www.prospect.org By Robert Dreyfuss Issue Date: 4.1.03

For months Americans have been told that the United States is going to war against Iraq in order to disarm Saddam Hussein, remove him from power, eliminate Iraq's alleged stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, and prevent Baghdad from blackmailing its neighbors or aiding terrorist groups. But the Bush administration's hawks, especially the neoconservatives who provide the driving force for war, see the conflict with Iraq as much more than that. It is a signal event, designed to create cataclysmic shock waves throughout the region and around the world, ushering in a new era of American imperial power. It is also likely to bring the United States into conflict with several states in the Middle East. Those who think that U.S. armed forces can complete a tidy war in Iraq, without the battle spreading beyond Iraq's borders, are likely to be mistaken.

"I think we're going to be obliged to fight a regional war, whether we want to or not," says Michael Ledeen, a former U.S. national-security official and a key strategist among the ascendant flock of neoconservative hawks, many of whom have taken up perches inside the U.S. government. Asserting that the war against Iraq can't be contained, Ledeen says that the very logic of the global war on terrorism will drive the United States to confront an expanding network of enemies in the region. "As soon as we land in Iraq, we're going to face the whole terrorist network," he says, including the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and a collection of militant splinter groups backed by nations -- Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia -- that he calls "the terror masters."

"It may turn out to be a war to remake the world," says Ledeen.

In the Middle East, impending "regime change" in Iraq is just the first step in a wholesale reordering of the entire region, according to neoconservatives -- who've begun almost gleefully referring to themselves as a "cabal." Like dominoes, the regimes in the region -- first Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia, then Lebanon and the PLO, and finally Sudan, Libya, Yemen and Somalia -- are slated to capitulate, collapse or face U.S. military action. To those states, says cabal ringleader Richard Perle, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and chairman of the Defense Policy Board, an influential Pentagon advisory committee, "We could deliver a short message, a two-word message: 'You're next.'" In the aftermath, several of those states, including Iraq, Syria and Saudi Arabia, may end up as dismantled, unstable shards in the form of mini-states that resemble Yugoslavia's piecemeal wreckage. And despite the Wilsonian rhetoric from the president and his advisers about bringing democracy to the Middle East, at bottom it's clear that their version of democracy might have to be imposed by force of arms.

And not just in the Middle East. Three-thousand U.S. soldiers are slated to arrive in the Philippines, opening yet another new front in the war on terrorism, and North Korea is finally in the administration's sights. On the horizon could be Latin America, where the Bush administration endorsed a failed regime change in Venezuela last year, and where new left-leaning challenges are emerging in Brazil, Ecuador and elsewhere. Like the bombing of Hiroshima, which stunned the Japanese into surrender in 1945 and served notice to the rest of the world that the United States possessed unparalleled power it would not hesitate to use, the war against Iraq has a similar purpose. "It's like the bully in a playground," says Ian Lustick, a University of Pennsylvania professor of political science and author of Unsettled States, Disputed Lands. "You beat up somebody, and everybody else behaves."

Over and over again, in speeches, articles and white papers, the neoconservatives have made it plain that the war against Iraq is intended to demonstrate Washington's resolve to implement President Bush's new national-security strategy, announced last fall -- even if doing so means overthrowing the entire post-World War II structure of treaties and alliances, including NATO and the United Nations. In their book, The War Over Iraq, William Kristol of The Weekly Standard and Lawrence F. Kaplan of The New Republic write, "The mission begins in Baghdad, but it does not end there. … We stand at the cusp of a new historical era. … This is a decisive moment. … It is so clearly about more than Iraq. It is about more even than the future of the Middle East and the war on terror. It is about what sort of role the United States intends to play in the twenty-first century."

Invading Iraq, occupying its capital and its oil fields, and seizing control of its Shia Islamic holy places can only have a devastating and highly destabilizing impact on the entire region, from Egypt to central Asia and Pakistan. "We are all targeted," Syrian President Bashar Assad told an Arab summit meeting, called to discuss Iraq, on March 1. "We are all in danger."

