Dollar’$ downgrade

The state of the dollar’s health is reflected in the story of Dania, the desirable San Andres, Columbia escort who was allegedly propositioned for $800 to join a U.S. Secret Service guy only to be handed $30 at the end. Any decent bikini-clad hard-partying Señorita on the take-and-make Cartagena business would complain, too. And why not? Tacos and enchiladas are not getting any cheaper, and Dania is a single mother with a 9-year-old son.

Our favored Garapan girl would not condescend to do a hand job for that amount of money! (Those snickering, “hand job” is a form of massage that is actually refreshing, if one gets the right touch.) It is really a rapid decline of the value of a currency that used to “Won” you a lot of Kim Chee in the old days around West Gate of the Imperial Palace in Seoul, if one could not fork the dough for the manicured fingers up Walker Hill!

That’s neither here nor there but the news in the Cartagena Presidential U.S. Secret Service affair prior to the Summit of the Americas is not the morality involved since even El Mayor del Ciudad de Cartagena declared that the issue is on the commercial value of the beef, after secured Texas-size packages hit the local market needing tender kneading services. Remunerative justice, not ethics, is at the core of the matter!

The real news at the Summit was about BRICS’ (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) proposal after its March gathering to create a multi-currency World Bank to supplement the weakening $$$ and the floundering euro. That’s the kind of stuff that cannot allay fears with ex-grunt muscle and sophisticated communication kits of Secret Service personnel.

We suggested previously that maybe the U.S. Dollar might have a few more years to reign supreme in the world market as the medium of exchange, with the reputation of EU consigned to the Grecian urn after Athens’ economic health rapidly declined.

However, the dynastic and narrowly concentrated American worth and wealth is rather embarrassing for an experiment in political democracy! Distributive justice is the meat, harken America.

Now the BRICS’ masa (the combined population of the five countries is about 50 percent of the world’s total), are flexing their muscles, displaying a financial growth at 50-plus percent compared to the just over 9 of the G8 nations, and insisting that perhaps, their currency is just as useful as the greenback. India and China even had the ’temerity’ to suggest that they can start trading goods with partners using national currencies.

Wall Street, the metaphorical bestiary of the financial universe, in Bill Moyers’ colorful characterization, long ago joined in the weakening of the dollar as big commercial concerns influenced legislation to limit and lower corporate taxes in the U.S., while expanding operations in the cheap labor markets and lax tax atmosphere of other places.

Some corporate head honchos even go so far as to oppose legislation requiring predatory companies (those who buy existing business concerns and tear them apart for sale and a tidy profit) to reveal the ratio of CEO pay with those of its own workers. Now the hired help is up in arms and the thawing of spring is sending them out in the streets.

Being “Occupy” is reaching a new level of integrity as a professional occupation in some quarters! Occupiers are bracing for a long hot summer, and with the presidential circus on center stage, the world’s digitized microphone and lens is focused on America at a transmittal speed of three seconds on the 4G.

The word on the street, after Dania’s bikini fairness hit the web, is that she is only a click away from a Playboy shoot. Good for her. She hails from San Andres, an island closer to Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama, but flies the Columbian flag and grooms workers in the tourist industry for Cartagena de Indias.

We’ve been to Bogota once and though we tried to triangulate Jamaica, Guatemala, and Venezuela, we never really set foot on the modern resort of Cartagena, the illustrious ancient Caribbean City that is named after her sister city in Spain; she is sister city as well to our old hangout Manila in the Philippines. It hit the popular imagination in the movie Romancing the Stone.

We saw it in the movie The Mission, the SJ’s fictionalized work with the Guaranis up the Iguazu falls separating Brazil and Argentina, filmed in Cartagena. Fans of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera will recognize the city as the setting, and more recently, Tom Cruise in the movie Collateral knocked off a drug cartel target in a bar at the city. A busy air and water port, Cartagena has a history more ancient and richly more colorful than that of Louisiana’s New Orleans.

It is, thus, proper that in the shadows of its brothels, the decline of the U.S. dollar would find its most symbolic yet radical downgrade. We do not rejoice at this. We only note it as another of those reality factors unfolding in the world stage.

One wit was unkind. “At least, the U.S. Secret Service is not on guard duty over Gaia’s economy,” she said. Coyly, she delivered the coup d’grace: “They would deceptively conclude all transactions on the cheap!”

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Jaime R. Vergara (jrvergarajr2031@aol.com) previously taught at San Vicente Elementary School on Saipan and is currently a guest lecturer at Shenyang Aerospace University in China.