Overlapping Conflicts

Let’s look at the conflicts erupting and simmering in the Islamic world.

The Russians have told the West that they cannot “two cards at the same time.” Attacking both the Assad regime in Syria and ISIS at the same time is counterproductive, they claim. Americans still make regime change in Syria a basic principle, although there now talk of a time-line for Assad’s departure from power. As the only presidential candidate with a tangible, multi-step anti-ISIS program, Hillary Clinton focuses on addressing the Assad issue first as an essential precondition to crushing ISIS. Conflict One: Sunni Rebels and the West vs. Syria’s Assad.

Shiite nations in the region (Iran – 95% Shiite, Iraq – 60% Shiite, and the Syrian leadership – 10% Shiite ruling a nation that is 80% Sunni and 10% Christian), including their Hezbollah surrogates in places like Lebanon and Houthis in Yemen, are staring down militarism from extremely anti-Shiite Sunni nations like Saudi Arabia and the Taliban in Afghanistan.  Conflict Two: Regional Shiites vs Sunni Powers. Conflict Three: Saudi Arabia vs Yemeni Houthi.

This further complicates the “boots on the ground” necessity to face down ISIS, which now rules over vast tracts of Iraq and Syria – all Sunnis as ISIS has declared itself the protector of Sunnis against Shiites, the West and Israel. The most likely forces – Shiite troops from Iran and Iraq (including Hezbollah) and Shiite-led troops from Syria – are the last “rescuers” that conquered Sunnis under ISIS rule want to see.

In Afghanistan, politely a failed state under a mega-corrupt government installed by the United States, struggles against local warlords and, mostly, a reconfigured and much stronger Taliban insurgency (Sunni extremists). Conflict Four: West and Installed Afghan Government vs. Taliban. Add: Taliban vs. Neighboring Pakistan (Conflict Three and a Half?)

In Libya, what seemed like a successful secular election that followed the toppling of the brutal Muamar Kaddafi dictatorship has devolved into a religious war between fundamentalist Sunnis and the incumbent “elected” government: Conflict Five: Civil War in Libya.

In Nigeria, ISIS sympathizers and murdering/kidnapping Sunni extremists are struggling to usurp government control in the north (including neighboring nations). Conflict Six: Boko Haram vs. Nigeria’s incumbent government and the Christian south.

As al Shabaab militants from Somalia have raided and blasted, shot and terrorized neighboring Kenya, that war has escalated. Conflict Seven: Kenya/Somalia vs. al Shabaab.

Meanwhile, even as Sunni Turkey makes nice-nice with Shiite Iran (because Iran is a regional powerhouse with a big military) and Russia (a world power ready to take big risks), even as it has joined the fight against both Assad and ISIS, President Recep Erdoğan has used his mandate against ISIS to field forces against his own independence-seeking Kurds. Conflict Eight: Turkey vs. Its Kurdish Opposition Parties.

Russia has now laid the groundwork to step into the void left by the failed regional efforts by the United States and her allies. Allied with Iran and Syria, with a downed airliner, clearly the work of ISIS terrorists who planted a bomb on board a Russian aircraft, Russia has now redoubled her efforts against ISIS, but even as a peace and a working détente of some kind is needed to coordinate Western/Russian efforts, there are Russian pilots in the air over Syria, striking at anti-Assad rebels and ISIS alike, generating a direct surrogate shooting war in Syria against Western-supplied rebels.Conflict Nine: Russia vs. the United States and Her Allies. Will the Paris ISIS strike bring Russia and the West to the same side? France thinks that is part of the solution.

The antagonism between mostly Hindu India and mostly Muslim Pakistan over the bona fides of India’s rule over mostly-Muslim Kashmir has bubbled over frequently with violent attacks between the principals and their surrogates.Conflict Ten: India vs. Pakistan over Kashmir.

The main battle seems to be the war against ISIS (add al Qaeda, al Nusra, etc., etc.) as ISIS solidifies its hold on huge areas and significant cities in both Syria and Iraq. While drones and airstrikes have hit ISIS facilities and degraded their oil fields, these efforts seem little more than mosquito bites against a malevolent force that seems to have been increasingly entrenched in their positions. With few inroads against them, mostly from Kurdish Peshmerga forces, the absence of a major concerted ground assault against ISIS forces has resulted in virtually no change or significant reductions in ISIS power or controlled lands. Conflict Eleven: ISIS vs. Shiites, Regional Moderate Sunnis, Christians, Russia and the West.