"They want to foment revolution in Iran and use that to isolate and possibly attack Syria in [Lebanon's] Bekaa Valley, and force Syria out," says former Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs Edward S. Walker, now president of the Middle East Institute. "They want to pressure [Muammar] Quaddafi in Libya and they want to destabilize Saudi Arabia, because they believe instability there is better than continuing with the current situation. And out of this, they think, comes Pax Americana."

The more immediate impact of war against Iraq will occur in Iran, say many analysts, including both neoconservative and more impartial experts on the Middle East. As the next station along the "axis of evil," Iran holds power that's felt far and wide in the region. Oil-rich and occupying a large tract of geopolitical real estate, Iran is arguably the most strategically important country in its neighborhood. With its large Kurdish population, Iran has a stake in the future of Iraqi Kurdistan. As a Shia power, Iran has vast influence among the Shia majority in Iraq, Lebanon and Bahrain, with the large Shia population in Saudi Arabia's oil-rich eastern province and among the warlords of western Afghanistan. And Iran's ties to the violent Hezbollah guerrillas, whose anti-American zeal can only be inflamed by the occupation of Iraq, will give the Bush administration all the reason it needs to expand the war on terrorism to Tehran.

The first step, neoconservatives say, will be for the United States to lend its support to opposition groups of Iranian exiles willing to enlist in the war on terrorism, much as the Iraqi National Congress served as the spearhead for American intervention in Iraq. And, just as the doddering ex-king of Afghanistan served as a rallying point for America's conquest of that landlocked, central Asian nation, the remnants of the late former shah of Iran's royal family could be rallied to the cause. "Nostalgia for the last shah's son, Reza Pahlavi … has again risen," says Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA officer who, like Ledeen and Perle, is ensconced at the AEI. "We must be prepared, however, to take the battle more directly to the mullahs," says Gerecht, adding that the United States must consider strikes at both Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps and allies in Lebanon. "In fact, we have only two meaningful options: Confront clerical Iran and its proxies militarily or ring it with an oil embargo."

Iran is not the only country where restoration of monarchy is being considered. Neoconservative strategists have also supported returning to power the Iraqi monarchy, which was toppled in 1958 by a combination of military officers and Iraqi communists. When the Ottoman Empire crumbled after World War I, British intelligence sponsored the rise of a little-known family called the Hashemites, whose origins lay in the Saudi region around Mecca and Medina. Two Hashemite brothers were installed on the thrones of Jordan and Iraq.

For nearly a year, the neocons have suggested that Jordan's Prince Hassan, the brother of the late King Hussein of Jordan and a blood relative of the Iraqi Hashemite family, might re-establish the Hashemites in Baghdad were Saddam Hussein to be removed. Among the neocons are Michael Rubin, a former AEI fellow, and David Wurmser, a Perle acolyte. Rubin in 2002 wrote an article for London's Daily Telegraph headlined, "If Iraqis want a king, Hassan of Jordan could be their man." Wurmser in 1999 wrote Tyranny's Ally, an AEI-published book devoted largely to the idea of restoring the Hashemite dynasty in Iraq. Today Rubin is a key Department of Defense official overseeing U.S. policy toward Iraq, and Wurmser is a high-ranking official working for Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton, himself a leading neoconservative ideologue.

But if the neocons are toying with the idea of restoring monarchies in Iraq and Iran, they are also eyeing the destruction of the region's wealthiest and most important royal family of all: the Saudis. Since September 11, the hawks have launched an all-out verbal assault on the Saudi monarchy, accusing Riyadh of supporting Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda organization and charging that the Saudis are masterminding a worldwide network of mosques, schools and charity organizations that promote terrorism. It's a charge so breathtaking that those most familiar with Saudi Arabia are at a loss for words when asked about it. "The idea that the House of Saud is cooperating with al-Qaeda is absurd," says James Akins, who served as U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia in the mid-1970s and frequently travels to the Saudi capital as a consultant. "It's too dumb to be talked about."

