Just wait a little while

SUBHEAD: You’ll have to earn everything worth having, including self-respect and your next meal.

By James Kunstler on 7 August 2017 for Kunstler.com -
(http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/just-wait-little/)


Image above: Aarly 20th century Russian painting of "A Peasant Leaving His Landlord on Yuri's Day" by Sergei V. Ivanov. From (https://www.kp.ru/radio/26511/3430500/).

The trouble, of course, is that even after the Deep State (a.k.a. “The Swamp”) succeeds in quicksanding President Trump, America will be left with itself — adrift among the cypress stumps, drained of purpose, spirit, hope, credibility, and, worst of all, a collective grasp on reality, lost in the fog of collapse.

Here’s what you need to know about what’s going on and where we’re headed.

The United States is comprehensively bankrupt. The government is broke and the citizenry is trapped under inescapable debt burdens. We are never again going to generate the kinds and volumes of “growth” associated with techno-industrial expansion.

That growth came out of energy flows, mainly fossil fuels, that paid for themselves and furnished a surplus for doing other useful things. It’s over.

Shale oil, for instance, doesn’t pay for itself and the companies engaged in it will eventually run out of accounting hocus-pocus for pretending that it does, and they will go out of business.

The self-evident absence of growth means the end of borrowing money at all levels. When you can’t pay back old loans, it’s unlikely that you will be able to arrange new loans.

The nation could pretend to be able to borrow more, since it can supposedly “create” money (loan it into existence, print it, add keystrokes to computer records), but eventually those tricks fail, too.

Either the “non-performing” loans (loans not being paid off) cause money to disappear, or the authorities “create” so much new money from thin air (money not associated with real things of value like land, food, manufactured goods) that the “money” loses its mojo as a medium of exchange (for real things), as a store of value (over time), and as a reliable index of pricing — which is to say all the functions of money.

In other words, there are two ways of going broke in this situation: money can become scarce as it disappears so that few people have any; or everybody can have plenty of money that has no value and no credibility.

I mention these monetary matters because the system of finance is the unifying link between all the systems we depend on for modern life, and none of them can run without it.

So that’s where the real trouble is apt to start. That’s why I write about markets and banks on this blog.

The authorities in this nation, including government, business, and academia, routinely lie about our national financial operations for a couple of reasons.

One is that they know the situation is hopeless but the consequences are so awful to contemplate that resorting to accounting fraud and pretense is preferable to facing reality.

Secondarily, they do it to protect their jobs and reputations — which they will lose anyway as collapse proceeds and their record of feckless dishonesty reveals itself naturally.

The underlying issue is the scale of human activity in our time. It has exceeded its limits and we have to tune back a lot of what we do. Anything organized at the giant scale is headed for failure, so it comes down to a choice between outright collapse or severe re-scaling, which you might think of as managed contraction.

That goes for government programs, military adventures, corporate enterprise, education, transportation, health care, agriculture, urban design, basically everything. There is an unfortunate human inclination to not reform, revise, or re-scale familiar activities.

We’ll use every kind of duct tape and baling wire we can find to keep the current systems operating, and we have, but we’re close to the point where that sort of cob-job maintenance won’t work anymore, especially where money is concerned.

Why this is so has been attributed to intrinsic human brain programming that supposedly evolved optimally for short-term planning. But obviously many people and institutions dedicate themselves to long-term thinking.

So there must be a big emotional over-ride represented by the fear of letting go of what used to work that tends to disable long-term thinking. It’s hard to accept that our set-up is about to stop working — especially something as marvelous as techno-industrial society.

But that’s exactly what’s happening. If you want a chance at keeping on keeping on, you’ll have to get with reality’s program. Start by choosing a place to live that has some prospect of remaining civilized. This probably doesn’t include our big cities.

But there are plenty of small cities and small towns out in America that are scaled for the resource realities of the future, waiting to be reinhabited and reactivated.

A lot of these lie along the country’s inland waterways — the Ohio, Mississippi, Missouri river system, the Great Lakes, the Hudson and St. Lawrence corridors — and they also exist in regions of the country were food can be grown.

You’ll have to shift your energies into a trade or vocation that makes you useful to other people. This probably precludes jobs like developing phone apps, day-trading, and teaching gender studies.

Think: carpentry, blacksmithing, basic medicine, mule-breeding, simplified small retail, and especially farming, along with the value-added activities entailed in farm production.

The entire digital economy is going to fade away like a drug-induced hallucination, so beware the current narcissistic blandishments of computer technology.

Keep in mind that being in this world actually entitles you to nothing. One way or another, you’ll have to earn everything worth having, including self-respect and your next meal.

Now, just wait a little while.

.

Abundance Circle • Story Connective

SUBHEAD: A volunteer effort to share the abundance of food between individual growers and gatherers.

By Rebecca Rhapsody on 23 April 2017 for Story Connective -
(https://storyconnective.podbean.com/)


Image above: Avacados and grapefruit offered by Judy and Matt sharing extra produce with to Abundance Circle on Maui through Vicki Levin. Still frame from video below by Story Connection.

Vicki Levin is a champion of locally grown food and community. She gathers up excess food produced by her friends' and neighbors' gardens and distributes it among them all.

It's called the Abundance Circle.

For example, when one member of the Abundance Circle has too many ripe oranges from their tree for their own household, they contribute the extra fruit to the Abundance Circle.

Vicki collects everyone's excess produce and distributes it to the group. In this way, the person contributing the excess oranges will get sunflower sprouts, kale, bananas, & more from the extra produce other Abundance Circle members give... free of charge!

It's not a trade and it's not a barter. Even when a member's garden doesn't have anything to give for a time, they still receive. Everyone just contributes whatever they have excess of to the Circle Abundance, and everyone benefits. Vicki's dream is for everyone to have even a small garden in their backyard.


Video above: Interview with Vicki Levin by Rebecca Rhapsody about the Abundance Circle on Maui. From (https://youtu.be/HD-j7VgKetI).

VIDEO CREDITS:
Interview
Rebecca Rhapsody at StoryConnective.org

Audio and video production
Loxley Clovis at StoryConnective.org

Ukulele score and performance
Rebecca Rhapsody at StoryConnective.org

Story Connective art and logo by
Sarai Stricklin SaraiStricklin.com

SPECIAL THANKS TO:
Vicki Levin and her Abundance Circle members

Artwork ‘Makamaluohonaokalani’
Marilyn Kahalewai at Kumukahi.org

Moku and Ahupuaa map of Maui 'Mokupuni O Maui"
Juan Wilson at IslandBreath.org

SHARING AND SUPPORT: 
If you support Story Connective's 501(c)(3) mission and vision of bringing stories of resilience and possibilities to the world and would like to help our project, there are many ways you can help us.

Share this with video friends, family, coworkers. Like us at Facebook.com/StoryConnective

Subscribe to our YouTube Channel at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDb41I_NpEhN-_ciTLOGt7A

Subscribe to our podcast feed: https://storyconnective.podbean.com/ using the Podbean app (for all devices), iTunes (Apple devices), & Google Play Music (Android devices)

Stay tuned to Story Connective on YouTube and the Story Connective podcast for more on this series: Re-envision Maui.

Fiscal Sponsor of Story Connection is ELLSSA – a non profit committed to Empowering individuals to take care of the future. Learn more about at www.ellssa.org

The Story Connective is listener and viewer supported. Support our crowdfunded project at https://www.Patreon.com/Storyconnective or by using the "Be a patron" button on your Podbean podcast app.

FAIR USE:
The purpose of this video is for non-profit education, news and commentary.

CREATIVE COMMONS LICENSE:
Attribution-ShareAlike
2.5 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.5)

.

The Hoard of the Nibelungs

SUBHEAD: Money is so central to current notions of economics that getting by without it is all but unthinkable.

By John Michael Greer on 12 November 2014 for the Archdruid Report -
(http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2014/11/dark-age-america-hoard-of-nibelungs.html)


Image above: Nibelung dwarf about to seize the gold of a Rhineland maid. An illustration by Arthur Rackham (in 1910) for an English translation of the lyrics "Rhine Gold", an opera composed by Richard Wagner based on old German folklore.  From (http://thegentlemanangler.com/historic-tales/rhine-gold-with-illustrations-by-arthur-rackham/1185/).