But we cannot forget about what has moved from center stage to a side-show, albeit one of the most critical struggles in the Middle East. Knifings and shootings suggest the potential return of the Intifada to the region.  Conflict Twelve: Israel vs. Palestinians (and their allies).

But the biggest conflict of all is within Islam itself. It’s what we don’t like to talk about, and it is quite apart from the massive schism between Shiites and Sunnis. It is the undercurrent that threatens to become a war of civilizations, the truly most serious aspect of the current litany of conflicts: CONFLICT THIRTEEN (NOTE THE NUMBER!): AN EXTREME AND VIOLENT, INTOLERANT INTERPRETATION OF THE QUR’AN THAT MANDATES KILLING, CONQUEST AND UNTOLD CRUELTY IN THE NAME OF GOD.

Fomented over the years by elements like oil-rich Saudis (and others) paying guilt-money to atone for their excessive lifestyles (used to fund militants as well as for Islamist madrasa – schools that teach intolerance and hate), sympathetic Pakistani intelligence services and power-hungry jihadists ready to use God to recruit and maim, this willingness to embrace extremism impacts way too many Muslims who have anchored their violent views with direct references to the Qur’an.

Unless this mega-issue is tackled from within Islam itself, most other efforts will not solve the overall terrorism elements that threaten us all. While most victims are fellow Muslims, even as we exterminate radical vermin from their positions of power, the world will just face sequential groups of extremists testing their mettle against the most obvious targets, regional and global.

There are additional root causes of this jihadist trend. Betrayed by Western promises and corrupt leaders, too many have turned to violent extremism as a last hope. Without a massive effort from the huge majority of Muslims who interpret their faith as tolerant and laden with charitable values, the horrors we see will expand and invite the kinds of military responses that cannot benefit anybody. The resurrection of Islam’s seventh century growth of “conversion under the sword” is an intolerable presence in the twenty-first century.

There are lots of other recent Islam-related explosions in Egypt, Morocco,  Mali (including the November 20^th hostage debacle from al Qaeda), Thailand, Western China, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and other nations in that world that could be cited as additional conflict zones, but for now, let’s just leave the list as noted in the red sections above. That should be more than enough to reflect the complexity of the Islam-driven conflict the world over, the greatest source of violence on earth.

With 90% of global violence today linked to Muslim insurrection of one form or another, it is easy to ignore the non-Islamic firestorms in Latin America, like the FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia) rebellion in Colombia or the sure-looks-like-a-civil-war cartel bloodshed in Mexico, driven by demand for illicit narcotics in the United States and the massive illegal smuggling of guns (legally purchased in the U.S.) south into Mexico. But today’s blog is about the Islamic issues that are in the global spotlight right now.

Think about the complexity of dealing with all of the above Islam-related parties, the above internecine rivalries and the undercurrent of extremism that just seem to be getting worse. Some of these battles seem like distractions – like Saudis fighting Shiite Houthis in Yemen instead of deploying forces against ISIS. But when you think of the alignments needed to tame this beast, ISIS (and its ilk) is going to have its way with the world for quite a while. As long as they only face air attacks, they are willing to endure. They have even decentralized their military command to insure against strategic damage from drone strikes against their leadership.

Alignments? Yeah, like healing the great Sunni-Shiite rift that keeps Sunnis like Saudis and Shiites like Iranians from joining forces to a common end: killing ISIS that is dedicated to destroying both Iran and the Saudi monarchy. Add NATO power Turkey, directly impacted Syria and Iraq, Egypt as well as the United States and its European allies and Russia. Will France’s renewed commitment to the anti-ISIS fray based on the Paris attacks added to Russia’s rage at the destruction of their commercial airliner help erase some of these rivalries? Notice the absence of Israel and Palestine from the above list of required participants? Time will tell.

And who is going to address the regional economic collapse, the farms rendered fallow from global-warming-caused droughts, the lack of work, upside and hope among their young, even the college-educated? There are too many undercurrents to expect this global infection to be cured anytime soon. We cannot underestimate the seething pain from these socio-economic issues as great motivators of “nothing-left-to-lose” militant radicalization.

