Your post was intriguing, well written and I wanted to learn more. Feel free to go to town with it. Really! I should have said that but got caught up with the equating thing. Want to learn more.
Is anyone picking up anything regarding food? Lack of food, high food prices, a food related business having troubles? Perhaps farming? Within the next 8 weeks maybe sooner? I don't know where I am picking up a possible issue but I think one is coming soon.
Regarding food. It depends on where in the world you are focusing on.
Perhaps you could specify.
I don’t get anything exceptional on food in the US at this time. I feel it’s an issue much further down the road, like decades away.
Pacosurfer— I feel you will be okay, that you are protected.
re Recession: If the 2014 vision I had about this time period is correct and we are going into a bear market then it returns to pre-bear market levels around 2028 and perhaps a little sooner.
People should take care not to rely on any one person’s predictions though
Coyote, I’m sorry I put my foot in my mouth. Please say more. Your points are intelligent and I want to understand more.
Thank you, Jeanne.
Yes, I will be 41 next Friday. I've made it this far!
I'll be okay :)
To
"Thank you, Jeanne.
Yes, I will be 41 next Friday. I've made it this far!
I'll be okay "
And to that I add a great big, hurray hurray hurray. Right on @pacosurfer ! You are lighter already!
?
Bananas.
Noticed it both physically and vibrationally a few years ago. Bit by bit, lesser varieties were replacing the ones I was used to. Many went from green at purchase to over ripe at home in one or two days at least in in my marketing area or my vision and taste buds.
Now it has the potential to devastate not just entire crops but all bananas as we know them.
They will take time to be erased from our produce sections but it has seriously begun.
Regarding my previous comment, I got drunk on words and was trying to allude to meta philosophical themes that really aren’t meant for the limited space of a forum post. It was not my intention to invoke mealy-mouthed “both sides do it”-ism with regards to the current political landscape. I don’t want to distract more from the topic of this topic of this thread, so that’s all I’m going to say.
Nooooo! Don't stop, Coyote!
Please say more and more.
Something each of us says any place here relates to those open to receive and looking and perhaps even needing.
Nothing (even the ridiculous) goes to waste here!
It is all needed by someone who was drawn here. Its makes our final pushing out to rebirth and last intake of our breathe to transition all the more powerful.
If you need encouragement, I'll get up on a table with my glass and dance--keeping in mind that I turn 70 this year and de-light in being a spectacle at weddings with dancing -- so so oh yes, I will (my perfect example ? of the ridiculous under this heading of "The Economy") while you say more and more everywhere on any and every thing the rest of us can imagine or create.
I didn't think you put your foot in your mouth, really. We're living in such fiery, stressful times, and I myself let that "fed up"-ness get to me when I posted. So I wanted to take a step away to refine my thoughts and make sure I wasn't helping to turn this lovely community into an angsty Reddit forum. Some of what I posted previously belongs in a different thread, but the most important point I was trying to make about the economy was the need for regional creativity as opposed to rigid centralization.
One of the things that's been papered over about the 1930s is that in both Europe and North America, the Great Depression spurred a great deal of economic ingenuity at the local level. It wasn't all bread lines and Okies. Instead, many municipalities invigorated their local economies by experimenting with grassroots solutions, especially by implementing local "emergency currencies" that were not based on interest or the attendant mindset of wealth hoarding (as exemplified by the town of Wörgl, Austria and its stamp scrip currency). Naturally, central authorities on both sides of the Atlantic were horrified by the prospect of having their bureaucratic prerogative usurped by "provincial bumpkins." And so most national authorities, including the FDR administration, applied the paternalistic logic of "central government knows best" and outlawed emergency currencies, thus consigning the Western world to a bleak landscape of bread lines and shantytowns until ethnic hatred (spurred on by economic woes), Hitler, genocide, and WWII came along.
I've drawn attention to the emergency currencies of the 1930s in order to make a point about the mentality of control, which infects almost all of our institutions in the industrial world, including most of the platforms of our major political parties to varying degrees (the origins and scope of the mentality of control is a topic that deserves its own thread). As we head into the 2020s, as the economy worsens, and as environmental disruption ramps up, I feel like the most promising solutions will be small scale and locally based (as opposed to the ambitions of empire and dominion over nature that landed us in the mess we're in). And I feel like no matter who's in the White House, federal institutions will try their damnedest to thwart any sort of grassroots problem solving that tries to alter the fundamental structure of our society (just imagine how the Federal Reserve would respond if counties started ditching the US dollar in favor of stamp-scrip currencies). Yet what we need now more than ever is fundamental restructuring.
I should add that I'm not advocating a libertarian agenda where government authority is absent. But because many of our federal institutions (in the US and abroad) were crafted for an age of empire and paternalistic control, the interests of the nation-state isn't always going to align with the era of organic, locally-incubated creativity that our era of converging crises is calling upon us to commence.
That is what I was thinking. It was 2007 when the economy started to falter, but it took until 2008 for everything to collapse.