Of all the differences that separate the feudal economy sketched out in last week’s post from the market economy most of us inhabit today, the one that tends to throw people for a loop most effectively is the near-total absence of money in everyday medieval life.

Money is so central to current notions of economics that getting by without it is all but unthinkable these days. 

The fact—and of course it is a fact—that the vast majority of human societies, complex civilizations among them, have gotten by just fine without money of any kind barely registers in our collective imagination.

One source of this curious blindness, I’ve come to think, is the way that the logic of money is presented to students in school. Those of my readers who sat through an Economics 101 class will no doubt recall the sort of narrative that inevitably pops up in textbooks when this point is raised.

You have, let’s say, a pig farmer who has bad teeth, but the only dentist in the village is Jewish, so the pig farmer can’t simply swap pork chops and bacon for dental work.

Barter might be an option, but according to the usual textbook narrative, that would end up requiring some sort of complicated multiparty deal whereby the pig farmer gives pork to the carpenter, who builds a garage for the auto repairman, who fixes the hairdresser’s car, and eventually things get back around to the dentist.

Once money enters the picture, by contrast, the pig farmer sells bacon and pork chops to all and sundry, uses the proceeds to pay the dentist, and everyone’s happy. Right?

Well, maybe. Let’s stop right there for a moment, and take a look at the presuppositions hardwired into this little story. First of all, the narrative assumes that participants have a single rigidly defined economic role: the pig farmer can only raise pigs, the dentist can only fix teeth, and so on.

Furthermore, it assumes that participants can’t anticipate needs and adapt to them: even though he knows the only dentist in town is Jewish, the pig farmer can’t do the logical thing and start raising lambs for Passover on the side, or what have you.

Finally, the narrative assumes that participants can only interact economically through market exchanges: there are no other options for meeting needs for goods and services, no other way to arrange exchanges between people other than market transactions driven by the law of supply and demand.

Even in modern industrial societies, these three presuppositions are rarely true. I happen to know several pig farmers, for example, and none of them are so hyperspecialized that their contributions to economic exchanges are limited to pork products; garden truck, fresh eggs, venison, moonshine, and a good many other things could come into the equation as well.

For that matter, outside the bizarre feedlot landscape of industrial agriculture, mixed farms raising a variety of crops and livestock are far more resilient than single-crop farms, and thus considerably more common in societies that haven’t shoved every economic activity into the procrustean bed of the money economy.

As for the second point raised above, the law of supply and demand works just as effectively in a barter economy as in a money economy, and successful participants are always on the lookout for a good or service that’s in short supply relative to potential demand, and so can be bartered with advantage.

It’s no accident that traditional village economies tend to be exquisitely adapted to produce exactly that mix of goods and services the inhabitants of the village need and want.

Finally, of course, there are many ways of handling the production and distribution of goods and services without engaging in market exchanges.

The household economy, in which members of each household produce goods and services that they themselves consume, is the foundation of economic activity in most human societies, and still accounted for the majority of economic value produced in the United States until not much more than a century ago.

The gift economy, in which members of a community give their excess production to other members of the same community in the expectation that the gift will be reciprocated, is immensely common; so is the feudal economy delineated in last week’s post, with its systematic exclusion of market forces from the economic sphere. There are others, plenty of them, and none of them require money at all.

Thus the logic behind money pretty clearly isn’t what the textbook story claims it is. That doesn’t mean that there’s no logic to it at all; what it means is that nobody wants to talk about what it is that money is actually meant to do.

Fortunately, we’ve discussed the relevant issues in last week’s post, so I can sum up the matter here in a single sentence: the point of money is that it makes intermediation easy.

Intermediation, for those of my readers who weren’t paying attention last week, is the process by which other people insert themselves between the producer and the consumer of any good or service, and take a cut of the proceeds of the transaction.

That’s very easy to do in a money economy, because—as we all know from personal experience—the intermediaries can simply charge fees for whatever service they claim to provide, and then cash in those fees for whatever goods and services they happen to want.

Imagine, by way of contrast, the predicament of an intermediary who wanted to insert himself into, and take a cut out of, a money-free transaction between the pig farmer and the dentist.

We’ll suppose that the arrangement the two of them have worked out is that the pig farmer raises enough lambs each year that all the Jewish families in town can have a proper Passover seder, the dentist takes care of the dental needs of the pig farmer and his family, and the other families in the Jewish community work things out with the dentist in exchange for their lambs—a type of arrangement, half barter and half gift economy, that’s tolerably common in close-knit communities.

Intermediation works by taking a cut from each transaction. The cut may be described as a tax, a fee, an interest payment, a service charge, or what have you, but it amounts to the same thing: whenever money changes hands, part of it gets siphoned off for the benefit of the intermediaries involved in the transaction. The same thing can be done in some money-free transactions, but not all.

Our intermediary might be able to demand a certain amount of meat from each Passover lamb, or require the pig farmer to raise one lamb for the intermediary per six lambs raised for the local Jewish families, though this assumes that he either likes lamb chops or can swap the lamb to someone else for something he wants.

What on earth, though, is he going to do to take a cut from the dentist’s side of the transaction?  

 There wouldn’t be much point in demanding one tooth out of every six the dentist extracts, for example, and requiring the dentist to fill one of the intermediary’s teeth for every twenty other teeth he fills would be awkward at best—what if the intermediary doesn’t happen to need any teeth filled this year?

What’s more, once intermediation is reduced to such crassly physical terms, it’s hard to pretend that it’s anything but a parasitic relationship that benefits the intermediary at everyone else’s expense.

What makes intermediation seem to make sense in a money economy is that money is the primary intermediation. Money is a system of arbitrary tokens used to facilitate exchange, but it’s also a good deal more than that. It’s the framework of laws, institutions, and power relationships that creates the tokens, defines their official value, and mandates that they be used for certain classes of economic exchange.

Once the use of money is required for any purpose, the people who control the framework—whether those people are government officials, bankers, or what have you—get to decide the terms on which everyone else gets access to money, which amounts to effective control over everyone else. That is to say, they become the primary intermediaries, and every other intermediation depends on them and the money system they control.

This is why, to cite only one example, British colonial administrators in Africa imposed a house tax on the native population, even though the cost of administering and collecting the tax was more than the revenue the tax brought in.

By requiring the tax to be paid in money rather than in kind, the colonial government forced the natives to participate in the money economy, on terms that were of course set by the colonial administration and British business interests.

The money economy is the basis on which nearly all other forms of intermediation rest, and forcing the native peoples to work for money instead of allowing them to meet their economic needs in some less easily exploited fashion was an essential part of the mechanism that pumped wealth out of the colonies for Britain’s benefit.

Watch the way that the money economy has insinuated itself into every dimension of modern life in an industrial society and you’ve got a ringside seat from which to observe the metastasis of intermediation in recent decades.

Where money goes, intermediation follows:  that’s one of the unmentionable realities of political economy, the science that Adam Smith actually founded, but was gutted, stuffed, and mounted on the wall—turned, that is, into the contemporary pseudoscience of economics—once it became painfully clear just what kind of trouble got stirred up when people got to talking about the implications of the links between political power and economic wealth.

There’s another side to the metastasis just mentioned, though, and it has to do with the habits of thought that the money economy both requires and reinforces. At the heart of the entire system of money is the concept of abstract value, the idea that goods and services share a common, objective attribute called “value” that can be gauged according to the one-dimensional measurement of price.

 It’s an astonishingly complex concept, and so needs unpacking here. Philosophers generally recognize a crucial distinction between facts and values; there are various ways of distinguishing them, but the one that matters for our present purposes is that facts are collective and values are individual.

Consider the statement “it rained here last night.” Given agreed-upon definitions of “here” and “last night,” that’s a factual statement; all those who stood outside last night in the town where I live and looked up at the sky got raindrops on their faces. In the strict sense of the word, facts are objective—that is, they deal with the properties of objects of perception, such as raindrops and nights.

Values, by contrast, are subjective—that is, they deal with the properties of perceiving subjects, such as people who look up at the sky and notice wetness on their faces.

One person is annoyed by the rain, another is pleased, another is completely indifferent to it, and these value judgments are irreducibly personal; it’s not that the rain is annoying, pleasant, or indifferent, it’s the individuals who are affected in these ways. Nor are these personal valuations easy to sort out along a linear scale without drastic distortion.