So let’s now cut to the mutterings of the vast majority of presidential candidates with simplistic bully-bully slogans-masquerading-as-solutions and compare their tough-dude words to the litany of conflicts, rivalries and socio-economic challenges that are the hard facts in this distorted world. Is the tough talk, the railing against refugees, the pledge of more airstrikes and supplying local anti-ISIS combatants offering a solution? Or simply playing into the battle plan that ISIS has mapped out, facilitating their recruiting of tens if not hundreds of thousands of new fighters as the West continues to provide irrefutable proof that this has now become a war between the West and Islam? Which candidate do you think really understands the complexities that really exist and the profound difficulty in taming this revolting set of beasts?

I’m Peter Dekom, and you’d think that after the debacles we caused in Iraq and Afghanistan, we would have learned to shy away from bully-bully simplistic slogans-instead-of-solutions to understand the complexities of our mission… you’d think!

The United States, North Korea, Zimbabwe and Venezuela

We like to think of the United States as a modern, progressive nation that takes great care of its citizens. Yet we still have one of the least accessible, most expensive healthcare systems in the developed world, one where even the Affordable Care Act has catered to the insurance and pharmaceutical industries at the expense of consumers. Republicans, where they have a policy at all, would repeal that minimal statute and revert to an era of market-rate healthcare policies, with pre-existing conditions and aggregate benefit caps factored into the cost structure. For so much of America, particularly in the “gig” economy, where recourse is often only getting individual policies for any coverage, not having access to a group where costs and bargaining power can be amortized over a bigger body of covered individuals, would be nothing short of disastrous.

Our costs per individual coverage healthcare costs per annum remain thousands of dollars over the second most expensive nation, Switzerland, so you’d think that we are the best protected people with the best medical care on earth. By objective measurements, not only do we have the most expensive medical costs in the world, but the results are abysmal by western measurements.

The primary standards for measuring healthcare success include life expectancy and maternal mortality. As far as life expectancy goes, according to the World Health Organization, there are 38 countries – including virtually all of Europe (the laggards in Europe are former CIS and Eastern Bloc nations) and countries like Cuba, Chile and even war-torn Lebanon – with longer life-expectancies than the United States. Guess we are not getting our money’s worth; rich folks can afford that cutting edge stuff, but the rest of us get what we get.

So if life expectancy isn’t reflecting well on American healthcare, you’d think we’d do well on that other measurement at least: maternal mortality. We fail even more miserably under that standard. A woman giving birth in the United States is twice as likely to die as one delivering in Canada, a country with universal healthcare provided free for all.

According to a World Bank report released on November 12^th: “The United States was… one of only 13 countries to have worse rates of maternal mortality in 2015 than in 1990 - a group that also includes North Korea, Zimbabwe and Venezuela… [T]he U.S. average has slipped from 12 deaths to 14 per 100,000 live births over the past 25 years, while Canada's is where it was in 1990, at seven.

“Over the same period Belarus has cut its maternal death rate from 33 to four, making it one of the safest places to have a baby, just behind the world leaders - Iceland, Finland, Poland and Greece - where only three mothers die for every 100,000 births… The world average is 216 deaths, ranging from 12 in rich countries to 546 in sub-Saharan Africa.” AOL.com, November 12^th. Ah, it is less than reassuring to know that things are steadily getting worse.

Not only are we slowly becoming a plutocracy, not only is the middle class contracting and sliding downwards and not only have 70% of working Americans generated less buying power every year for decades, but our healthcare standards simply are not keeping up with the rest of the developed world. That the big insurance and pharmaceutical companies are quite profitable, thank you, may be great for shareholders and the one-percenters, but the resulting rise in healthcare costs coupled with the decline in the quality of coverage just cannot be acceptable to most Americans. That Republicans – who initiated the call to universal healthcare during the Nixon administration and under Governor Mitt Romney’s tenure as governor of Massachusetts – now want to revert to the old world of exclusionary policies with staggering costs for those who need the care the most is amazing to me.

The schism between a White traditional society mired in the past and the growing progressive demographic diversity that is redefining the future of America perhaps reflect the irreconcilable differences that may rend this nation into a new groupings of fractious separate nation-states. It does seem that except for out-and-out slavery, the issues that defined our Civil War remain the great divisions between us. Nevertheless, if the healthcare system bothers you, perhaps it is time to fix the healthcare law we have – one that was passed only by catering to the profit desires of insurers and pharmas – and make it represent what’s best for most of us.