That doesn't stop the neoconservatives from doing so, however. In The War Against the Terror Masters, Ledeen cites Wurmser in charging that, just before 9-11, "Saudi intelligence had become difficult to distinguish from Al Qaeda." Countless other, similar accusations have been flung at the Saudis by neocons. Max Singer, co-founder of the Hudson Institute, has repeatedly suggested that the United States seek to dismantle the Saudi kingdom by encouraging breakaway republics in the oil-rich eastern province (which is heavily Shia) and in the western Hijaz. "After [Hussein] is removed, there will be an earthquake throughout the region," says Singer. "If this means the fall of the [Saudi] regime, so be it." And when Hussein goes, Ledeen says, it could lead to the collapse of the Saudi regime, perhaps to pro-al-Qaeda radicals. "In that event, we would have to extend the war to the Arabian peninsula, at the very least to the oil-producing regions."

"I've stopped saying that Saudi Arabia will be taken over by Osama bin Laden or by a bin Laden clone if we go into Iraq," says Akins. "I'm now convinced that's exactly what [the neoconservatives] want. And then we take it over."

Iraq, too, could shatter into at least three pieces, which would be based on the three erstwhile Ottoman Empire provinces of Mosul, Baghdad and Basra that were cobbled together to compose the state eight decades ago. That could conceivably leave a Hashemite kingdom in control of largely Sunni central Iraq, a Shia state in the south (possibly linked to Iran, informally) and some sort of Kurdish entity in the north -- either independent or, as is more likely, under the control of the Turkish army. Turkey, a reluctant player in George W. Bush's crusade, fears an independent Kurdistan and would love to get its hands on Iraq's northern oil fields around the city of Kirkuk.

The final key component for these map-redrawing, would-be Lawrences of Arabia is the toppling of Assad's regime and the breakup of Syria. Perle himself proposed exactly that in a 1996 document prepared for the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies (IASPS), an Israeli think tank. The plan, titled, "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," was originally prepared as a working paper to advise then-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. It called on Israel to work with Turkey and Jordan to "contain, destabilize and roll-back" various states in the region, overthrow Saddam Hussein in Iraq, press Jordan to restore a scion of its Hashemite dynasty to the Iraqi throne and, above all, launch military assaults against Lebanon and Syria as a "prelude to a redrawing of the map of the Middle East [to] threaten Syria's territorial integrity." Joining Perle in writing the IASPS paper were Douglas Feith and Wurmser, now senior officials in Bush's national-security apparatus.

Gary Schmitt, executive director of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), worries only that the Bush administration, including Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney, might not have the guts to see its plan all the way through once Hussein is toppled. "It's going to be no small thing for the United States to follow through on its stated strategic policy in the region," he says. But Schmitt believes that President Bush is fully committed, having been deeply affected by the events of September 11. Schmitt roundly endorses the vision put forward by Kaplan and Kristol in The War Over Iraq, which was sponsored by the PNAC. "It's really our book," says Schmitt.

Six years ago, in its founding statement of principles, PNAC called for a radical change in U.S. foreign and defense policy, with a beefed-up military budget and a more muscular stance abroad, challenging hostile regimes and assuming "American global leadership." Signers of that statement included Cheney; Rumsfeld; Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz; Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs Peter W. Rodman; Elliott Abrams, the Near East and North African affairs director at the National Security Council; Zalmay Khalilzad, the White House liaison to the Iraqi opposition; I. Lewis Libby, Cheney's chief of staff; and Gov. Jeb Bush (R-Fla.), the president's brother. The PNAC statement foreshadowed the outline of the president's 2002 national-security strategy.

Scenarios for sweeping changes in the Middle East, imposed by U.S armed forces, were once thought fanciful -- even ridiculous -- but they are now taken seriously given the incalculable impact of an invasion of Iraq. Chas Freeman, who served as U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War, worries about everything that could go wrong. "It's a war to turn the kaleidoscope, by people who know nothing about the Middle East," he says. "And there's no way to know how the pieces will fall." Perle and Co., says Freeman, are seeking a Middle East dominated by an alliance between the United States and Israel, backed by overwhelming military force. "It's machtpolitik, might makes right," he says. Asked about the comparison between Iraq and Hiroshima, Freeman adds, "There is no question that the Richard Perles of the world see shock and awe as a means to establish a position of supremacy that others fear to challenge."