The human experience of value is a richly multidimensional thing; even in a language as poorly furnished with descriptive terms for emotion as English is, there are countless shades of meaning available for talking about positive valuations, and at least as many more for negative ones.

From that vast universe of human experience, the concept of abstract value extracts a single variable—“how much will you give for it?”—and reduces the answer to a numerical scale denominated in dollars and cents or the local equivalent.

Like any other act of reductive abstraction, it has its uses, but the benefits of any such act always have to be measured against the blind spots generated by reductive modes of thinking, and the consequences of that induced blindness must either be guarded against or paid in full. The latter is far and away the more common of the two, and it’s certainly the option that modern industrial society has enthusiastically chosen.

Those of my readers who want to see the blindness just mentioned in full spate need only turn to any of the popular cornucopian economic theorists of our time.

The fond and fatuous insistence that resource depletion can’t possibly be a problem, because investing additional capital will inevitably turn up new supplies—precisely the same logic, by the way, that appears in the legendary utterance “I can’t be overdrawn, I still have checks left!”—unfolds precisely from the flattening out of qualitative value into quantitative price just discussed. 

The habit of reducing every kind of value to bare price is profitable in a money economy, since it facilitates ignoring every variable that might get in the way of making money off  transactions; unfortunately it misses a minor but crucial fact, which is that the laws of physics and ecology trump the laws of economics, and can neither be bribed nor bought.

The contemporary fixation on abstract value isn’t limited to economists and those who believe them, nor is its potential for catastrophic consequences.

I’m thinking here specifically of those people who have grasped the fact that industrial civilization is picking up speed on the downslope of its decline, but whose main response to it consists of trying to find some way to stash away as much abstract value as possible now, so that it will be available to them in some prospective post-collapse society.

Far more often than not, gold plays a central role in that strategy, though there are a variety of less popular vehicles that play starring roles the same sort of plan.

Now of course it was probably inevitable in a consumer society like ours that even the downfall of industrial civilization would be turned promptly into yet another reason to go shopping. Still, there’s another difficulty here, and that’s that the same strategy has been tried before, many times, in the last years of other civilizations. There’s an ample body of historical evidence that can be used to see just how well it works. The short form? Don’t go there.

It so happens, for example, that in there among the sagas and songs of early medieval Europe are a handful that deal with historical events in the years right after the fall of Rome: the Nibelungenlied, Beowulf, the oldest strata of Norse saga, and some others.

Now of course all these started out as oral traditions, and finally found their way into written form centuries after the events they chronicle, when their compilers had no way to check their facts; they also include plenty of folktale and myth, as oral traditions generally do.

Still, they describe events and social customs that have been confirmed by surviving records and archeological evidence, and offer one of the best glimpses we’ve got into the lived experience of descent into a dark age.

Precious metals played an important part in the political economy of that age—no surprises there, as the Roman world had a precious-metal currency, and since banks had not been invented yet, portable objects of gold and silver were the most common way that the Roman world’s well-off classes stashed their personal wealth.

As the western empire foundered in the fifth century CE and its market economy came apart, hoarding precious metals became standard practice, and rural villas, the doomsteads of the day, popped up all over.

When archeologists excavate those villas, they routinely find evidence that they were looted and burnt when the empire fell, and tolerably often the archeologists or a hobbyist with a metal detector has located the buried stash of precious metals somewhere nearby, an expressive reminder of just how much benefit that store of abstract wealth actually provided to its owner.

That’s the same story you get from all the old legends: when treasure turns up, a lot of people are about to die. The Volsunga saga and the Nibelungenlied, for example, are versions of the same story, based on dim memories of events in the Rhine valley in the century or so after Rome’s fall.

The primary plot engine of those events is a hoard of the usual late Roman kind,  which passes from hand to hand by way of murder, torture, treachery, vengeance, and the extermination of entire dynasties.

For that matter, when Beowulf dies after slaying his dragon, and his people discover that the dragon was guarding a treasure, do they rejoice?

Not at all; they take it for granted that the kings and warriors of every neighboring kingdom are going to come and slaughter them to get it—and in fact that’s what happens. That’s business as usual in a dark age society.

The problem with stockpiling gold on the brink of a dark age is thus simply another dimension, if a more extreme one, of the broader problem with intermediation. It bears remembering that gold is not wealth; it’s simply a durable form of money, and thus, like every other form of money, an arbitrary token embodying a claim to real wealth—that is, goods and services—that other people produce.

If the goods and services aren’t available, a basement safe full of gold coins won’t change that fact, and if the people who have the goods and services need them more than they want gold, the same is true.

Even if the goods and services are to be had, if everyone with gold is bidding for the same diminished supply, that gold isn’t going to buy anything close to what it does today. What’s more, tokens of abstract value have another disadvantage in a society where the rule of law has broken down: they attract violence the way a dead rat draws flies.

The fetish for stockpiling gold has always struck me, in fact, as the best possible proof that most of the people who think they are preparing for total social collapse haven’t actually thought the matter through, and considered the conditions that will obtain after the rubble stops bouncing.

Let’s say industrial civilization comes apart, quickly or slowly, and you have gold.  In that case, either you spend it to purchase goods and services after the collapse, or you don’t.

If you do, everyone in your vicinity will soon know that you have gold, the rule of law no longer discourages people from killing you and taking it in the best Nibelungenlied fashion, and sooner or later you’ll run out of ammo. If you don’t, what good will the gold do you?

The era when Nibelungenlied conditions apply—when, for example, armed gangs move from one doomstead to another, annihilating the people holed up there, living for a while on what they find, and then moving on to the next, or when local governments round up the families of those believed to have gold and torture them to death, starting with the children, until someone breaks—is a common stage of dark ages.

It’s a self-terminating one, since sooner or later the available supply of precious metals or other carriers of abstract wealth are spread thin across the available supply of warlords.

This can take anything up to a century or two before we reach the stage commemorated in the Anglo-Saxon poem “The Seafarer:” Nearon nú cyningas ne cáseras, ne goldgiefan swylce iú wáeron (No more are there kings or caesars or gold-givers as once there were).

That’s when things begin settling down and the sort of feudal arrangement sketched out in last week’s post begins to emerge, when money and the market play little role in most people’s lives and labor and land become the foundation of a new, impoverished, but relatively stable society where the rule of law again becomes a reality.

None of us living today will see that period arrive, but it’s good to know where the process is headed. We’ll discuss the practical implications of that knowledge in a future post.

.

Seed Libraires and the Law

SUBHEAD: Setting the record straight on the legality of local seed libraries and exchanges.

By Janelle Orsi & Neil Thapar on 11 August 2014 for NewDream.org -
(http://www.newdream.org/blog/seed-libraries-take-on-the-law)


Image above: The Seed Library of Los Angeles is open for business on 18 February 2012 . From (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Openforbusiness.jpg).

After the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture cracked down on a community seed library, hundreds of seed libraries in the U.S. are suddenly wondering if they are breaking the law. According to PA regulators, in order to give out member-donated seeds, the Simpson Seed Library in Cumberland County would have to put around 400 seeds of each variety through prohibitively impractical seed testing procedures in order to determine quality, rate of germinability, and so on.

The result of the PA crackdown is that the library can no longer give out seeds other than those which are commercially packaged.

Quite ironically, this is in the name of “protecting and maintaining the food sources of America.” In this news article that went viral, regulators cited, among other things, that “agri-terrorism is a very, very real scenario.” In reality, seed libraries have emerged in an effort to protect our food sources and to ensure access to locally adapted and heirloom varieties.

The public’s access to seeds has been narrowing ever since 1980, when the Supreme Court ruled that a life-form could be patented. Since then, large seed companies have shifted away from open-pollinated seeds to patented hybridized and genetically-engineered varieties.

The companies generally prohibit farmers from saving and replanting the seeds, requiring that farmers buy new seed each year. In response to this trend, seed libraries give members free seeds and request that members later harvest seed and give back to the library in the future, thereby growing the pool of seeds available to everyone.

Seed Law Basics
It’s important to set the record straight about the legalities of seed libraries. Let’s begin with the basics: In every state, there are laws requiring seed companies to be licensed, test seeds, and properly label them. At the federal level, there is a comparable law governing seed companies that sell seeds in interstate commerce.

All of these laws exist for good reason: If a tomato grower buys 10,000 tomato seeds, the grower’s livelihood is on the line if the seeds turn out to be of poor quality or the wrong variety.