Agreed. As I have stated on this forum before our current system is broken and we need to rethink how we've done things in the past. I have always thought that we should go back to a barter system. I have been told that the reason this system stopped was because it was hard to determine the exact worth of each item and it made it difficult to exchange in other countries due to the inability to find equal worth. Please correct me if I am wrong on that as that my understanding as to why we switched to monetizing goods. That being said, if we are placed in a situation where we can no longer trade with other countries due to a trade war and nationalism, then maybe local communities can determine an effective barter system for the local community.
There might be more one can do than you think. Perhaps someone can provide the food ingredients and the other person cook. Some, even an older person might be able to watch children after school or help tutor. Although this was not bartering, my great uncle passed away recently at the age of 104. He owned a small apartment building, 1920's old world style in Los Angeles, perhaps a total of 6 units. Everyone who knew him loved him. He was a true gentleman, grounded, a gardener, worldly and heart centered in all he did. He refused to raise the rent for years on most of his tenants. because he knew they could not afford a higher rent. They were mostly young struggling young professionals and actors. They gave back to him in many ways including making sure he was eating, drove him to appointments, shopped with him for groceries. They loved being with him and he with them. They were like his grand kids and everyone took care of each other. .
I think barter works in small-scale local situations (car repair for braces, for example). It starts to become very limiting quickly once it involves more than a few people, though. Take the orthodontist, for example. She may be able to straighten a child's teeth, but what she needs on a daily basis are food, rent, transportation, etc. How often can she directly barter her services for those things? How many children's teeth would her landlord, grocer, and local metro need straightened?
Some kind of currency would start develop quickly.
As for local scrip, I think that developed during the Great Depression in response to the bank runs which put banks out of the business and paralyzed the economy. Hopefully, that will not happen again. (One of the incredibly few things I ever agreed with George W. Bush about was the bailout of the banks, because that could be absolutely disastrous during the Great Recession).
But local scrip is also very limiting as far as any long-term economic situation is concerned. If one region of the country (say, Central California) wants to trade produce with another region of the country with a different scrip, how would that work? Are they basically all going to be local currencies? What about stuff that's sold nationally like prescription drugs? Interest rates?
That's not to say that I'm against local economic innovation at all. I think one of the great values of states is that they can function as labs for innovation for things that may work and see other things that don't work.
Thanks so much for telling us about your great uncle. His behavior is a perfect example of how a gift economy can work, as described by Lewis Hyde in his book, The Gift. Basically, whenever someone gifts something to the community, the spirit of that gift circulates until it finds an individual or enterprise that is most in need. By "gifting" a lower rent to his tenants, your great uncle received that gift in return in his own times of need in the form of favors from his tenants. What excites me are local currencies, like LETS systems and demurrage currencies, that incorporate the spirit of the gift into the formal monetary system.
Agreed, bartering is a plausible arrangement, and I'm all for removing as many social functions as possible from the monetary system. @ElaineG There are ways to incorporate the spirit of bartering (and the gift) at a higher level of complexity so that everyone has purchasing power, regardless of their skills or material possessions. For example, LETS systems (Local Exchange Trading Systems) conceive of monetary units as only coming into existence when a person is gifted a good or service from someone else. So if person A is given a box of produce from person B's garden, person A may then be 5 units in debt to the community as a whole. Person A could then redeem her debt by, say, babysitting or tutoring, as Lovendures has pointed out. And nothing's stopping communities from exempting individuals who are too sick or old from exchanging labor. But debt and the concept of "you owe me one" shouldn't be the animating principle of these systems. LETS systems ideally honor the spirit of the gift and communal wellbeing.
One of the things I miss about living in a small town back East is that we had a pretty good ad hoc barter system. Here are some of the things we bartered with or for:
Reiki, acupuncture, massage, eggs, milk, baked goods, cooked meals, homegrown produce, pet sitting, baby sitting, seeds, art.
I live in a small town (2,600) and there is a lot of bartering going on - we call it helping our neighbors where we can.
It seems to me that many people believe we live in a capitalist country - we don't. Some of our economy is purely socialist (Veteran's healthcare, public schools, etc.), much is crony capitalism (pharmaceutical and energy industries, private prisons), some is run by robber barons (health insurance) and, of course, some is actual capitalism (your local plumber). While I admit it is a broad generalization, the bigger you are, the less likely your company is "capitalist" and the more likely the fix is in. We need the spirit of Teddy Roosevelt again.
I live in a small town (2,600) and there is a lot of bartering going on - we call it helping our neighbors where we can.
It seems to me that many people believe we live in a capitalist country - we don't. Some of our economy is purely socialist (Veteran's healthcare, public schools, etc.), much is crony capitalism (pharmaceutical and energy industries, private prisons), some is run by robber barons (health insurance) and, of course, some is actual capitalism (your local plumber). While I admit it is a broad generalization, the bigger you are, the less likely your company is "capitalist" and the more likely the fix is in. We need the spirit of Teddy Roosevelt again.
Absolutely. Completely on point.