But Freeman, who is now president of the Middle East Policy Council, thinks it will be a disaster. "This outdoes anything in the march of folly catalog," he says. "It's the lemmings going over the cliff." Robert Dreyfuss

Copyright © 2003 by The American Prospect, Inc. Preferred Citation: Robert Dreyfuss, "Just the Beginning," The American Prospect vol. 14 no. 3, March 1, 2003 . This article may not be resold, reprinted, or redistributed for compensation of any kind without prior written permission from the author. Direct questions about permissions to permissions@prospect.org.

www.agriculture.com By Ohio State University News Service

COLUMBUS, Ohio — Although America's minds are on Iraq and the potential impacts of war, the agriculture industry should be keeping a close eye on the developments with North Korea, says an Ohio State University agricultural economist.

Matt Roberts, with the Department of Agricultural, Environmental, and Development Economics, said a war with Iraq may cause little, if any, economic impacts, but a conflict with North Korea could cause a dramatic disruption in agricultural trade and market prices.

"A potential war with Iraq is simply creating short-term financial uncertainty, which may result in higher interest rates if tensions continue," said Roberts."Any long-term ramifications may result in the slow-down of imports and exports due to heightened security, and in what we call reputation effects — America’s standing in the international community when it comes time for other countries to make American purchases."

North Korean involvement could hamper ag trade

Such impacts would be minor and diminish as time moved on, but a war with North Korea could have a longer-lasting effect, said Roberts.

"South Korea is a very industrialized nation and is a close trading partner with the U.S. I think it's the fifth largest export market for our beef and pork," said Roberts. "Any attack would probably involve the near leveling of Seoul (the South Korean capital) from the north, so the economic disruptions would be immense. We would feel that in our agricultural community. The lesser demand for meat would reduce the demand for feed grains. In other words, a decrease in exports translates into a decrease in grain prices."

Although any conflict with Iraq or North Korea would produce some economic instability, the biggest impact a war would have on the U.S. agricultural community would be one of a social nature, said Roberts.

"The National Guard and (Army) Reserves draw heavily from rural areas: police forces, firefighters, farmers. If a war with Iraq is not a quic k and decisive one or if tensions continue to increase on the Korean peninsula, it's possible we'll start to see more people drawn out of our rural and farming communities," said Roberts. "Their absence would just compound the stresses that some of these families already face with drought and finances and a tough winter."

One impact Americans have felt with a looming war with Iraq has been an increase in gas prices, currently averaging $1.68 a gallon — a 54-cent increase from this time last year.

"Probably the biggest economic impact we would see with a war with Iraq would be sustained high gas prices," said Roberts.

With natural gas prices following suit, it could mean higher-priced fuel and fertilizers for farmers.

"We import more of our natural gas than we once did. It's the primary feedstock from which anhydrous is made, so that has some potential to impact farming profitability this year," said Roberts. "I don't think this is shaping up to be a year like 2001 where there was a gross anhydrous shortage, but those gas prices will stay higher. We may see a slight shift from corn planting to soybean planting because corn production requires higher input costs."

Venezuela also a piece of crude oil price puzzle

The other piece to the crude oil price puzzle is the political unrest in Venezuela that has substantially reduced the flow of petroleum products. Venezuela is the United States' third-largest oil exporter, behind Mexico and Saudi Arabia.

"Venezuela pretty much shot itself in the foot with this situation," said Roberts. "Venezuela has always been a reliable partner for us, until now. Many of our refineries were built to process Venezuelan oil, but they have had to alter their processes and it has made them less efficient."

Carl Zulauf, an Ohio State agricultural economist, said that another impact a war with Iraq could have would be a renewed emphasis on U.S. energy independence. This would result in the increased use of alternative fuel s like etha nol and biodiesel, crop byproducts.