Seed laws, like other truth-in-labeling laws, keep seed companies accountable, prevent unfair competition in the seed industry, and protect farmers whose livelihoods depend on access to quality seeds. The testing and labeling of the seeds also helps to prevent noxious weeds and invasive species from getting into the mix.

In some states, the licensing, labeling, and testing laws only apply if you sell seed. In other states, such as California, the laws apply if you even offer seeds for barter, exchange, or trade. How do you define words like sell, barter, exchange, and trade? And how do they apply to seed libraries? Read on if you are ready to venture into interesting legal grey areas.

In at least one state (yup, Pennsylvania), even supplying seeds make you subject to at least some regulation. But the Pennsylvania seed law is about to be put to the test, and we think that regulators should have read their law more carefully.

Using the Letter of the Law
When you see a law enforced unfairly, read the letter of the law and see if you can find holes in it. Found one!

In Pennsylvania, supplying seed might make you subject to the requirement to get a license, which involves filling out a form and paying an annual $25 fee (Section 7103, Chapter 71 of PA Consolidated Statutes). However, the sections of the law (7104, 7105, etc.) that mandate testing and labeling only apply if you sell seed. Not “supply,” but “sell!”

Has anyone in Pennsylvania noticed this nuance since the whole kerfuffle with Simpson Seed Library began? Seed libraries in Pennsylvania could perhaps test this: Fill out the license form, pay the $25 fee, and continue to operate as usual.

If the PA Department of Agriculture demands testing and labeling of seeds, a seed library could try holding its ground until the regulators see their own error or until a court makes a determination that the library is not “selling” seeds.

(Note: We’re not giving legal advice here! Get legal advice from a PA lawyer, because breaking this law the first time could result in up to 90 days of prison time, and breaking it the second time can result in up to two years.)

Working Within Grey Areas
California and other states define “sell” to include exchange, barter, or trade. This broad definition helps to ensure that people can’t sidestep regulation simply because they aren’t using dollars to bargain. Bargaining is a key concept in all of this.

We have innumerable regulations designed to temper the potential harms that arise when people bargain in the context of commerce. Merchants have an incentive to seek high prices and to reduce their costs in order to get more.

When people transact within the “get more” frame of mind, it is far more likely they will cut corners, disregard risks, be careless, mislead people, and so on. That’s why regulations apply when people sell things, but rarely when people give things.''

Seed libraries have a “give more” frame of mind, which motivates the libraries to do right by their members and the community. They ask people to donate seed back to the library, but do so with the goal of giving away more seed. The letter of the law doesn’t tell us that seed libraries are clearly exempt from regulation, but the spirit of the law does.

When the application of a law is unclear, we must go deeper to hone our legal arguments. Although the libraries both give and receive seeds, there’s a strong argument that they do not, in fact, exchange seed in the way the California regulation envisions.

To find solid legal ground for this argument, seed libraries can borrow legal arguments from time banks. A time bank is an organization through which members do favors for one another and award one another a “time dollar” or “time credit” for every hour of service. People can use their time credits to reward favors they receive from other members of the network.

The IRS has acknowledged in private letter rulings that this activity is distinct from that of a barter exchange for two primary reasons:

1. the giving and receiving of favors happens informally, meaning that people get no contractual right to have their favor returned, and
   
   
2. the exchanges are non-commercial, as demonstrated by the fact that everyone’s hour is valued equally, meaning that people are not bargaining for services at market rate.

Similarly, seed libraries generally give and receive seeds on an informal basis, meaning that neither the library nor its members have a right or requirement to give seed. Members likely have a sense of responsibility to give back to the seed library, but the library cannot force them to do so. In addition, seed libraries give and receive seeds on a non-commercial basis.

People neither pay money for seeds, nor do they measure the value of seeds they give in proportion to what they get. You can learn more the about nuanced differences between giving, swapping, exchanging, and selling here and here.

Note that it’s important for seed libraries to ensure that their policies, languaging, and practices reflect what we’ve described in the above paragraph.

If the library makes people feel as if they are required to give seed later on or if the library is counting seeds in order to keep score somehow, then the library might actually come under the regulations. We have seen at least one seed library that has members sign a contract indicating that the member “shall” or “agrees to” donate twice the amount of seed that they checked out. This is risky.

We suggest that all seed libraries review their documents and revise paperwork in order to simply collect information from members about what kind of seed they received, what they are donating, their experience with the plant, and so on.

Crowdsourcing a Seed Law Library
Drawing upon the spirit of reciprocity that motivates seed libraries, we’d like to urge readers to take 30 minutes and give back by doing research on other states’ seed laws.

We’ve created a Hackpad where anyone can add links to state seed laws, copy and paste in key provisions, and add your comments and questions. Wanna take a crack at it? It’s very empowering to learn how to find and navigate laws.

The American Seed Trade Association compiled a list of state seed laws, but many of the links are broken, so you may need to access the laws by navigating through state agricultural codes. Commonly, state seed laws live in two places: 1) state statutes created by legislators, and 2) regulations created by the state department of agriculture. You need to review both.

We Still Need to Change These Laws!
Even though we have arguments that seed libraries are not subject to state and federal testing and labeling requirements, it would be ideal for our laws to say this explicitly. No matter what state you are in, you could look on either end of the political spectrum and probably find a legislator who would be sympathetic to these issues. You could ask a legislator to introduce a bill that has simple language such as:

“Notwithstanding any other provision of this [law, act, chapter, article], Seed Libraries shall be exempt from all licensing, testing, labeling, and other requirements of this [law, act, chapter, article]. ‘Seed Library’ shall be defined as a nonprofit, cooperative, or governmental organization that donates seed and receives donations of seed.”

Depending on how much discretion your state department of agriculture has with regard to the crafting of regulations, you could, instead, simply ask the department to amend the regulations.

Also, we recommend that seed libraries and other advocates write letters to the Association of American Seed Control Officials (AASCO), a national membership organization comprised of state seed regulatory officials. Among other activities, AASCO developed and maintains the Revised Uniform State Seed Law, the model law on which many states’ seed laws are based.

If AASCO were to expressly exempt seed libraries from regulation, several states would likely follow suit, since they often adopt wholesale AASCO’s recommendations. AASCO’s membership directory also contains mailing and email addresses for seed regulators in each state, so we recommend that everyone write to them as well.

If we change laws to create a clear legal space for seed libraries, we should perhaps also do so for small-scale seed enterprises. If current law requires a seed business to test 400 seeds of each variety, this privileges large seed companies, and effectively blocks farmers from starting small seed enterprises.

Further, the scale of operation should make a difference when it comes to achieving the goals of these laws. If a package of 100 seeds ends up being of poor quality or if it contains noxious weeds, the harm to the grower or to society is much lower than if the packet contained 10,000 seeds.

Likewise, seed sales that are conducted direct-to-consumer within a small geographic area present minimal risk of introducing new invasive or noxious species. Thus, when we change the laws, we should also create exemptions and lower compliance hurdles for seed enterprises that sell seeds in small quantities, direct-to-consumer, and/or within a confined region.

In the big picture, laws should not try to protect citizens from all imaginable harms nor should laws overreach into all areas of our lives. Every law requires a balancing act. Although driving a car is quite dangerous, people are allowed to do it, because society has decided that the benefit of mobility outweighs the risk of harm.

Similarly, during times of food insecurity, climate disruption, and genetic consolidation of the sources of our food (seeds!), the benefit of seed libraries is enormous as compared to the potential harm of a seed packet gifted within a community. Let’s make sure our laws get with the times!

• This article was written by Janelle Orsi and Neil Thapar of the Sustainable Economies Law Center, with input from Neal Gorenflo of Shareable, and Sarah Baird of the Center for a New American Dream.

.

The End of Employment

SUBHEAD: In nonindustrial societies  individuals consume or barter the product of their own labor.

By John Michael Greer on 16 April 2014 for the Archdruid Report-
(http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-end-of-employment.html)


Image above: Etchinjg of man bartering with shop keeper. From (http://www.gizmag.com/bitcoin-currency-money-economy-mature/30863/).

Nothing is easier, as the Long Descent begins to pick up speed around us, than giving in to despair—and nothing is more pointless. Those of us who are alive today are faced with the hugely demanding task of coping with the consequences of industrial civilization’s decline and fall, and saving as many as possible of the best achievements of the last few centuries so that they can cushion the descent and enrich the human societies of the far future.  That won’t be easy; so?  

