The culture of money

For those of us who take more than a cursory curiosity over the strands of time in the journey of the human race, and the expanse of space in every crack and cranny of planet Earth, the culture of money is certainly at the head of the class as the organizing principle of our era.

As sixth grade Social Studies students will tell you, humans exchanged produce first through barter before settling to using animals, primarily cows, as the medium of value exchange. In some places, the shells of mollusks were used even up to the middle of the previous century in the Pacific.

China in 100 AD started with metal money and coins; four centuries later, Lydia (Turkey) came out with silver that evolved through the Aryan-Greco-Roman empires into the familiar round form we know today.

Danes slit citizens’ noses when they failed to pay poll tax before the last millennium, thus the phrase “pay through the nose.” Paper currency appeared in China, while the wampum (beads) flourished in North America before the European contact. England adopted the gold standard in 1816 tying it to banknotes; the U.S. came on board the standard in 1900, forsaking it after the 1929 crash and Great Depression.

Ben Franklin ruled the world for a while until the click of the mouse digitized monetary value into the electronic currency that measures phantom wealth today.

Money has become the economic measure of value, and the political world, even in today’s U.S. presidential election, staggers under the image that it is for sale to the highest bidder.

After Liza Minnelli and Joey Grey belted out Money Makes the World Go Round in the movie Cabaret, money was confirmed as the meaning-giver in ascertaining the significance of our lives, and culture took on Uncle $am’s signs, a Franc Force, a Pound Label, and the universal ¥en preceded the ¥uan to organize the value of our lives.

Money in the economic process is simply the medium of exchange, giving value to the utilization of resources, the production of goods, and the distribution of services. It is an instrument without an intrinsic value, a relational measure subject to the value of the objects it is relating, and to the “eye of the beholding relator.” Or, in our current dispensation, to the realtor!

The image in a three-sided polarity is the triune pole of resource, production, and distribution. Money is the medium of exchange in the distribution pole.

In our current scheme of things, the distribution pole in the economic process has become the giant that dominates resource and production. A pair of rubber shoes sold in the mall for $180 is worth $10 at the resource and production end, which means that the cost and profit of distribution-financing, marketing and sales-makes up the $170 difference.

The guardians of finances take up a substantial portion of that cost. In fact, the U.S. economy relies on our dominance in the financial markets and systems. We peg that on our self-appointed financial stewardship on oil, and since we abandoned gold as the standard value of our currency, we ensure our superiority through our military presence around the globe that now consumes 50 percent of government budget.

Production is outsourced. But the size and value of the financial system, a non-productive enterprise from which we profit, gives us enormous wealth, and we see the collapse of that financial system as markets around the world are impinged by the reality check of the hollowness at the core of our projected wealth. Making money out of money is not a productive enterprise.

Banks are the guardians of our monetary system, and if accounts are to be trusted, the reason the books showed incredible growth in our financial markets during the Clinton administration was that the President kept his hands off Wall Street.

Deregulation begun during Reagan’s administration allowed the financial sector to grow into its monstrous size at the cost of exploiting resources and cheapening the integrity of production forces and instruments. Wealth shifted to the distribution pole, and the managers of the financial houses raked in the proceeds.

Were we to look at this from a dialectical window, a three-sided triangle of economic-political-cultural processes, the economic dominates the political, and the cultural is enslaved into submission. In the three poles of the economic process, distribution overwhelms production, and dominates resource. Money is ensconced in the middle as king, the all time regulator of everything that moves and breaths. Money does make the world go round.

Watch our discourse on the future of the CNMI. The casino sleight-of-hand continues to be about bringing in other people’s money. Our resentment over Uncle Sam is that the money it brings has strings attached, and because we want the money, we reluctantly dance to the tune that comes along.

I have yet to see a projection of where the CNMI is headed that describes how people live for the pleasure of living, and not for the security of a job or a career where the value of one’s future is determined by the income we secure, rather than the quality of our expenditure and labor.

Anything we can do?

Jaime R. Vergara (jrvergarajr2031@aol.com) is a former PSS teacher and is currently writing from the campus of Shenyang Aerospace University in China.