"In the short run, this is probably good for U.S. agriculture, in particular corn producers because of increased demand for ethanol," said Zulauf. "In the long run, the impact could be more problematic if some other source of alternative fuel emerges that displaces the demand for ethanol."

Last year, the ethanol industry set an all-time production record and production in 2003 is likely to follow suit. According to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, American ethanol producers made 177,000 barrels of ethanol per day in January. Total production is projected to hit 2.5 billion gallons by the end of the year.

"In the past year, since harvest, ethanol has truly been a savior to the corn market. Our corn exports have been very weak. However, ethanol production has exploded over the last six months, to the point where ethanol is consuming around 8 percent of American corn production," said Roberts.

Biodiesel, another renewable fuel, is also making headlines in U.S. energy production. Last March, the Minnesota legislature passed a law mandating a 2 percent inclusion of biodiesel into the state’s petroleum diesel supply beginning in 2005. Minnesota is the first state to require the addition of biodiesel in commercial diesel supplies.

More recently, a bill was introduced to the U.S. Congress that would give biodiesel the same tax incentives that ethanol currently receives.

"Much of the tax incentive for ethanol is because it is exempt from the highway excise tax, but it has begun to impact the budget of the interstate highway system," said Roberts. "If biodiesel is exempt from those same taxes, concerns are being raised that as the production of alternative fuels increases, it will seriously impact that budget and the money is going to have to come from somewhere."

More emphasis on alternative fuels, however, would provide support for farm prices.

"Over the course of the year, my feeling is th at national p rices have been a dime higher because of increase in our ethanol production," said Roberts. 03/11/2003 12:22 p.m. CDT