 The same challenge has been faced many times before, and quite often it’s been faced with relative success.

The circumstances of the present case are in some ways more difficult than past equivalents, to be sure, but the tools and the knowledge base available to cope with them are almost incomparably greater. All in all, factoring in the greater challenges and the greater resources, it’s probably fair to suggest that the challenge of our time is about on a par with other eras of decline and fall. 

The only question that still remains to be settled is how many of the people who are awake to the imminence of crisis will rise to the challenge, and how many will fail to do so.

The suicide of peak oil writer Mike Ruppert two days ago puts a bit of additional emphasis on that last point. I never met Ruppert, though we corresponded back in the days when his “From The Wilderness” website was one of the few places on the internet that paid any attention at all to peak oil, and I don’t claim to know what personal demons drove him to put a bullet through his brain.

Over the last eight years, though, as the project of this blog has brought me into contact with more and more people who are grappling with the predicament of our time, I’ve met a great many people whose plans for dealing with a postpeak world amount to much the same thing.  Some of them are quite forthright about it, which at least has the virtue of honesty.  

 Rather more of them conceal the starkness of that choice behind a variety of convenient evasions, the insistence that we’re all going to die soon anyway being far and away the most popular of these just now.

I admit to a certain macabre curiosity about how that will play out in the years ahead.

I’ve suspected for a while now, for example, that the baby boomers will manage one final mediagenic fad on the way out, and the generation that marked its childhood with coonskin caps and hula hoops and its puberty with love beads and Beatlemania will finish with a fad for suicide parties, in which attendees reminisce to the sound of the tunes they loved in high school, then wash down pills with vodka and help each other tie plastic bags over their heads.

Still, I wonder how many people will have second thoughts once every other option has gone whistling down the wind, and fling themselves into an assortment of futile attempts to have their cake when they’ve already eaten it right down to the bare plate. We may see some truly bizarre religious movements, and some truly destructive political ones, before those who go around today insisting that they don’t want to live in a deindustrial world finally get their wish.

There are, of course, plenty of other options. The best choice for most of us, as I’ve noted here in previous posts, follows a strategy I’ve described wryly as “collapse first and avoid the rush:”  getting ahead of the curve of decline, in other words, and downshifting to a much less extravagant lifestyle while there’s still time to pick up the skills and tools needed to do it competently.

Despite the strident insistence from defenders of the status quo that anything less than business as usual amounts to heading straight back to the caves, it’s entirely possible to have a decent and tolerably comfortable life on a tiny fraction of the energy and resource base that middle class Americans think they can’t possibly do without.

Mind you, you have to know how to do it, and that’s not the sort of knowledge you can pick up from a manual, which is why it’s crucial to start now and get through the learning curve while you still have the income and the resources to cushion the impact of the inevitable mistakes.

This is more or less what I’ve been saying for eight years now. The difficulty at this stage in the process, though, is that a growing number of Americans are running out of time. I don’t think it’s escaped the notice of many people in this country that despite all the cheerleading from government officials, despite all the reassurances from dignified and clueless economists, despite all those reams of doctored statistics gobbled down whole by the watchdogs-turned-lapdogs of the media and spewed forth undigested onto the evening news, the US economy is not getting better.  

Outside a few privileged sectors, times are hard and getting harder; more and more Americans are slipping into the bleak category of the long-term unemployed, and a great many of those who can still find employment work at part-time positions for sweatshop wages with no benefits at all.

Despite all the same cheerleading, reassurances, and doctored statistics, furthermore, the US economy is not going to get better: not for more than brief intervals by any measure, and not at all if “better”  means returning to some equivalent of America’s late 20th century boomtime.

Those days are over, and they will not return. That harsh reality is having an immediate impact on some of my readers already, and that impact will only spread as time goes on. For those who have already been caught by the economic downdrafts, it’s arguably too late to collapse first and avoid the rush; willy-nilly, they’re already collapsing as fast as they can, and the rush is picking up speed around them as we speak.

For those who aren’t yet in that situation, the need to make changes while there’s still time to do so is paramount, and a significant number of my readers seem to be aware of this.

One measure of that is the number of requests for personal advice I field, which has gone up steeply in recent months. Those requests cover a pretty fair selection of the whole gamut of human situations in a failing civilization, but one question has been coming up more and more often of late: the question of what jobs might be likely to provide steady employment as the industrial economy comes apart.

That’s a point I’ve been mulling over of late, since its implications intersect the whole tangled web in which our economy and society is snared just now. In particular, it assumes that the current way of bringing work together with workers, and turning the potentials of human mind and muscle toward the production of goods and services, is likely to remain in place for the time being, and it’s becoming increasingly clear to me that this won’t be the case.

It’s important to be clear on exactly what’s being discussed here.

Human beings have always had to produce goods and services to stay alive and keep their families and communities going; that’s not going to change. In nonindustrial societies, though, most work is performed by individuals who consume the product of their own labor, and most of the rest is sold or bartered directly by the people who produce it to the people who consume it. What sets the industrial world apart is that a third party, the employer, inserts himself into this process, hiring people to produce goods and services and then selling those goods and services to buyers. 

That’s employment, in the modern sense of the word; most people think of getting hired by an employer, for a fixed salary or wage, to produce goods and services that the employer then sells to someone else, as the normal and natural state of affairs—but it’s a state of affairs that is already beginning to break down around us, because the surpluses that make that kind of employment economically viable are going away.

Let’s begin with the big picture. In any human society, whether it’s a tribe of hunter-gatherers, an industrial nation-state, or anything else, people apply energy to raw materials to produce goods and services; this is what we mean by the word “economy.” The goods and services that any economy can produce are strictly limited by the energy sources and raw materials that it can access.

A principle that ecologists call Liebig’s law of the minimum is relevant here: the amount of anything  that a given species or ecosystem can produce in a given place and time is limited by whichever resource is in shortest supply.

Most people get that when thinking about the nonhuman world; it makes sense that plants can’t use extra sunlight to make up for a shortage of water, and that you can’t treat soil deficient in phosphates by adding extra nitrates. It’s when you apply this same logic to human societies that the mental gears jam up, because we’ve been told so often that one resource can always be substituted for another that most people believe it without a second thought.

What’s going on here, though, is considerably more subtle than current jargon reflects.

Examine most of the cases of resource substitution that find their way into economics textbooks, and you’ll find that what’s happened is that a process of resource extraction that uses less energy on a scarcer material has been replaced by another process that takes more energy but uses more abundant materials.

The shift from high-quality iron ores to low-grade taconite that reshaped the iron industry in the 20th century, for example, was possible because ever-increasing amounts of highly concentrated energy could be put into the smelting process without making the resulting iron too expensive for the market.

The point made by this and comparable examples is applicable across the board to what I’ve termed technic societies, that subset of human societies—ours is the first, though probably not the last—in which a large fraction of total energy per capita comes from nonbiological sources and is put to work by way of  machines rather than human or animal muscles.  Far more often than not, in such societies, concentrated energy is the limiting resource.

Given an abundant enough supply of concentrated energy at a low enough price, it would be possible to supply a technic society with raw materials by extracting dissolved minerals from seawater or chewing up ordinary rock to get a part per million or so of this or that useful element. Lacking that—and there are good reasons to think that human societies will always be lacking that—access to concentrated energy is where Liebig’s law bites down hard.

Another way to make this same point is to think of how much of any given product a single worker can make in a day using a set of good hand tools, and comparing that to the quantity of the same thing that the same worker could make using the successive generations of factory equipment, from the steam-driven and belt-fed power tools of the late 19th century straight through to the computerized milling machines and assembly-line robots of today.

The difference can be expressed most clearly as a matter of the amount of energy being applied directly and indirectly to the manufacturing process—not merely the energy driving the tools through the manufacturing process, but the energy that goes into  manufacturing and maintaining the tools, supporting the infrastructure needed for manufacture and maintenance, and so on through the whole system involved in the manufacturing process.

Maverick economist E.F. Schumacher, whose work has been discussed in this blog many times already, pointed out that the cost per worker of equipping a workplace is one of the many crucial factors that  mainstream economic thought invariably neglects.

