Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Creating Your Own Currency-It Has Gotten To That Now!

America is suffering!! We have a Trickle Down economic plan shoved down our throats. Small business in small towns are fighting to stay alive. What is needed is a bottom-up stimulus New Deal plan, but that is not occurring at this time.

Communities are beginning to figure ways of surviving during this time when consumers are tightening their belts, jobs are disappearing, and downtown shops are finding their windows boarded up. A new American paradigm is beginning in a nation that used to be the world's number one exporter of finished goods, and the number one importer of raw materials. Now this picture has been turned upside-down. We now buy stuff at Wal-Mart, which imports over 70% of its inventory from China.

How do suffering communities keep their dollars within their borders. I guess you might want to think "protectionism". 

Ithaca, New York, Pittsboro, North Carolina, and Detroit, Michigan are just a few places figuring out a way to survive. They came up with their own currencies. This was done during the Depression. President Lincoln came up with debt-free Greenbacks used to pay down his war debt.

Massachusetts has come up with a currency called BerkShares, and Detroit has begun printing Detroit Cheers and Pittsboro, North Carolina has been circulating their Plenty for the purchase of groceries, fuel, services and a whole lot more. If a person wants to buy BerkShares they can go to one of a dozen local banks and plop down a cool $95 and get $100 in this new local currency, which can be spent in a few hundred places. BerkShares has been going on since 2006, and has circulated over $2 million worth.

These localized domestic currencies are not printed on a inkjet printer down at the print shop, but are actually engraved and printed like the dollar.

It appears that consumerism has found a way to spend their incomes locally instead of the profits finding their way to a parent company outside of town. These currencies stay within the city limits and are circulated. 

This is just the beginning of what will evolve into a new American paradigm.