Think anything near this notion is remotely possible with the current congressional configuration? The majority in congress benefit greatly by leaving the law without the obvious and necessary fixes; it gives them a platform to rail against. Repair the statute and make it work? Lose the argument that “Obamacare” is a failure by fixing it, like every other piece of seminal social legislation – from income taxes to Social Security – ever enacted in this great nation? Reality seems to be a really difficult factor to deal with for our elected representatives. And running away from reality never works… ever.

I’m Peter Dekom, and we really need to replace inaccurate and sloganeering with hard, fact-driven policies that actually make life better for most of us.

My Robot Can Out-Earn Your Robot

Machines have slowly made much of the drudgery of hard manual labor tolerable, manageable and often efficient. Men controlled the machines, and progress has accelerated over the years. The one component of automation – self-correcting, learning and innovating machines – has been viewed as a spirited possibility fit for a futuristic film. The Terminator series movies dealt with LAWS – lethal autonomous weapon systems – most of us believe that sometime years from now, such robots will trash each other on the battlefield. But with drones and cruise missiles with autonomous target identification systems, there is often no human being making the “firing” decisions. That’s today!

Elon Musk and Bill Gates have warned us of the dangers of the increasing sophistication of machines guided by so-called “artificial intelligence.” With human beings spared the direct risk of engagement in conflict, the temptation of going to war has to be that much easier. Picture how many fewer conflicts there would be if we had to draft our youngest adults to fight a war before we engaged the enemy? Ethical issues abound. Especially if the machines themselves determine that their superiority merits taking over the world, a la Terminator.

But the real concern for most of us has to be what happens in a world where virtually any physical or knowledge-based job can, sooner or later, be performed most effectively and more efficiently than a human counterpart. In a world of rising unemployment, how exactly are human beings losing opportunities for productive work going to support themselves when half the jobs on earth can be accomplished better by machines, many empowered with self-directing, learning artificial intelligence? Our capitalist, market-driven values, will tell you that we cannot pay those who cannot find an economic place in society. They will have to wither away and die under current governmental assumptions. Really?

Another view has human beings benefitting by building, designing and maintaining these new machines of the future, but that view has to be predicated on a belief that humans can perform such tasks better than machines, an assumption that artificial intelligence (AI) has severe limits that cannot supersede human skills. Quite an assumption.

Perhaps only those who own the robots of the future will merit pay (like the one-percenters of today)… and perhaps that segment of society that focuses on “relationship” work – person-on-person communication and care – will find an earning place in this new society. And contrary to mass assumptions, the threats are not something for future generations to consider; the issues are here, now and likely to accelerate fast.

The November 13^th FastCompany.com frames these issues: “Over the last few years, we've heard a lot about how artificial intelligence could put large numbers of people out of work. An often-cited study from Oxford University found that 47% of jobs in America are at ‘high risk of computerization’ in the next 20 years. And more recent research from Forrester predicts a net loss of 9.1 million jobs in the next decade.

“A new McKinsey report sees things slightly differently. Yes, advances in AI and the like will cause a big wave of automation, it says. But it won't necessarily lead to job losses. Rather, many jobs will be redefined by technology, with the boring, rote stuff done by computers, and the exciting, creative stuff done by humans…

“The research says 45% of paid activities could be automated using ‘currently demonstrated technologies,’ and that these activities represent about $2 trillion in annual wages. Sixty percent of occupations could have 30% or more of their activities automated, but only 5% of occupations could be eliminated completely, at least using today's tech.” What impacted blue collar workers over the past century and a half is slowly making inroads into high-end service professions today: lawyers, medical diagnosticians (we call them doctors), surgeons (more doctors), accountants, financial analysts, investment advisors and even CEOs.

We’re already seeing this displacement happening all around us. Maybe in developing countries – locked in a time-warp that is still mired in the eighteen century – subsistence farmers will just keep struggling for the foreseeable future. But as the opportunity for automation grows, so will be the big issue: will society learn to support and care for people who have been displaced by automation under a futuristic model that mirrors communism more than capitalism? Or will “unproductive” human beings just wither away. The temptation to replace humans with machines is only growing, and we are just seeing the most basic versions of AI that are sure to blow our minds with their sophistication over the coming years.