That cost is usually expressed in financial terms, but underlying the abstract tokens we call money is a real cost in energy, expressed in terms of the goods and services that have to be consumed in the process of equipping and maintaining the workplace. If you have energy to spare, that’s not a problem; if you don’t, on the other hand, you’re actually better off using a less complex technology—what Schumacher called “intermediate technology” and the movement in which I studied green wizardry thirty years ago called “appropriate technology.”

The cost per worker of equipping a workplace, in turn, also has a political dimension—a point that Schumacher did not neglect, though nearly all other economists pretend that it doesn’t exist.

The more costly it is to equip a workplace, the more certain it is that workers won’t be able to set themselves up in business, and the more control the very rich will then have over economic production and the supply of jobs.

As Joseph Tainter pointed out in The Collapse of Complex Societies, social complexity correlates precisely with social hierarchy; one of the functions of complexity, in the workplace as elsewhere, is thus to maintain existing social pecking orders.

Schumacher’s arguments, though, focused on the Third World nations of his own time, which had very little manufacturing capacity at all—most of them, remember, had been colonies of European empires, assigned the role of producing raw materials and buying finished products from the imperial center as part of the wealth pump that drove them into grinding poverty while keeping their imperial overlords rich.

He focused on advising client nations on how to build their own economies and extract themselves from the political grip of their former overlords, who were usually all too eager to import high-tech factories which their upper classes inevitably controlled. The situation is considerably more challenging when  your economy is geared to immense surpluses of concentrated energy, and the supply of energy begins to run short—and of course that’s the situation we’re in today.

Even if it were just a matter of replacing factory equipment, that would be a huge challenge, because all those expensive machines—not to mention the infrastructure that manufactures them, maintains them, supplies them, and integrates their products into the wider economy—count as sunk costs, subject to what social psychologists call the “Concorde fallacy,” the conviction that it’s less wasteful to keep on throwing money into a failing project than to cut your losses and do something else.

The real problem is that it’s not just factory equipment; the entire economy has been structured from the ground up to use colossal amounts of highly concentrated energy, and everything that’s been invested in that economy since the beginning of the modern era thus counts as a sunk cost to one degree or another.

What makes this even more challenging is that very few people in the modern industrial world actually produce goods and services for consumers, much less for themselves, by applying energy to raw materials. The vast majority of today’s employees, and in particular all those who have the wealth and influence that come with high social status, don’t do this. 

Executives, brokers, bankers, consultants, analysts, salespeople - well, I could go on for pages: the whole range of what used to be called white-collar jobs exists to support the production of goods and services by the working joes and janes managing all the energy-intensive machinery down there on the shop floor. So does the entire vast maze of the financial industry, and so do the legions of government bureaucrats—local, state, and federal—who manage, regulate, or oversee one or another aspect of economic activity.

All these people are understandably just as interested in keeping their jobs as the working joes and janes down there on the shop floor, and yet the energy surpluses that made it economically viable to perch such an immensely complex infrastructure on top of the production of goods and services for consumers are going away.

The result is a frantic struggle on everyone’s part to make sure that the other guy loses his job first. It’s a struggle that all of them will ultimately lose—as the energy surplus needed to support it dwindles away, so will the entire system that’s perched on that high but precarious support—and so, as long as that system remains in place, getting hired by an employer, paid a regular wage or salary, and given work and a workplace to produce goods and services that the employer then sells to someone else, is going to become increasingly rare and increasingly unrewarding. 

That transformation is already well under way. Nobody I know personally who works for an employer in the sense I’ve just outlined is prospering in today’s American economy.  Most of the people I know who are employees in the usual sense of the word are having their benefits slashed, their working conditions worsened, their hours cut, and their pay reduced by one maneuver or another, and the threat of being laid off is constantly hovering over their heads. 

The few exceptions are treading water and hoping to escape the same fate. None of this is accidental, and none of it is merely the result of greed on the part of the very rich, though admittedly the culture of executive kleptocracy at the upper end of the American social pyramid is making things a good deal worse than they might otherwise be.

The people I know who are prospering right now are those who produce goods and services for their own use, and provide goods and services directly to other people, without having an employer to provide them with work, a workplace, and a regular wage or salary. Some of these people have to stay under the radar screen of the current legal and regulatory system, since the people who work in that system are trying to preserve their own jobs by making life difficult for those who try to do without their services.

Others can do things more openly. All of them have sidestepped as many as possible of the infrastructure services that are supposed to be part of an employee’s working life—for example, they aren’t getting trained at universities, since the US academic industry these days is just another predatory business sector trying to keep itself afloat by running others into the ground, and they aren’t going to banks for working capital for much the same reason.

They’re using their own labor, their own wits, and their own personal connections with potential customers, to find a niche in which they can earn the money (or barter for the goods) they need or want.

I’d like to suggest that this is the wave of the future—not least because this is how economic life normally operates in nonindustrial societies, where the vast majority of people in the workforce are directly engaged in the production of goods and services for themselves and their own customers. 

The surplus that supports all those people in management, finance, and so on is a luxury that nonindustrial societies don’t have. In the most pragmatic of economic senses, collapsing now and avoiding the rush involves getting out of a dying model of economics before it drags you down, and finding your footing in the emerging informal economy while there’s still time to get past the worst of the learning curve.

Playing by the rules of a dying economy, that is, is not a strategy with a high success rate or a long shelf life. Those of my readers who are still employed in the usual sense of the term may choose to hold onto that increasingly rare status, but it’s not wise for them to assume that such arrangements will last indefinitely; using the available money and other resources to get training, tools, and skills for some other way of getting by would probably be a wise strategy.

Those of my readers who have already fallen through the widening cracks of the employment economy will have a harder row to hoe in many cases; for them, the crucial requirement is getting access to food, shelter, and other necessities while figuring out what to do next and getting through any learning curve that might be required.

All these are challenges; still, like the broader challenge of coping with the decline and fall of a civilization, they are challenges that countless other people have met in other places and times.

Those who are willing to set aside currently popular fantasies of entitlement and the fashionable pleasures of despair will likely be in a position to do the same thing this time around, too.
.

Community Credit Structure

SUBHEAD: Ebay and PayPal point to a way to community based economies to operate independently.

By Simon H. on 16 September 2013 for Of Two Minds -
(http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/the-infrastructure-for-community-based.html)


Image above: An illustration of a possible PayPal Point-of-Sale system. From (http://www.barcodediscount.com/catalog/paypal/part-dcswaa01us.htm).

A Community Credit Based Trading Infrastructure

Digital technology enables a community-based, full-employment economy that operates independently.

During the financial crisis there was a very real chance that without intervention the whole financial system could have collapsed. If this had actually happened then how would we have coped? Without being able to draw money out of cashpoints or make electronic card payments how would we carry on making exchanges with one and other which is the fundamental mechanism that enables an economy to function as such? Employees would receive no wages but would they carry on working regardless? In terms of a thought experiment - what would our social landscapes have looked like.

In the absence of any backup infrastructures, it is possible that communities and societies could have completely broken down and householders would have found themselves trying to defend their homes and precious resources against a tidal wave of crime. Reading comments on the web, particularly from US citizens, it is clear that those who believe the system will inevitably collapse are preparing by buying weapons and ammunition and stock piling tinned foods etc.

This is a sad indictment of the isolationist characteristics of the functioning of the post-industrial world which has effectively deconstructed communities and their ability to understand, define, develop and protect their collective interests.

s bleak outcome can only materialize because there is no adequate sense of who and what constitutes the community and that consequently there are no community based backup and disaster recovery infrastructures.

It is possible given a systemic collapse, that communities would have joined together in an ad hoc fashion and pooled their resources to collectively manage their survival and security in order to make a transition to some new financial system and community stability.

In such a situation, tightly knit communities with a strong sense of solidarity and good organizational skills and communications would be best able to distribute their resources and effectively manage their collective security.

Given such a systemic collapse, communities would clearly need some kind of infrastructure for managing these requirements. Communities would essentially have to know who they are and what they can do. It would not simply be a case a pooling resources such as food and fuel to ensure that they are used and managed in the most efficient way, but also pooling and organizing community time, labour, skills and talents most effectively.

In such circumstances every member has the opportunity to make some kind of contribution to the collective effort. One does not need to be interviewed or compete for positions one simply volunteers whatever you have to offer. No-one but the most elderly of infirm would be unemployed as such - as everyone is invited to pitch in and to contribute their time, resources and efforts in order to keep the community economy functioning as such.

