by Rob Winfield
Decentralized, relocalized economies will make it much more difficult to destroy the livelihood of dissenters and political resistance organizers.
The Imperial US government’s true power comes from controlling the money, which means to control the system of value exchange. Let’s call it “The Controlled Economy,” because that’s a largely accurate statement.
Controlling the exchange of value meant they could do things like steal from the taxpayers and help the super-rich create monopolies, taking away the means of production from us, and turning us into debt ridden serfs on the global plantation. Controlling value exchange gives the controllers the “push-button power” to dictate, and force us to go along.
American dissenters who obey the law and exercise their Constitutional Rights are still subjected to an unofficial form of “economic sanctions.” The Southern Poverty Law Center, doing the dirty work that the US government is legally barred from doing, will do things like call the employer of a dissenter to get him fired from his job. However, in a notorious recent case, a reporter for “The Oregonian,” Betsy Hammond, attempted to get someone fired from his job for the sin of writing a polite letter to the editor of the Oregonian. http://www.vdare.com/letters/tl_013109.htm.
The Oregonian/Hammond story is an example of “domestic economic sanctions against an American dissenter.” It’s a smaller scale version of the economic sanctions against Iraq back in the 1990’s which resulted in the deaths of a half million Iraqi children and was “worth it,” according to Madeline Albright.
Decentralized, relocalized economies will make it much more difficult to destroy the livelihood of dissenters and political resistance organizers. We may find ourselves materially poorer, but much more free. The death of the post-WWII Controlled Economy will force us to either make this transition, or die.One sign of the death of the Controlled Economy is the growing practice of barter between brick and mortar corporations, linked and quoted below from the Wall Street Journal. The growth of Bartering means that economic activity is by necessity relocalizing, which will mean a radical change in American culture.
The past several decades, since the end of World War II, which saw the increase of the American standard of living, also allowed us to isolate ourselves and stop cooperating with each other on the local level. This isolation gives the US Regime THE POWER TO DO ANYTHING TO US, from sending our factories abroad, to changing our diets to food that makes us obese and diabetic, to launching wars of choice, to moving in Somali “refugees” next door to making it easy for millions of Crimigrants to (illegally) immigrate/invade and live among us against our will.
The post-WWII prosperity would have died a natural death in the 1970’s, but it was revived and kept on life support. Debt is the iron lung keeping the Controlled Economy wheezing along, but for how much longer?
We Americans need not die with this empire, but we will need to make a colossal effort to save ourselves. This effort is to take back the economy for ourselves, including rebuilding local means of production, doing a lot of second hand exchange (Craig’s List, Freecycle), getting to know the people in our towns again, with the goal of taking bigger and bigger bites of the value exchange via barter and possibly silver coins, all the while, buying less and less stuff at Walmart.
If we are to save ourselves, then we must work towards pulling the plug on the Controlled Economy, without getting taken down with it.
Link: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123482445928394833.html
<quote>In 2008, about 250,000 North American companies conducted barter transactions worth more than $16 billion, according to the International Reciprocal Trade Association, a nonprofit based in Portsmouth, Va., that regulates and provides standards for modern trade and barter-service companies. The amount for small businesses climbed to an estimated $11 billion last year from $10 billion in 2007. David Wallach, the association’s president, says if the trend continues he expects a 15% gain this year to about $12.7 billion.
NuBarter.com, a barter company in Savannah, Ga., has seen its sales grow — from $285,000 in transactions in the first quarter of last year to $464,000 in the fourth quarter. In addition, the number of transactions has doubled in the past six months, to 650 per month from 310 a month. NuBarter has 800 members, up from 400 a year ago.
“Companies that had turned us down a few years ago are joining now,” says Gary Field, NuBarter’s president.
Similarly, Seattle-based BizXChange Inc. saw a 40% increase in new members to 1,300 last year. Its transactions were up 55% to $5.5 million.</quote>