“Automation clearly presents a lot of benefits to companies, and not only because of reduced labor costs. It estimates the pay-off could equal three to 10 times the cost of investment, and says artificial intelligence will generally free up people to be more creative. For example, financial advisors could spend less time analyzing their clients' finances (computers will do that) and more time understanding needs and explaining options.

“It's worth noting that the discussion only encompasses currently available technology. It says nothing about the implications of future advances, which are surely coming. Robots may well take over eventually, putting many people out of work, just not quite yet.” FastCompany.com. If not now or tomorrow, when? Estimates are that by 2025, as many as one third of current American jobs will be displaced. What exactly will happen to those displaced? New opportunities or ?????

I’m Peter Dekom, and such rapidly advancing changes will require us all to reexamine the very basis of our modern socio-political systems.

Catch-22, Paris Style

It seems that migrants streaming in from Islamic nations into the European Union include a small fraction of jihadists with terror and destabilization on their minds. Authorities have little doubt that, however few, there are dangerous people crossing, seeking to wreak havoc, reinforce already-existing sleeper cells and accelerate jihadist recruitment. They are also agents provocateurs, hoping that French and Belgian authorities, bolstered by popular cries against the migrants and indigenous Muslims, will crack down heavily on both groups. Indeed, suspects are being interrogated, rounded up, and Europeans are looking at the slightly darker-skinned immigrants, even their own second and third generation Islamic citizens, with less-than-friendly stares. Hate crimes are simmering; discrimination is rising fast.

The heavier the authorities crack down, the more blatant the discrimination, the greater the jihadists’ ability to recruit new fighters, new folks ready to take up arms against the relevant European oppressors, and new volunteers ready to train as marksmen and suicide bombers ready to take their revenge against those attempting to crush them. And those folks are already there. It has been particularly difficult for second generation Muslim young males, born in the Islamic ghettos of several European capitals, lacking the skills to mount mainstream careers, discriminated by reason of their color, religion and even their names.

They face the greatest motivator for angry violent reaction for Muslims everywhere: humiliation. Lacking hope in their European home country, and having their own most basic identity crises, these young men (and a few women) are drawn to a violent cause that will indeed give them meaning and direction, albeit a horrific journey into murderous terrorism.

Certainly no stranger to ultra-violence, from the beheadings of Robespierre to the Nazi occupation, France faced repeated terrorist turmoil in the last half of the 20th century. “The independence struggle of former colony Algeria led to what had been called the worst terrorist attack in modern French history, with the bombing in 1961 of a Strasbourg-Paris train by the Organisation de l'armee secrete — a far right paramilitary organisation dedicated to maintaining French rule in northern Africa.

“The 1970s saw a series of bombing and shooting attacks, mainly in Paris, linked to crises in the Middle East… They continued into the 1980s, including a deadly bombing of Orly Airport by the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia in which eight people died… Islamist-linked attacks began in earnest in that decade, with five bombings attributed to the Lebanese Shi'ite Muslim militant group Hezbollah… In the 1990s, Algerian insurgents the Armed Islamic Group were responsible for an Air France hijacking and two bombings on Paris trains.” ABC (Australia), November 13^th.

But these days, Paris has become the focal point for ISIS’ wrath.  The goading of their sacred icons – Mohammad himself – by the Parisian satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo, has been a particularly humiliating and insulting thorn in their side. ISIS has made it clear that, among Western nations, France is a priority target for them. The January attack on Charlie Hebdo was a cold and unexpected reality. And while the attack on Friday the 13^th of November was hardly expected, this time was different.

“[The] came just 10 months after the massacre at Charlie Hebdo and the attack on a kosher grocery store, and seemed to many people here to be deliberately targeted at their way of life and their young people in particular, provoking fear and new concern about France’s ability to manage the gulf between Muslims and non-Muslims here.

“On Jan. 7, on the night of the killings at the editorial offices of Charlie Hebdo, thousands of Parisians spontaneously came out on the streets, bearing candles. Following the shooting later at the kosher grocery store, which resulted in more deaths, that mood of defiance and resilience grew until Jan. 11, when millions of people joined an official march of unity and solidarity in Paris.