www.heraldtribune.com By LIZ DOUP

Her name is Sarah. Sarah Mohammed. She's easy to identify at Boca Raton High because she dresses according to her Muslim faith. Her body is covered. Her head is covered. As President Bush talks to the country about war with Iraq, Sarah struggles through every day at school, looking different, feeling different. But she's found a bit of acceptance in the school's ROTC program, of all places. Not because of its connection with military training, but because of the commander, a man with brown skin and accented English, a man who knows what it's like to be an outsider, too. He's retired U.S. Navy Chief Petty Officer Edwin Morales - Chief Morales to the kids in the Navy Junior ROTC program he helps run. Inside the portable classroom, Sarah, 17, joins students from this country and around the globe - Haiti, Colombia, Russia, Venezuela, Brazil ... At the moment, two boys are being reprimanded for breaking a trophy. The talk centers on responsibility, honesty and respect for others. ROTC programs in high schools are about teaching values, not guns and bullets. "What we're trying to do here is build character," Chief Morales said. Before Morales took on this mini United Nations, before he spent 20 years in the Navy, he was a kid from Puerto Rico, growing up in the Bronx, tangling with bullies. "I do understand what Sarah, what a lot of these kids face," Morales said. "I've been there." Sarah, in three years on Florida soil, has heard enough fighting words. "But I don't want to fight," she said. "I want to teach." Understand she's a Muslim from Trinidad, not the Middle East. But ever since 19 terrorists on four planes changed history nearly 18 months ago, many Muslims have felt under attack. That includes Sarah, whose parents kept her home for two months after 9-11 because they feared for her safety. In the days and weeks that followed, she was spit on by a boy who passed her in the hall, had her hijab - her head covering - snatched off and was called a terrorist by other kids. Now, with the specter of terrorism and the prospect of war, she's bracing for more. Students in ROTC rally around her but can't be with her every minute. Just today, as she walked to class, a boy yelled at her, "Freak!" It's no wonder that Sarah was drawn to ROTC for its order and discipline. They do precision marching drills. They answer "Sir" and "Ma'am." Sarah sits ramrod straight in the classroom where other students are surprisingly quiet, too. It's current events time, when the kids talk about the newspaper's front page. It can get dicey at times, discussing global events with kids from all over the world. When Colombian drug wars make headlines, some kids want to label the Colombian students drug runners. When terrorism is the talk, Sarah can suffer. "Stereotypes are rampant," Morales said. "That's what these kids have to deal with." But Morales has a way of keeping hot topics neutral. Often, after a student's comment, he orders the class, military style, to "Give 'em some love." In unison, the class responds with a syncopated clap. Clap. Clap. Clap-clap-clap. Clap. Clap. Clap-clap-clap. It's a show of unity among the kids, even if they are oceans apart in beliefs. When it's Sarah's time to speak, her red-hot topic is the war between Palestinians and Israelis. In a soft voice, she talks of land disputes, broken promises and shattered dreams. A girl asks about suicide bombers. And a boy says, "If it's about religion, then nothing's going to change, right? You can't tell people what they should believe." Morales lets the kids talk and Sarah respond, before he gets to the most important point: "You don't have to agree with Miss Mohammed," he said. "But you need to respect her. If we all don't listen to each other, how are we to learn? How are we to understand?" Sarah sees herself as a teacher who can educate people about her faith. She answers all the questions people shoot at her, silly as some seem. "Why do you dress like that?" "My religion tells me to, and, also, modesty." "Why do Muslims kill people?" "My religion doesn't teach people to hurt people." "We can't see your hair, so I was wondering, is it black?" "Yes." Sarah longs for people to understand she's no different from other kids in so many ways. She lives with her parents - her father is a cabinetmaker - two sisters and a brother who moved here, like so many others, for a more stable life. In her short time here, she's grown fond of Ben Affleck; she listens to Power 96; and when she's out of her ROTC uniform, she wears jeans under her tunic, not a long skirt. She can do all that, you understand, and still be the girl in the hijab who faces Mecca to pray. And when she prays, she prays for peace. "She's a very courageous young woman," Morales said. "Not only does she come to school, she lets everyone know she's Muslim and proud of it." In the classroom, Sarah learns from others as others learn from her. It's a two-way street, with Sarah listening to others' point of view, too, Morales said. But last fall, the pressure of being different weighed too heavily. Sarah dropped out for three weeks until Morales coaxed her back. In the past few weeks, as the prospect of war dominated headlines, she started missing classes. So Morales took her aside again. The world is full of bullies, he told her. But you don't fight them with fists or by quitting. You fight them by being a good example. That means going to school. That means doing your work. You fight them with character. "As a Muslim, Sarah represents what so many people fear today because they don't know any better," he said. "I like to think these kids will grow up not being afraid and ignorant because they knew Sarah." And in the classroom, they're showing some love. Clap. Clap. Clap-Clap-Clap. Clap. Clap.

www.outlookindia.com UMA SHASHIKANT

Imagine an information exchange into which all requirements for all imaginable goods and services are stored and available to all those who care to access it.

The world which we live in is a boring world of sequence. We study, then get a job; work and then get paid; pay taxes and then spend; spend and then save; save and then acquire assets. Think about it—the speed of this sequence is at the root of all costs, wastages and inefficiencies. If we enhanced its speed and also found out ways to parallel processing, what will happen to our abilities to earn and spend and save? What if we decide to ride technology and put this sequence on a fast track or better still, break this sequence and indulge in simultaneous processing of an infinite set of information?

Imagine an information exchange into which all requirements for all imaginable goods and services are stored and available to all those who care to access it. Imagine an encrypted electronic card that identifies you with your fingerprint—dna if you care—and automatically credits you when you earn and debits you when you spend. Imagine a world of totally anonymous dealings in money for you, no one knowing what you earn and spend. Imagine a world without currency notes. Imagine a world without transaction costs, income-taxes and inflation. That is the power of enabling a costless exchange for goods and services that spreads across the world.

That’s the future of money.

We have a positive rate of inflation today because we have to store purchasing power. We have to print currency that actually earns nothing to support all exchanges in the system. If all storage is in the form of deployed wealth and all spends are in the form of e-transfers, we need no currency. If all money in a system is "working", there’s no need for idle cash and inflation is zero.