One could leave this sort of backup infrastructure to chance and its being implemented to various degrees of success across all of our communities, or one could design the basic organizational and communication infrastructures now while there is still time. Such a technological infrastructure would only need to be developed once, but in principle if designed correctly and effectively - could be deployed and used by all communities across the world.

Before I go on to outlining how such a community based system of exchange could function I would like to look at the phenomenon of PayPal and eBay as they have functioned within the internet revolution and consider what aspects might be useful for a community based economy.

As an internet programmer, the first e-commerce application I wrote back in 1999, was integrated with the WorldPay on-line payment system owned and run by the Royal Bank of Scotland. In order to be able to set up an account and start trading on-line meant that one had to already have an existing business account and stump up a large sign-up fee along with yearly service charges and individual payment fees. The system was infrastructural restrictive in these terms and effectively this allows for the system’s control and regulation of participants

For any budding e-commerce entrepreneurs, it placed far too many bureaucratic and financial hurdles in the way to begin trading on-line. This was essentially a limitation imposed by the infrastructures of the ruling financial institutions at that time and the limited range of options available to produce, buy and sell stuff.

When eBay and PayPal materialized on the internet they bought new infrastructures, interfaces and rules as to what was required to become an entrepreneur. Originally conceived as a simple auction site, EBay quickly evolved into the infrastructure of a free market place that enabled individuals to easily establish themselves as entrepreneurial traders.

The great thing about this business model is that the eBay system allowed for the blurring of the distinction between being a private citizen and a businessman. One could easily start trading in a small and unofficial way and slowly transform oneself into a fully-fledged trading entity. In order to trade stuff, all you needed was a supplier and buyers. You didn’t need retail premises and providing your supplier could deliver to you in a reasonable time frame you did not to even hold any stock. You could sell on EBay, have the supplier deliver the products you had sold within a day or two and then repost them on to the buyer within an acceptable time period.

If you are unemployed, this is a virtually cost free business model to set up which only requires getting your profit margins right to ensure that you can cover the sales and transaction fees and still earn a productive living. All you need to do is find suppliers and buyers.

As much as eBay provided the critical and simplified infrastructure for a new more democratically accessible trading system to emerge, then it was also essential for a simplified and more democratic infrastructure to emerge to facilitate exchanges in terms of payments.

It was no surprise then that EBay acquired they PayPal payment system as it was the missing piece of the jigsaw within their business model.

Compared to the demands being made by the traditional banks who controlled e-commerce prior to PayPal coming on the scene, establishing a PayPal account in order to receive money on-line was a complete doddle. One didn’t need to have savings to make any large advance payments, there were no annual service costs and the only costs borne by any budding entrepreneur was a cost-effective payment by payment transaction fee.

This made payment processing costs far more manageable The more you sold the greater the fees, but if your business plan was a complete failure, then you would lose nothing in fees to the payment service provider.

One wonders how great a role the eBay and PayPal systems have played in keeping families solvent since the financial crisis and how many businesses have been started as a direct result of these new infrastructures?

What must be abundantly clear is that the creation of new infrastructures has led to revolutionary changes in ways that we can be productive and earn some kind of living when the traditional system has reached capacity and has no room for for a growing population who find themselves on its margins.

Whilst eBay, PayPal and social media sites such as Facebook, have enabled individuals to earn money towards making a living, or to provide some form of basic virtual communities based on personal and referred friendships and common interests, none of them have a community-centric element based upon strict geography.

They do not enable any community-based immediate forms of trading and exchange, nor do they facilitate communities discovering, organizing themselves, managing themselves, expressing their interests and ultimately, fully realizing themselves and their potentials.Part of what is missing then, is an infrastructure that fulfills the basic trading functions of eBay and PayPal, but which is individually owned, maintained and run by communities themselves.

In terms of a community based economy, the fundamental requirement is for the members of a community to be able to instantly and freely advertise, manage and exchange the goods and services they have to offer and also operate an entirely independent system of payments or community credits - controlled by the community itself to facilitate its exchanges in order for a community centric economy to function in its most efficient and independent infrastructural form.

It is important to note here that both eBay and PayPal are not independent infrastructures as they are directly tied to the banking and taxation systems of our existing infrastructures. As such, in the event of a collapse of the financial and governmental revenue systems, any savings each individual has with PayPal are liable to disappear or be confiscated.

In terms of their globalization and centralization they are relatively easy for our existing infrastructures to monitor, tax or confiscate should the need arise.

The PayPal payment system has only designed itself with such a flaw because of its global and national reach and that it saw a necessity for users to be able to sell directly in their own nationally defined and controlled currencies or exchange goods via the mechanisms of foreign currency exchange infrastructures.

This is necessary within a national model of supply and demand, where a trader’s supplier would naturally request payment in their own nationally acceptable currency, but there is no necessary requirement whereby a community based economy/infrastructure would need to function in the same way with the same rules and requirements.

However, given a systemic financial breakdown and the confiscation or collapse in the credibility of its credit, it would be possible for PayPal to issue all its members substitute PayPal credits which it could electronically print and issue, just as central banks have printed their own credits via quantitative easing. In this case however, the credit created would go directly to the masses and not to the tiny minority who have benefitted from central bank interventions

At the end of the day, currency systems are not based upon intrinsic values or precious metals, they are based upon relationships of trust. In the absence of any other reliable currency, a PayPal credit could function just as efficiently providing we all accept and share a belief in its ‘value’ which is nothing other than its ability for exchanges to efficiently take place. I could accept PayPal credits when I sell something and the system stores the credits I receive until I need to convert them into goods that I need in the future.

If we had a community based trading and payment system along the lines of the eBay and PayPal systems then this could also be based upon a system of community issued credits. All a ‘currency’ has to do is facilitate exchanges to take place and provide for the accumulation and storage of credits.

If we accept a community credit as a basis for exchange and have faith in its ability to service this simple function then that’s all we need.

There are many advantages to a community based system of credit. Firstly it cannot be taxed or monitored by national agencies. Governments cannot confiscate or tax community credits as they have no way of spending them. They can only be ‘spent’ as such, within the community that issues and uses them. They are also not subject to any speculative activity or market collapse.

Once a community can effectively issue its own credit as virtual currency, the community can exercise QE in its own right as it can electronically create credits and then allocate them where it believes they are needed. In doing this it is merely creating or enabling a claim on the future efforts of all its participants and is actually enabling its members to participate and for community trade, production and development to take place on its own terms.

Whilst the majority blindly accept QE on a national scale despite the fact that it only favours 1% of the population, then a community centric form of QE could not make credit allocations on such a basis. It would know and see precisely where investments needed to be made and distribute the benefits of its investments across the community as it needs everyone to be strong within it and realize that it is only when the community realizes that its strength, prosperity and security is wholly reliant upon the all-inclusive integration and well-being of all its actors.

This also has an effect that all wealth generated through community trade, will always be directly circulated and multiplied within the community itself.

Once we have the infrastructure for a community based trading and payment system that is not possible to tax or regulate by national entities, then we need have no distinction between being a private citizen and an entrepreneur, no distinction between being unemployed and employed. There are no bureaucratic barriers to becoming productive and useful.

If you wanted to roast chestnuts and sell them in a market place tomorrow you could just go out and do it with no worries about regulations as you are technically not selling as such - merely exchanging and building credits and personal and community credibility within a self-regulating system based upon community unity, trust and common interests.

The more localized the system of trust, the more reliable it must necessarily be - as to abuse such local trust is to abuse someone whom one is very likely to have embarrassing social and economic contact with on a regular basis.

How could such a system even begin to be established given the basis of what would be initially, a zero level of trust in its systemic practicability?

A community based trading system could be established whereby every member of the community which joined it would receive a certain amount of community credits free. This could be the equivalent of a week or a month’s wages.

Initially then, it would start by enabling its members to trade and exchange things that they don’t use or are going to throw away.

A broken laptop has no value to one person, but another person with the knowledge to repair laptops who accumulates broken laptops and takes functional parts from donor machines to repair more viable machines, can be productive and useful and spend and earn community credits. Providing you acquire the skills to do this, and you can download service manuals which give step by step instruction to take laptops apart and there are hundreds of instructional videos on YouTube showing you how to repair or maintain just about everything, then you can easily make a self-trained transition from being unemployed to a productive and useful community member.

