The day the dollar died temporarily

Most people spent a greater part of their lives working so that they get money and most times in so doing they ignore the emotional needs of their children and loved ones. The pursuit of riches has often resulted in people not getting time to spent quality time with the people they love, the very people whom they will be working to provide for. The search for money has also often led to people becoming so inhuman, take for example during the 2009 recession when quite a number of people were left homeless because they couldn't pay their mortgages, this showed that people value money more than the well-being of their fellow humans. It is during times like that, that I have often wished that that piece of paper called money did not exist. The whole world has let that piece of paper called money rule us to the extend that when we don't have it we are devoid of peace and happiness. It is said that, "Money is the root of all evil," and that is true to a certain extend but I think the saying should have been, "The lack of money is the root of all evil", because a lot of crimes and inhuman activities are committed with the motive of getting that piece of paper called money. I value love, peace and happiness more than money and when I look around me and see the bad effects of the love of money above all else I often fantasise with my over-imaginative mind of strangling money to death. My dream came true in USA recently when for but only a day the USA Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke caused the dollar to die temporarily.

This word to word extract from the link http://www.theonion.com/content/news/u_s_economy_grinds_to_halt_ ,will make you understand what I am talking about.

WASHINGTON—The U.S. economy ceased to function this week after unexpected existential remarks by Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke shocked Americans into realizing that money is, in fact, just a meaningless and intangible social construct.

What began as a routine report before the Senate Finance Committee Tuesday ended with Bernanke passionately disavowing the entire concept of currency, and negating in an instant the very foundation of the world's largest economy.
"Though raising interest rates is unlikely at the moment, the Fed will of course act appropriately if we…if we…" said Bernanke, who then paused for a moment, looked down at his prepared statement, and shook his head in utter disbelief. "You know what? It doesn't matter. None of this—this so-called 'money'—really matters at all."
"It's just an illusion," a wide-eyed Bernanke added as he removed bills from his wallet and slowly spread them out before him. "Just look at it: Meaningless pieces of paper with numbers printed on them. Worthless."
According to witnesses, Finance Committee members sat in thunderstruck silence for several moments until Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) finally shouted out, "Oh my God, he's right. It's all a mirage. All of it—the money, our whole economy—it's all a lie!"
Screams then filled the Senate Chamber as lawmakers and members of the press ran for the exits, leaving in their wake aisles littered with the remains of torn currency.
As news of the nation's collectively held delusion spread, the economy ground to a halt, with dumbfounded citizens everywhere walking out on their jobs as they contemplated the little green drawings of buildings and dead white men they once used to measure their adequacy and importance as human beings.

At the New York Stock Exchange, Wednesday morning's opening bell echoed across a silent floor as the few traders who arrived for work out of habit looked up blankly at the meaningless scrolling numbers on the flashing screens above.
"I've spent 25 years in this room yelling 'Buy, buy! Sell, sell!' and for what?" longtime trader Michael Palermo said. "All I've done is move arbitrary designations of wealth from one column to another, wasting my life chasing this unattainable hallucination of wealth."
"What a cruel cosmic joke," he added. "I'm going home to hug my daughter."

Sources at the White House said President Obama was "still trying to get his head around all this" and was in seclusion with his coin collection, muttering "it's just metal, it's just metal" over and over again.
"The president will be making a statement very soon," press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters. "At the moment, though, his mind is just too blown to comment."

A few U.S. banks have remained open, though most teller windows are unmanned due to a lack of interest in transactions involving mere scraps of paper or, worse, decimal points and computer data signifying mere scraps of paper. At a Bank of America branch in Spokane, WA, curious former customers wandered aimlessly through a large empty vault, while several would-be robbers of a Chase bank in Columbus, OH reportedly put their guns down and exited the building hand in hand with security guards, laughing over the inherent absurdity of the idea of $100 bills.

Likewise, the real estate industry has all but vanished, with mortgage lenders seeing no reason to stop people from reclaiming their foreclosed-upon homes. "I don't even know what we were thinking in the first place," said former banker Nathan Collins of Brandon, MS, as he jimmyed open a door to allow a single mother and her five children to move back into their house. "A bunch of people sign a bunch of papers, and now this family has no place to live? That's just plain ludicrous."

The realization that money is nothing more than an elaborate head game seems to have penetrated the entire country: In Wilmington, DE, for instance, a collection agent reportedly broke down in joyful sobs when he informed a woman on the other end of the phone that he had absolutely no reason to harass her anymore, as her Discover Card debt was no longer comprehensible. For some Americans, the fog of disbelief surrounding the nation's epiphany has begun to lift, with many building new lives free from the illusion of money. "It's back to basics for me," Bernard Polk of Waverly, OH said. "I'm going to till the soil for my own sustenance and get anything else I need by bartering. If I want milk, I'll pay for it in tomatoes. If I need a new hoe, I'll pay for it in lettuce." When asked, hypothetically, how he would pay for complicated life-saving surgery for a loved one, Polk seemed uncertain. "That's a lot of vegetables, isn't it?" he said.