“This time, most people agree, the mood is different; the ‘spirit of January 11th,’ so often cited by politicians, seems a distant memory. The city on Saturday was somber and subdued as people absorbed the news…

“This time… it seemed to be young people who were targeted, a fact that resonates with a generation that has no memory of past events. One retired couple said their children were more shocked than they were. ‘We remember the terrorist attacks in the 1990s,” said Françoise, who was afraid to give her last name. ‘Our children don’t have any recollection of that.’” New York Times, November 14^th. Venues were closed. Events were cancelled. Restaurants and stores closed. Police advised citizens to delay larger gatherings.

“Paris, with a population of 2.2 million inside the city limits, can feel very small at a time like this. Many young people have been to concerts like the one that was targeted at the Bataclan [concert venue] on Friday night. The neighborhood where the attacks took place is typically packed on weekends. That familiarity only brings the events closer to home.

“Mr. [Tony] Balet [a 57-year-old Parisian stylist] has a 24-year-old friend who was at the Bataclan concert, and emerged safe but ‘traumatized,’ he said. Another friend of his watched horrified from her window as people were gunned down in her street. Down the road, a woman at a minimarket said a friend of her son’s had been wounded in the attacks, and was now between life and death at a nearby hospital.

“‘Parisians are not very talkative,’ said Maxim Ferron, the 30-year-old manager of Love Organic, a trendy tea shop in the 9th arrondissement. ‘They keep things, their thoughts to themselves. But this time, the shock is greater: Charlie Hebdo was a target, a symbol. Yesterday, the victims weren’t journalists, or famous. They were civilians.’

“People talk about the need to show solidarity but they worry that the scale of the massacre will only divide society even further… Some people of immigrant background, who declined to give their names, worry that people will conflate France’s large Muslim population with radical Islam.” NY Times.

If it were fear that ISIS wanted to instill in the hearts and minds of Parisians… and Europeans in general… they have been wildly successful. ISIS is simply hoping that the French will overreact as they have predicted, making the recruiting and terrorism effort just that much easier. In the malevolent eyes of ISIS, nothing would please them more than Western bias, discrimination and misplaced violent action that can be cast as the West fighting a “War against Islam.” Recruits from around the world would gather to defend their faith… everywhere. Somewhere between prudence and humanity, there is balance.

Here in the United States, contrary to the U.S. Constitution and the 1980 Refugee Act, governors from Alabama, Arkansas, Texas, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi, Pennsylvania and Texas have fulfilled ISIS’ fondest dreams by refusing to take in any of the 10,000 Syrian refugees earmarked for the United States. I suspect that ISIS can and will use these decisions to support their position that the United States and her allies have declared war on Islam. That should result in another body of recruits, possibly as many as 10,000, to ISIS, insanely angry young men and women who will believe that they now must die in the defense of their faith. ISIS has released a video asserting that they will not just continue their attack on France and Paris, but that other major cities in the West – specifically including Washington, D.C. – are next on their hit list.

These governors are only making things worse, much much worse. We need to engage migrants and appropriate ethnic and religious locals, asking them to help find the worst of the worst. Without that engagement, the situation gets truly even more horrific. Catch-22. It cannot be us against them.

I’m Peter Dekom, and it is so much easier to disrupt than to defend and build.

Ugh! Wampum Not Enough

From direct product-for-product trading, to “currency” in the form of salt, pukka-shells, wampum escalating to gold and silver coinage and finally (??) to paper money that, at first anyway, was backed by troves of gold and precious metals, and then simply by the “creditworthiness” of the nation issuing the notes… money has come a long way. In the private sector, all kinds of financial instruments have developed, from simply IOUs to complex promissory notes and financial instruments that are hard to understand. Folks learned how to write checks. Credit cards and debit cards have arisen, at first with magnetic stripes, then with chips and, ultimately smart phone coding.

Financial regulators and central banks have grown powerful and sophisticated. Some are simply populist pawns that belie deep instability. Kenya went bust recently, not a cent to spend. Parliament in Nairobi was without electricity or staff. Argentina, to no real surprise, has almost exhausted its currency reserves. Greece still stands out as a Eurozone catastrophe.

