[p2p-research] Fwd: Summer Newsletter from thomas greco

Fri Aug 13 06:32:29 CEST 2010

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Thomas Greco <thg at mindspring.com>
Date: Fri, Aug 13, 2010 at 3:12 AM
Subject: Summer Newsletter
To: Thomas Greco -- thg <thg at mindspring.com>

 **

*Summer Newsletter               12 August 2010*

Thomas H. Greco, Jr.

*

O.L.D.

*

No, you haven’t missed anything; this IS the first newsletter I’ve sent out
since April. Old Lazy Dog would happily spend all his time reading novels,
watching movies, playing computer games, drinking beer with friends,
wandering around, visiting family, and lazing around on beaches. I do a bit
of that, but that’s not what life is all about or what the times require.
There’s still a lot of work that needs to be done.

*The Great Unraveling*

No one likes to talk about, much less hear about, things that they consider
“bad” or unpleasant. *Gloom-and- doomer* is a term that is often applied to
someone who tries to give warning about some impending challenge. I say *
challenge* instead of *disaster* because disaster is a judgmental term and
the quality of our experience depends a lot on how we view it and our
willingness to let go and accept what life brings us. Granted, some things
are hard to bear and there are many things that I hope I never have to
experience, but… Well, you get the picture.

What I’m leading up to with all that is the financial and economic “weather
report.” I think I’ve gained some understanding of these things over the
years, and I consider myself fairly well informed about the changing
circumstances which leads me to conclude that we are now in the early stages
of what I’m calling *The Great Unraveling.* When I wrote my first book, *Money
and Debt: a Solution to the Global Crisis*, twenty years ago, I reported
that our modern monetary system creates money on the basis of debt to which
an interest/usury burden is attached, and that the compound growth of debt
would eventually exceed the capacity of the real economy to bear it.

If you want to get a more detailed picture of this you can watch one of the
many presentations I’ve given about it during the past few years. You’ll
find several on my blog, http://beyondmoney.net/. The most recent
presentations which I gave last month are not yet available, but there are
several from last year. You might start with the one I did in Seattle last
November (The direct link is http://vimeo.com/7490027).

I would also suggest that you pay attention to other sources whose knowledge
and insights I respect. Among these are Ilargi and Stoneleigh of *The
Automatic Earth*, http://theautomaticearth.blogspot.com/. Stoneleigh (a.k.a.
Nicole M. Foss)* *gave a presentation in the UK in June which Aaron Wissner
has* *made available at http://localfuture.org/stoneleigh.htm. I
*strongly*recommend that
*everyone* take the time to listen to it. I think the picture Stoneleigh
paints is quite accurate and her short-range predictions are almost
certainly correct. If there is one thing I might take issue with, it is what
might be expected to happen over the longer term. There are numerous factors
that are converging to reshape our world. What has so far been lacking is a
process by which the various perspectives can be adequately combined to
discover likely scenarios and formulate effective responses.

One thing seems certain to me; civilization is at a point of historical *
singularity*. While there are similarities with past situations (like the
Great Depression), it would be a mistake to think that things will play out
as they did before. I’ve been talking lately about the emergence of *The
Butterfly Economy*, and if the metaphor is anywhere near the mark, it seems
worthwhile to study the way the metamorphic process works in nature. In my
view, the old *Caterpillar Economy* is finished, done, kaput. It is
disintegrating beneath our feet. The basic question now is “how do we
channel the resources of the disintegrating caterpillar economy in ways that
will support the emergence of the new *Butterfly Economy.”* I gave a talk on
this subject just two weeks ago in Portland. No, I don’t have all the
answers, and my talk just barely scratched the surface, but I am pretty
confident about the direction we need to take.

The bottom line for me at this point is the urgent necessity for action to
restore resilience to our communities by learning to share, cooperate, and
organize as never before. We need to *spend locally, save locally, and
invest locally. *We need to apply our dollar resources to projects that:

·         Make the local community more self-reliant.

·         Provide greater local security in food, energy, housing, water and
other necessities of life.

·         Improve the overall quality of life.

·         Protect our savings against inflation of the dollar.

Along these lines,* *alternative financial consultant, Susan Boskey asked me
a few weeks ago* *to write something about investing for her newsletter. The
short article I wrote titled, *Investing in Uncertain Times,* expresses my
ideas about our current situation, and my advice about how to better use our
resources in this time of transition. I’ve posted it on my blog at
http://beyondmoney.net/2010/08/03/investing-in-uncertain-times/. **

And, of course, we need to reduce our dependence upon banks and conventional
money by organizing private exchange systems that can be networked together
to provide an interest-free and inflation-free means of payment, while
making credit reliably available to local productive enterprises.