I would be very happy to live in a world were people see money as the worthless piece of paper that it is, where people realise that the worth we place on money is all but only an illusion and so concentrate all their efforts on the real valuable issues in life like love, peace & happiness & spending quality time with loved ones. Pity that this lasted for only a day.

Long back, in 1967, Martin Luther King Jr said this about money in his speech called The Trumpet of Conscience, "We are prone to judge success by the index of our salaries or the size of our automobile rather than by the quality of our service and relationship to mankind. I am aware that there are many who wince at a distinction between property and persons--who hold both sacrosanct. My views are not so rigid. A life is sacred. Property is intended to serve life, and no matter how much we surround it with rights and respect, it has no personal being. It is part of the earth man walks on; it is not man."

Who exactly is benefitting from foreign aid given to African countries?

Self-reliance and poverty reduction are the ultimate goals of foreign aid to any country. Foreign aid is supposed to influence economic growth and promote the sustainable development of the country receiving aid. It is supposed to make a difference in the lives of people and increase their self-reliance. Foreign aid, comes in three different forms namely, economic development assistance, military aid, and humanitarian relief assistance, which all generally aims at promoting development through, economic and political reforms that promote human rights, good governance and democracy, through investments in technological innovations and ideas that make land, capital or labor more productive, through investments in physical and human capital and through institutional and capacity building with technical assistance. Apart from these “standard assumptions” cum motives for foreign aid, empirical evidence and literature reveal that there are other disguised motives for foreign aid. Foreign aid is and has been a tool of statecraft often used by the government providing it to encourage or reward politically desirable behavior on the part of the government receiving it. It has been an instrument of coercion and a tool for the exercise of power over poor nations by donors. Donor countries have been known to attempt to influence the policies of poor countries by promising to provide, or threatening to withhold financial or material assistance. Such a leverage may be exercised not only in the direct interest of the citizens of the poor countries but also in the direct political or economic interest of the donors. During the Cold War era aid was part and parcel of international power struggles between the West and the East and was given to developing countries in order to keep them in the same camp or prevent them from allying themselves with the other side. Economic development assistance in Africa has over the decades been used as an instrument by the donors to achieve a variety of non-economic objectives such as a containment of communist expansion in Africa. Therefore foreign aid to Africa more frequently reflect political considerations of donor countries rather than the real needs of the recipient nations.

Despite the flow of foreign aid to many African countries over the years since the 1960’s, Africa, continues to wallow in seemingly perpetual states of misery, poverty, crises, hunger, and chaos despite massive foreign aid being poured in. Paradoxically, most of the countries that are basket cases of lethargy and poverty, including Zimbabwe, have been recipients of massive amounts of foreign aid since their independences. Despite the massive infusion of billions of dollars in aid into Africa, there is little to suggest that aid has succeeded in either stimulating self-sustaining economic growth or improving the plight of the marginalized Africans. Africa’s development record has indicated that greater aid intensity has not necessarily led to sustainable development, improved institutions improved infant mortality rates, increase in primary school enrollments, improved life expectancy or good governance. The paradox is, how can massive inflows of aid coexist with massive economic deterioration? So who exactly is benefitting from foreign aid given to most African countries? Almost every African country in crisis today has received abundant foreign aid. Aid was found to primarily benefit a wealthy political elite and not the poor citizens it is meant to benefit. Most of these countries have slid into anarchy and unspeakable abuse of human rights of their citizens while abusing foreign aid to oppress the poor and sink them deeper into poverty. Indeed, foreign aid almost certainly helped create and aggravate problems in most African countries by subsidizing dictators and corrupt regimes. So often in Africa, and throughout the Third World, the main function of foreign aid seems to be to finance the emergence of kleptocracies and then entrench a powerful new class of rich people amidst the poor, destitute, and miserable. Many parts of Africa face daunting problems of extreme poverty, overpopulation, civil wars, crumbling public infrastructures and environmental degradation. The fact that these problems have persisted and in many respects actually worsened despite massive foreign aid is a prima facie evidence that foreign aid to Africa has failed to produce the results it is intended to produce. Africans are mainly to blame for not channelling the foreign aid towards sustainable development but they are not the only ones to blame. The donors themselves are also to blame because foreign aid programs are donor driven in the sense of being tied to the donor government’s non-developmental objectives and having program design and implementation tightly controlled by the donors. Therefore foreign aid, has often amounted to economic and technical advice that might have worked in the West, but that is grossly inappropriate for Third World countries with limited indigenous resources, poor infrastructure or uneducated work force.

