Stateside With Rosalea: Why I’m an antiplasticator

I’ve always had a somewhat different attitude to money than most people I know. It comes from imagining that I’ve been stranded on a desert island with an ATM machine containing all the money in the world, and nothing else except a plastic card that lets me access it whenever I want. Well, before I die of thirst, I guess I could use the ATM machine for shade, and the money for toilet paper but that’s all they’re worth.

Money has no intrinsic value—it’s just a medium of exchange. For those of us old enough to remember them, milk tokens are a good analogy. The only difference is that money can be redeemed for a limitless variety of goods and services, whereas a milk token was only good for milk.

The problems we face today are all rooted in the idea that money itself has worth. Debt is just a word that encapsulates the idea of buying one sum of money for a bigger sum of money by agreeing to pay interest on it. The power of deciding what people pay for money—i.e., what money is “worth” as a commodity in itself—is focused exclusively in the hands of central banks and other financial institutions.

For a very elegant explanation of how this led to the current state of the world’s financial systems and economies, you should watch this short graphic representation at http://www.crisisofcredit.com/

But this column isn’t about the big picture, it’s about the little one—me and my relationship with money and how my control of it has been steadily taken out of my hands since the 1980s when ATM machines came into widespread use. (BTW, did you know that the first large trial of the ATM cards we use today was in Christchurch, NZ?)

The rot really began to set in when electronic transactions became the norm for the payment of wages. Instead of people getting a sum of cash in their hand, and taking some of it to the bank to deposit in a checking and/or savings account, the relationship was upended and the bank got the money first. Convenient, true, except that it meant lining up at the bank to withdraw your spending money.

No wonder that ATM/EFTPOS cards became the norm so quickly. And along with them came a whole new set of fees charged by banks to everyone involved in the transaction. A typical scenario is this one, from a recent news story about unemployment benefits being paid electronically in the state of Pennsylvania.

Among the many comments on this CNN story at Mixx.com was one from North Carolina, which uses a company called eppicard to provide electronic payments to those receiving unemployment benefits. The commenter went to Wachovia to withdraw some money, but the ATM didn’t dispense any, despite debiting the account. He or she went into the bank to get it resolved, and the best the bank teller could come up with was a wait of 30 to 45 days until the dispute was resolved.

“I asked her what should I do for cash in the meantime and she told me that maybe the unemployment office will provide me with some funds in advance. I have not been able to reach anyone from the unemployment office in Raleigh, Greensboro, Reidsville or Yanceyville since Tuesday of this week. To top it off, I have yet to receive the forms from eppicard. This is a nightmare. Yes, I was charged fees for insufficient funds, account inquiry and withdrawal with this one issue. Nightmare? You think?”

I don’t just think, I know. Though I’ve never been on unemployment in the States, like the other hundreds of thousands—if not millions—of people in this country who live paycheck to paycheck even in the boom times, my personal finances were always operating on a razor-thin margin. An unexpected fee—even one as low as $1.50—could push me into overdraft. And even if that overdraft was only one cent and was there for only 24 hours before my pay went in, I would be charged with a $30 Insufficient Funds fee. That was $30 I didn’t have the next month to pay my bills.

Bank fees are very often the start of peoples’ spiral into ballooning debt, which brings me back to why I’m an antiplasticator. In 2005, I entered a debt management program and the wisest thing my debt counselor said to me was that a debit card is addictive the same way an open box of chocolates is—once it’s opened, you just can’t stop eating. It’s very easy to overspend using plastic, just like it’s very easy to overindulge in those chocolates.

Her advice? Go to the bank once a week, fill out a withdrawal slip, and get the money you’ve calculated you need/can afford to spend that week. Pay for everything in cash. Frankly, I’d rather risk being robbed by someone in desperate need of money than by a financial institution, especially now that the federal government has so cavalierly paid over my tax dollars to bail the bandits out. Plus I get to feel like a teenager again with that sacred thing called “spending money” in my wallet.

I worry though that in the future there truly will be a cashless society and there’ll be yet another pig snuffling at the trough—wireless phone companies charging for the text messages needed to complete a transaction. A firm called Global Agora—an agora is the equivalent of a cent to a dollar/shekel in Israeli currency—launched a trial using cellphones to pay for goods in China in 2001.

The proponents of using mobile phones for commerce and banking are antiplasticators of a very different stripe than I am—I want to keep cash as a medium of exchange because it puts money in the hands of the people; eCashers want to get rid of cash altogether, thereby keeping money in the hands of bankers and merchants. The European Union is trying to push this big-time, and here in the States we’re beginning to see with increasing frequency news stories about buying Coca Cola from drinks dispensers using your phone, or paying for transit that way.

Conspiracy theorists will be interested to know that Nicholas Rockefeller was on the board of Global Agora at the time of its launch in China. Anyone who’s watched Aaron Russo’s interview in which he says that Nick Rockefeller told him the ultimate aim of financiers is to have everyone embedded with an RFID chip that contains their financial information, will be similarly alarmed at where this notion of a cashless society is going.

There is another kind of “agora”, one based on the Greek meaning of the word as a gathering place where opinions might be aired. In an undated article entitled “A Global Agora vs Gated City Regions,” Riccardo Petrella, who is referred to as the official futurist of the European Union, sets out the following scenario:

“It is possible to imagine two mental maps of the world system in the times ahead. One map is that of a world dominated by a hierarchy of 30 city-regions linked more to each other than to the territorial hinterlands to which the nation state once bound them. This wealthy archipelago of city regions - with manageable populations of 8 -12 million - will be run by an alliance between the global merchant class and metropolitan governments whose chief function is supporting the competitiveness of the global firms to which they are host. These disassociated islands will be surrounded by an impoverished lumpenplanet where peasants have been uprooted from the land by global free trade and try to eke out an existence in violence ridden mega-urban settlements with populations of 15 - 20 million or more.”

Petrella describes the second mental map as:

“Instead of a world where the purely competitive or merely fortunate are forced to hole up in gated city-regions for fear of the crime and pandemonium all about them, the order based on a global [social] contract would give rise to a vital, multicultural civilization on a planetary scale. A kind of plural, global agora rather than the medieval would symbolize this new civilization.”

He concludes:

“In some ways, as this very article illustrates, the struggle is already on between the global civil society and the worldwide merchant class to draw a new map of the world for the next century. The more successful the merchant class is in drawing the boundaries of the new order over the coming decade, the more difficult it will be for the global civil society to alter that map. That is the danger now.” The global economic meltdown is an example of just how much a real version of Petrella’s first mental map is inexistence already.

Finally, when you hear people talking about how a financial institution is “too big to fail” because it would have dire consequences for the entire world economy, what you’re hearing is a tacit acceptance that the web that binds these institutions together is made of steel, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that it is made of spun sugar. The sugar it is spun out of is the notion that money has intrinsic worth. It doesn’t.

rosalea.barker@gmail.com

--PEACE—

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