*Northwest Tour, July 23 - August 4*

* *

The Portland presentation I alluded to above was part of a tour of the
Northwest. When I was invited a few months ago to go to southern Oregon to
meet with local exchange advocates, we agreed that late July would be a
possible timeframe. I put the word out to my network and it developed into a
two week tour with the following itinerary:

1. A public lecture in Medford on *The End of Money and the Future of
Civilization*,

2. A workshop in Ashland to assist the southern Oregon group in advancing to
the next stages of their project,

3. A public lecture in Eugene similar to the one I gave in Medford,

4. A public lecture in Portland titled, *The Butterfly Economy: How
communities are building a new world from the bottom up*. In Portland I also
consulted with the Xchange Stewards group, which I have been advising since
last year. The *Butterfly Economy* lecture covered a broader scope than the
others and included advice on how people might allocate their spare cash to
promote local energy and food security in ways that can also provide a hedge
against inflation.

5. A Cashless Exchange Colloquium in Seattle that brought together
individuals and groups that are either operating or planning exchange
systems in Oregon, Washington, or BC.

*BALLE conference and Eastern Tour*

Toward the end of May I traveled east for about three weeks to visit family
and to participate in the annual BALLE (Business Alliance for Local Living
Economies <http://www.livingeconomies.org/>) conference which was this year
held in Charleston, SC. I was on a panel with Derek Huntington of Sonoma
GoLocal and Jenny Kassan of the Katevich Law Group in Berkeley. Jenny has
created a dialog group called Cutting Edge Capital
Raising<http://cuttingedgecap.ning.com/>.
It is billed as *the place to talk about capital raising for small community
businesses.* It is open to all who wish to participate and you can sign up
at http://cuttingedgecap.ning.com/.

* *

**

**

*Localized small-scale Production of Ethanol Fuel*

* *

An unexpected outcome of the BALLE experience was a meeting with Christapher
Cogswell who is an associate of David Blume in a startup company, Blume
Distillation, LLC, that will manufacture small-scale ethanol production
units. I had, up until then, not regarded ethanol to be a viable alternative
to gasoline as a motor fuel but after Christapher explained the many
advantages of small-scale localized production, I came to realize that
communities might gain a great deal from producing their own ethanol for
fuel.

Subsequent correspondence led to David Blume’s visiting Tucson and his
presentation at the downtown library on July 19. David is the author of the
book, Alcohol Can Be a Gas! <http://www.permaculture.com/>, a massive book
that provides a wealth of information on all aspects of ethanol fuel
production and use. The localized approach has the potential to solve
virtually all the problems associated with our addiction to petroleum.
That’s a bold statement, but David is able to back it up with hard facts and
an amazing knowledge of permaculture, history and the politics of
technology.

Dave's talk was inspiring and informative. (Be sure to view his videos at
http://www.permaculture.com/).

At that event a number of people expressed interest in pursuing the
possibilities of ethanol fuel for enhancing local energy security, so now
there is on ongoing discussion about it. I’m enthusiastic about a local
ethanol production project because it fits in with my ideas about community
economic development and resilience. We need to invest our local resources
in local value creation, not in competing with other communities to attract
outside interests that are more interested in exploiting rather than
improving our community.

Viewed in a broader context, a local ethanol production facility might be
created by a local investment cooperative or LLC that would aggregate small
amounts of savings and investment capital to establish enterprises that
produce food, electricity, affordable housing, and other necessities.
Besides his encyclopedic knowledge of the technical aspects of alcohol fuel,
Blume has lots of knowledge on how to properly organize an LLC to produce
it.

*What’s next?*

I’m honored to have been invited to participate in the International Commons
Conference, which is being jointly organized by the Heinrich Boell
Foundation (http://www.boell.de/foundation/about-us.html) and the Commons
Strategies Group, to be held in Berlin on November 1 and 2. According to the
Foundation website:

The Heinrich Böll Foundation is part of the Green political movement that
has developed worldwide as a response to the traditional politics of
socialism, liberalism, and conservatism. Our main tenets are ecology and
sustainability, democracy and human rights, self-determination and justice.
We Are a Green Think Tank and an International Policy Network.

This will be my first visit to the Continent since 2005 and I am pleased to
be returning in connection with such a worthy effort.

Let us be thankful to be living in these exciting times.

Thomas

Thomas H. Greco, Jr.
PO Box 42663, Tucson, AZ 85733, USA
Website: http://reinventingmoney.com
Blog-Beyond Money: http://beyondmoney.net
Blog-Tom's News and Views: http://tomazgreco.wordpress.com
Photo Gallery: http://picasaweb.google.com/tomazhg
Skype/Twitter: tomazgreco

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Think tank: http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI
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