I am of the view that foreign aid is supposed to be temporary. Once the capacity for self – sustaining growth has been achieved, aid would no longer be required. But far from growth and development, most Third World countries seem to be more dependent on aid than ever. In fact, these countries are addicted to foreign aid. Decades of financial transfers have not fostered economic growth and, worse still, almost every African country in crisis today has received abundant foreign aid. The net effect of aid in Africa, as several development experts have observed, has been a culture of dependence that erodes self-confidence, creativity, and pride of citizens and leaders. Aid dependence has eroded and undermined the moral authority of African leaders to govern. It seems aid does not help ordinary people to help themselves, but systematically empowers and enriches the very forces that most efficiently stifle the initiative and resourcefulness of peasants, nomads, slum dwellers and villagers throughout the Third World. Most of the poor people in most poor countries most of the time never receive aid in any tangible form. There is ample evidence to show that during the past decades of massive aid flows, Sub Saharan Africa has lost the self-sufficiency in food and agriculture production it enjoyed before the injection of humanitarian food aid. Africa has now become a beggar continent that cannot feed her own people.

Africa would you please come up with sustainable development projects that will make you self-reliant so that you can wrench free from the addiction of donor funding,

Why waste money on military weapons?

It's really sad how some men and women who rule nations believe that their power and the respect their nations get is directly proportional to the amount of military weapons that they have and their military prowess. That used to be true before the computer age but with the advent of the computer which was utilised to control almost everything from air traffic, rail traffic in developed nations, road traffic lights, electric power stations, water supply systems to government databases and financial systems, the power of a nation now rests on how well it can protect its critical computer network systems from hackers. If ever there is going to be a world war III in years to come,(may God forbid) it is going to be a cyber war with nations launching cyber attacks on each other's critical computer network systems, which will render all military weapons useless.

Picture it this way. The year is 2060 and the whole wide world has become one computer network highway. China has become the number one superpower having overtaken giants like USA, Japan, UK, South Korea and Russia and that is because it has developed an army of hackers who have the ability to hack into any computer network system in the whole world and through those hackers China stole other nations' technology programs, business and strategic governance intelligence and improved on it to become a superpower to reckon with. Then it so happens that there is a diplomatic dispute between USA and China which escalates into an all-out war. USA is convinced that with its superior military weapons it can cut China down to size by defeating it in military war so it gives China an ultimatum to submit to USA's demands or else face their wrath in war. This ultimatum opens China's old wounds, the psychological trauma it suffered during the Opium Wars of the nineteenth century, when British gunboats routinely humiliated the Chinese government of the day. The deep feelings of resentment most Chinese feel for the humiliation they suffered during that time makes them want to ensure that there is no repeat of a time when foreign powers could push the Chinese people around with impunity. Therefore the Chinese knowing very well that they stand no chance if it came to a conventional military conflict with USA and its superior military firepower, they turn to using what they can do best, they utilise their army of hackers to launch a cyber attack on USA. So as the USA army is busy preparing to launch a barrage of ballistic missiles and jet fighters to destroy key Chinese targets, China simply telnets into the USA's critical computer network systems and by so doing takes over control of the whole nation of USA. At the flick of an electronic switch the Chinese army of hackers totally shut down USA's electric power stations, water supply systems, all traffic control systems, USA financial systems and all USA government databases. USA with all its computer network systems shut down abruptly stands still and the result is more devastating than the earthquake in Haiti of January 2010 and also more devastating than the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki of August 1945. There are airplane & airbus crashes, electric train crashes and road accidents all over USA, people suffocate in elevators and the effect of the terrible stench from decaying food supplies in refridgerators and toilets without water after a few days with the electronic switch off is worse than the effects of the poisonous gases at Chenobyl, Bhopal or Seveso combined. USA's attempt to respond by launching nuclear-armed Trident missiles at China proves impossible, as the computer systems that control the weapons system have been hacked into by the Chinese army of hackers.

Dear readers, heave a sigh of relief because this is a fictitious story and not a prophetic statement but be warned that a situation like this has the potential to become reality especially considering what was written on http://www.telegraph.co.uk recently , I quote,

"There have already been well-documented instances in recent years where Chinese hackers have successfully launched cyber attacks against key Western targets like the Pentagon and Whitehall. In America Chinese hackers are reported to have attempted up to 100 000 attacks on government computers each year, and have successfully penetrated the computer systems of some of American military's elite units, such as US Army's 101st and 82nd Airborne Divisions. In 2006 Chinese computer hackers were accused of shutting down the UK House of Commons computer network by flooding it with bogus emails, and the UK Foreign Office and other key government departments have accused Chinese computer experts of trying to hack into their systems. In fact, China is so obsessed with achieving electronic dominance over the whole world so much that it annually holds computer hacking competitions throughout the country, and then recruit the winners to their burgeoning cyber army."

So dear readers let me get back to my question, "Why waste money on military weapons when the real threat to the world today is hackers who can penetrate the computer networks that this technology age is dependent on to run people's lives efficiently." It would be best if countries like Iran which is refusing disarmament of its nuclear weapons would realise that their nuclear weapons are no threat to an army of hackers and get rid of the nuclear weapons and concentrate their efforts on building perfectly secure computer networks that even the most capable hacker can not penetrate.