Bitcoins – virtual money in a market-valued parallel universe – have slithered into the viable commercial world. The U.S. dollar has been the world’s standard measurement – “reserve currency” if you will – since the Bretton Woods Conference during World War II. The battle of the U.S. dollar to remain the world’s standard is heating up, and in the near term, we should expect a “basket of currencies,” a blended currency, to become the global reserve currency.

So there are forces pushing at established currencies, trying to change the way global values are established, all as paper money has slid further out of circulation. We somehow still refer to “printing money,” but what really happens is that central banks simply increase the money supply (M1) permitting banks to deal in larger aggregate numbers.

In the most developed countries, cash is decreasingly used. Credit and debit cards, whatever their incarnation, are much more pervasive. What all of this means is that the notion of “money” is changing just as it has throughout history. Hard cash and paper currency are slowly falling out of vogue. Can you picture a society completely without coins and cash? What would street panhandlers ask for?

Well one country, Sweden, is thinking about a world without coins or paper money. “Several major banks in Sweden no longer carry cash, and if you want to buy a candy bar at the corner store, you pull out your phone. Even homeless people selling newspapers on the street take credit cards. By the end of last year, four out of every five transactions in the country were cashless. And new research has found that the amount of money in circulation has dropped around 40% to 50% over the last six years.

“An app called Swish, launched by Swedish banks, is helping drive the change. The app allows people to digitally transfer funds between bank accounts as quickly as handing over cash (perhaps more quickly if your wallet is very disorganized). ‘It takes about two seconds to transfer the money, which gives it a character similar to cash,’ says Niklas Arvidsson, a professor at Sweden's KTH Royal Institute of Technology who studies the transition away from cash.

“Though other countries have similar apps, like Venmo in the U.S., they don't work in real time; a transfer might take one day or even two. The U.S. app Dwolla wants to bypass the traditional Automated Clearinghouse system to make instantaneous transfers, but so far only a few banks of signed on to its service. Sweden, on the other hand, has been quick to embrace it: It now has over 3 million users, out of a population of 9.5 million.

“Sweden has a history of being quick to adopt financial innovations. The country installed its first ATM machine in 1967, two years before the U.S. Now they're ripping the machines out (between 2010 and 2012, banks removed around 900 ATMs). The move to digitize everything has been happening for awhile—Sweden was also early to adopt direct deposits and paying with plastic. By this century, unions started pushing to get rid of cash as a way to protect workers like bus drivers from robberies—if you get on a bus now, you can't pay with paper money.

“‘There is also a demographic development behind this,’ says Niklas Arvidsson, a professor at Sweden's Royal Institute of Technology who studies the transition away from cash. ‘Younger people do not start using cash but instead move directly into new services, while older people—who are the most frequent users of cash—reduce their spending as they get older and older.’

“The move helps make robberies less likely and may reduce organized crime (the banks that still accept cash are suspicious when anyone tries to make a deposit) and tax evasion. It's cheaper for the country overall, because electronic transactions cost less than handing cash. And, for most people, it's more convenient—imagine never having to walk six blocks to the nearest ATM again.” FastCompany.com, October 27^th.

Sweden is a small, mostly homogeneous nation, with very little in the way of a poor lower class. It might be the perfect venue for experimentation and change. But change in the way we use “money” is inevitable. How do you think you will transact business in the future? In five years? Ten years? How would such a change impact you?

I’m Peter Dekom, but clearly how we pay for stuff has never stayed the same for very long.

In Memoriam – 158 Dead and Rising

 Your music died, your sounds replaced

Ripping bullets, bombs, souls displaced

Sipping coffee, pouring wine, smiles arise

Interruptions blast, bodies fly, evil tries

To terrify, murder, to kill what they fear

Ignorance meets hubris, roughness near

False gods called, their minds destroyed

Military actions, distortions so deployed

Their toxicity spreads to those disgraced

Hopelessness and hate, truth misplaced

We pray for all those who perished today

Paris cried, we observed that deadly fray

Forgiveness struggles against eye for eye

 Can peace arise or upon violence to rely

Paris, know that our hearts, our thoughts, our prayers are with you tonight. We stand, side-by-side, by you in this troubled time. Brothers and sisters sharing family grief. Beirut, we feel your pain. Libya, Syria, Iraq, Israel, Palestine… we see your blood. We pray for you all.

     I’m Peter Dekom, and tonight I cried.