We have transaction costs now as we think an intermediary can help us execute our deal. We pay the broker to get us accommodation in a new town. The broker’s cost has to come down if he looked at larger sets of customers and if the speed of matching a deal moves up. Information is the key to reducing transaction costs. What an information exchange that links to a system for wealth transfer will achieve is a higher velocity of money. If money and its uses ran a little more for all of us, we will do so much more with the same money. That’s the key to efficient use of money, which technology will help us get.

The best part of this dream is yet to begin. If an information exchange puts our earnings on fast track, can derivatives be far behind? There will be a near-explosion of futures and options on the information space—along with zillion exotics. You can use the credits your kid daughter gets for her birthday to buy ‘medicine futures’ in New Zealand. If she didn’t care for it, she would swap it for ‘creative photography’ in Venezuela—swaptions, which give her the option to swap the two, provided the national income futures of the two countries of study move the way she expected. The power of efficient exchange will be upon us and we could zip along costlessly exercising our options. Most illiquid assets will become liquid and our bankers will be busy managing our asset transactions and values for us, rather than staidly verifying signatures and passing cheques.

The icing on the cake is zero tax. Sitting in Mauritius, you, an Indian citizen, designed an aircraft that will be sold by the US to Zimbabwe for use in its project at Beijing. Your payments will flow into your accounts at Bahrain and Mumbai. Where was your income earned and where will it be taxed? The future of money, as I see it, will annoy governments no end. Current-day restrictions on encryption technologies is a well-known response to this "loss of control". Governments love to peep into our transactions. If all assets and transactions are electronic, tracking them is so easy. Governments may offer to actually file your tax returns for you, since they know all!

But the danger actually is in the intrusion into financial privacy, which democracies will refuse to suffer. The best-case scenario, then, is the total lack of control and the end of sovereignty. Income-tax has to go and we all will pay 0.01 paise on every rupee spent—and that would be more than enough for the government. Then government is a direct stake-holder in the speed of our information exchange, transfer of credit and velocity of money. Plus, communities will begin to create their own money and before we know it, there would be parallel money systems all over the world.

This is part of a future that’s already happened. Smart cards that enable an e-purse and also store a wealth of information have been around for a while. There are at least 1,500 private currency systems in the world, including Ithaca, which operates right under the nose of the world’s financial capital, New York. Everyone in the network logs in or draws out "Ithaca hours"—each equivalent to $10, for goods and services sold or bought. All earnings and spends are adjusted against the Ithaca hours and communities have discovered higher efficiency and harmony.

We’re on our way to creating our own money, storing and using it the way we like and doing all this with greater efficiency, zero tax, lower cost and with immense benefits. Walter Wriston, the former chairman of Citibank, had famously said, "Information about money has become almost as important as money itself." Indeed!

(The author is head, training and development, at Prudential icici Asset Management Co.)

www.wishtv.com March 7, 2003 - 1:05 pm

It's been a busy week for WISH-TV's new colleagues at WIIH. The WIIH presented the first local news broadcast in Spanish on Monday night.

Today News 8 spoke to WIIH's anchors, Marco Dominguez and Carolina Pimentel. "It's been great. It's amazing. I mean, the support we have received from WISH-TV, the support that we have received from the whole community. We can't complain," said Dominguez.

"We have been working hard, but because we have a huge responsibility with the community, we're enjoying ourselves. And this is an incredible job," said Pimentel.

Pimentel says she learned English through the infamous "immersion" style. "I came here in 1997 to study English and I just lived with my host mother at the time. I went to Butler University and everything was in English - except my roommate. She was from Venezuela, too, so we spoke a lot of Spanish. But lots of time - I would say like 90 percent of the time - was in English. I had to learn."

Dominguez also came to Indiana from Venezuela a few years ago and tried the immersion technique. "But I had a professor that told me once, 'The best way to practice your English is to listen to the Brady Bunch show.'  And I still have that song in my mind. I used to see it at 4:30 every afternoon, It was great," he laughed.

If you're considering immersing yourself in the Spanish language, check out WIIH at 11:00 pm on Channel 17.