[p2p-research] Paul Glover's visit to Fayetteville

[Kevin Carson]

To the management of Ozark Natural Foods:

In case any of you aren't yet aware of it, Ithaca Hours founder Paul
Glover is scheduled to visit Fayetteville on May 8-9, and talk with
community economic and political leaders.

It strikes me that ONF's membership, with its diversity of skills and
trades, would be an excellent pool of local providers of goods and
services for a LETS system.  That seems to be an idea that the
business community is currently receptive to, if Collier Drug's recent
policy of subsidizing employee purchases from local businesses is any
indication.

Most importantly, in an environment of near-depression and Peak Oil,
local currency systems may soon become vital in cushioning the shock
of the corporate economy's collapse and easing the transition to a
relocalized economy.

Historically, alternative currency systems have provided liquidity to
facilitate direct exchange between producers outside the wage system
and the corporate economy, when money has dried up in the larger
economy (the Worgl currency system in Austria during the Depression is
a good example, and likewise production-for-barter systems like the
Unemployed Cooperative Relief Organization in California).

But they might also become the backbone of a decentralized,
cooperative credit system.  Conventional credit unions can also be
useful to that end, if pushed in a progressive direction of lending
primarily to other cooperatives and promoting relocalization.  But as
an officially recognized part of the establishment banking system,
they're limited by the minimum capialization requirements and entry
barriers, and all the other mandated forms of high overhead that the
regulatory system imposes.  And they're pretty hard to push in that
direction, once they've been corrupted by the establishment culture of
the capitalist banking system and become Cooperative In Name Only.

There's much more hope IMO for expanding local currencies into the
realm of advancing credit to members, in a way that doesn't show up on
the radar of the regulators or the official banking system.  A LETS
system might provide the foundation and membership base for a
crowdsourced microcredit system.

When diesel fuel hits $12/gal in a few years, truckers are abandoning
their rigs on the shoulder, and the grocery shelves are mostly empty,
relocalized production may what prevents total collapse.  A LETS
system would go a long way toward facilitating such relocalization,
providing liquidity and credit to lubricate the an economy of market
gardeners, informal and household microenterprises, and the like.

Please consider sort of official ONF representation during Mr. Glover's visit.

Best,
Kevin

-- 
Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
http://www.mutualist.org/id47.html
Anarchist Organization Theory Project
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html