absorbing much of their poverty in the name of leveling the global playing field.
That’s my political rant of the day.
Holy moley, Svenson! I’m gonna need time to absorb all that properly!
Immediate comments:
Why are they doing this? And pretty please (not directed at you), let’s not allow this to devolve into a pointless (by that I mean replayed ad nauseum already online) conspiracy tirade about the New World Order.
By the way, this dovetails perfectly into the reasoning behind why I posted these AT&T ads:
http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2007...paign-your-seamless-world-all-videos/
It seems to be part of a larger effort to push the idea of “placeless living”… which is it’s own sub-topic. As someone who is professionally semi-nomadic, I fit perfectly into their demographic, and yet I don’t fully *buy* the reasoning they probably have behind this.
More soon… I have a hell of a lot on my plate right now offline.
On one of my NWO etc. sites I heard that under some obscure provision of a law passed in the wake of the Patriot Act would outlaw bartering w/o proper ID/permission. The video was two hours long and that wasn’t the topic but you might want to look into that. If I run into something I’ll pass it along.
Its just a change, one system winning out over another one. Of course the active players in this don’t sit around saying “I know, lets weaken the American nation-state!” they say “I know, lets facilitate an interconnected global market where we all depend on each other so we can eradicate war and make lots of money!” But its the same diff, for something to live something else often has to die.
It comes with some good and some bad. One tough part is moving away from the WWII era defense model, where we all band together and contribute and sacrifice for the war effort, to the “defense provider/consumer” model, where we have a war and we aren’t asked to contribute to it at all, but rather let the corporations take care of it while we get photographed naked at airports and have our phones tapped…But its all part of the shrinking America model, where we learn that “America” is something that applies to troops and contractors and supporters of certain policies, but not commoners like us, who are merely citizens of the world.
Its got its good too. I’m learning spanish, kind of looking forward to our new Latin American back yard. I would love to score some nice south American property in the coming years before the dollar gets too devalued and we are on a totally even keel with them…
Svenson,
have you read “the Shield of Achilles” by Phillip whatshisname?
Bobbit?
No, but I’m looking at it on Amazon now and it looks interesting. Is it worth checking out?
Addendum: I wish I didn’t say “shinking America model” above, I wish I had said “shrinking America phenomenon”. Its not like its some model somebody necessarily planned out…Its just that the language of conspiracy is one of the only ways we have to talk about emergent phenomenon in our own culture.
Yes, and this needs to be rectified quickly. One of the only other language frameworks we have seems to be stuff like “trend-casting” and other think-tank style speak. What’s *good* about conspiracy theory in that regard is that it becomes a layman’s language for analyzing these questions and issues, but it has SO MUCH BAGGAGE that it becomes emotionally draining and therefore inhibits its real usability.
I think the value of the dollar, while slowly decreasing for basic life-essential goods (and yet constantly increasing in terms of what you can buy with it technologically), is kind of a sociologically self-sustaining thing. I don’t think most people care what it’s based on, whether it’s gold or whatever, they just care that the next guy will take it when they want to buy something. And the next guy invariably does take it.
I would also add that the 3rd half of Jeanette Winterson’s new book, The Stone Gods, has an amazing take on the role of the Corporation in the future, not just in the context of war but in the context of the value that we place on our lives.
I can’t recommend this book highly enough. The front is a little bumpy, since it is her first foray into science fiction, but there were so many gems in this book, I just wanted to underline the whole thing.
I was thinking of something like ‘confluency theory’, historical events happen due to a confluence of interests and circumstances, not necessarily coordinated or even aware of each other. (a ‘confluent’ means the same thing as a ‘tributary’, a small stream of water that feeds a bigger one.)
Certainly there are plenty of conspirators who conspire, but in almost no case can we ever say a major event happened ‘because’ of the conspiracy. The conspirators’ operations are only instances or examples of greater trends.
If Hitler hadn’t burned the Reichstag, say that plan failed, the eco-socio-political environment that allowed the Nazis to come to power would still be there. There were conspirators at work, but they didn’t ’cause’ the rise of the Nazis so much as contributed to the trends that they themselves were born into.
Svenson, I don’t know what kind of books you are into but its a really good book, if long. Like really long. Honestly I skimmed a lot but read some chapters in depth and its great. Really good insight into the coming “market state”
If you like Malcom Gladwell, Howard Bloom, people that write like that you will like it. Bobbit takes you through history and shows how civilization has evolved.