Similarly you might want to dispose of furniture or white goods or pretty much anything. Most of our stuff can be recycled in that there is always someone who can find a way to make use of it and hence rationalize its production by ensuring that it is properly used and consumed and is not simply a dust-gathering waste of resources.

Essentially this not only enables a basic community trading infrastructure it also establishes a highly efficient recycling infrastructure.

Unlike basic bartering systems our community trading system enables us to buy and sell things directly and to accumulate and store our community credits for when we will need them. All we need to do is establish the technological infrastructure that enables community trading to take place in its simplest and easiest terms so that it will be ridiculously easy for me to advertise what I want to sell and for you to buy it if you need it.

In order to gain ‘currency’ as such, all a system has to do is show than it can function effectively. Once we have proved that a community credit based system can function effectively and we realize that we can profit from our exchanges, we will have built a systemic trust in that system and we can begin to build upon what is possible to exchange. In addition to buying and selling second hand items one could buy and sell new items and also trade services.

All one needs for this to take place is the community infrastructure and a collective faith in its ability to serve its purpose which is simply enabling trade and exchange of goods and services to take place. Such a system can function alongside our existing infrastructures but most notably would carry on functioning in the event of the systemic collapse of our traditional financial infrastructure. It needs to be designed so that it is entirely independent of external financial systems and entirely controlled and regulated by the community of members themselves.

This is just a small part of the infrastructure that needs to be put in place. Initially what communities really need is an infrastructure that enables them to establish and manage clubs based around their own common interests. These could be sports, drama, arts, cookery, wood working, political, literature, environmental, developmental etc., etc.

The point being that given the right infrastructure, the community could be an economy or grand club of its collective clubs and interests. One could find them all in the same place and take part in any.

It is only when such infrastructures have been put in place that communities can begin to discover, know and understand themselves and realize their potentiality. It is only when a community infrastructure is established that an effective community intelligence can emerge and be exercised.

This would enable communities to build a sense of unity and a real independent identity along with the communications and trading infrastructures required to successfully deal with and survive systemic crisis.

Build it and they will come to realize their own fields of dreams.


.

Greeks turn to barter system

SUBHEAD: We’re in an uncharted area. A lot of change is coming. Maybe it’s the beginning of the future. By Rachel Donadio on 1 October 2011 for the New york Times - (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/02/world/europe/in-greece-barter-networks-surge.html) Image above: Angeliki Ioanniti, a seamstress, runs a small shop in Volos and participates in a network that uses barter and vouchers. From original article. The first time he bought eggs, milk and jam at an outdoor market using not euros but an informal barter currency, Theodoros Mavridis, an unemployed electrician, was thrilled.

“I felt liberated, I felt free for the first time,” Mr. Mavridis said in a recent interview at a cafe in this port city in central Greece. “I instinctively reached into my pocket, but there was no need to.”

Mr. Mavridis is a co-founder of a growing network here in Volos that uses a so-called Local Alternative Unit, or TEM in Greek, to exchange goods and services — language classes, baby-sitting, computer support, home-cooked meals — and to receive discounts at some local businesses.

Part alternative currency, part barter system, part open-air market, the Volos network has grown exponentially in the past year, from 50 to 400 members. It is one of several such groups cropping up around the country, as Greeks squeezed by large wage cuts, tax increases and growing fears about whether they will continue to use the euro have looked for creative ways to cope with a radically changing economic landscape.

“Ever since the crisis there’s been a boom in such networks all over Greece,” said George Stathakis, a professor of political economy and vice chancellor of the University of Crete. In spite of the large public sector in Greece, which employs one in five workers, the country’s social services often are not up to the task of helping people in need, he added. “There are so many huge gaps that have to be filled by new kinds of networks,” he said.

Even the government is taking notice. Last week, Parliament passed a law sponsored by the Labor Ministry to encourage the creation of “alternative forms of entrepreneurship and local development,” including networks based on an exchange of goods and services. The law for the first time fills in a regulatory gray area, giving such groups nonprofit status.

Here in Volos, the group’s founders are adamant that they work in parallel to the regular economy, inspired more by a need for solidarity in rough times than a political push for Greece to leave the euro zone and return to the drachma.

“We’re not revolutionaries or tax evaders,” said Maria Houpis, a retired teacher at a technical high school and one of the group’s six co-founders. “We accept things as they are.”

Still, she added, if Greece does take a turn for the worse and eventually does stop using the euro, networks like hers are prepared to step into the breach. “In an imaginary scenario — and I stress imaginary — we would be ready for it.”

The group’s concept is simple. People sign up online and get access to a database that is kind of like a members-only Craigslist. One unit of TEM is equal in value to one euro, and it can be used to exchange good and services. Members start their accounts with zero, and they accrue credit by offering goods and services. They can borrow up to 300 TEMs, but they are expected to repay the loan within a fixed period of time.

Members also receive books of vouchers of the alternative currency itself, which look like gift certificates and are printed with a special seal that makes it difficult to counterfeit. Those vouchers can be used like checks. Several businesspeople in Volos, including a veterinarian, an optician and a seamstress, accept the alternative currency in exchange for a discount on the price in euros.

A recent glimpse of the database revealed people offering guitar and English lessons, bookkeeping services, computer technical support, discounts at hairdressers and the use of their yards for parties. There is a system of ratings so that people can describe their experiences, in order to keep transparent quality control.

(The network uses open-source software and is hosted on a Dutch server, cyclos.org, which offers low hosting fees.)

The group also holds a monthly open-air market that is like a cross between a garage sale and a farmers’ market, where Mr. Mavridis used his TEM credit to buy the milk, eggs and jam. Those goods came from local farmers who are also involved in the project.

“We’re still at the beginning,” said Mr. Mavridis, who lost his job as an electrician at a factory last year. In the coming months, the group hopes to have a borrowed office space where people without computers can join the network more easily, he said.

For Ms. Houpis, the network has a psychological dimension. “The most exciting thing you feel when you start is this sense of contribution,” she said. “You have much more than your bank account says. You have your mind and your hands.”

As she bustled around her sewing table in her small shop in downtown Volos, Angeliki Ioanniti, 63, said she gave discounts for sewing to members of the network, and she has also exchanged clothing alterations for help with her computer. “Being a small city helps, because there’s trust,” she said.

In exchange for euros and alternative currency, she also sells olive oil, olives and homemade bergamot-scented soap prepared by her daughter, who lives in the countryside outside Volos.

In her family’s optical shop, Klita Dimitriadis, 64, offers discounts to customers using alternative currency, but she said the network had not really gained momentum yet or brought in much business. “It’s helpful, but now it doesn’t work very much because everybody is discounting,” she said.

In an e-mail, the mayor of Volos, Panos Skotiniotis, said the city was following the alternative currency network with interest and was generally supportive of local development initiatives. He added that the city was looking at other ways of navigating the economic situation, including by setting aside public land for a municipal urban farm where citizens could grow produce for their own use or to sell.

After years of rampant consumerism and easy credit, such nascent initiatives speak to the new mood in Greece, where imposed austerity has caused people to come together — not only to protest en masse, but also to help one another.

Similar initiatives have been cropping up elsewhere in Greece. In Patras, in the Peloponnese, a network called Ovolos, named after an ancient Greek means of currency, was founded in 2009 and includes a local exchange currency, a barter system and a so-called time bank, in which members swap services like medical care and language classes. The group has about 100 transactions a week, and volunteers monitor for illegal services, said Nikos Bogonikolos, the president and a founding member.

Greece has long had other exchange networks, particularly among farmers. Since 1995, a group called Peliti has collected, preserved and distributed seeds from local varietals to growers free, and since 2002 it has operated as an exchange network throughout the country.

Beyond exchanges, there are newer signs of cooperation from the ground up. When bus and subway workers in Athens went on strike two weeks ago, Athenians flooded Twitter looking for carpools, using an account founded in 2009 to raise awareness of transportation issues in Athens. The outpouring made headlines, as a sign of something unthinkable before the crisis hit.

With unemployment rising above 16 percent and the economy still shrinking, many Greeks are preparing for the worst. “Things will turn very bad in the next year,” said Mr. Stathakis, the political economics professor.

Christos Papaioannou, 37, who runs the Web site for the network in Volos, said, “We’re in an uncharted area,” and hopes the group expands. “There’s going to be a lot of change. Maybe it’s the beginning of the future.”

.