By Tom on 3/10/2010 8:55 AM

Any interest in this subject is welcome, and the current by Dan Schumacher very much so (see March 9 VMIGP agenda). As a disabled veteran of the great non-events of 2008 and 2009  I herewith add two cents. The first is that reading the principal authors of books on the subject gets one ahead much faster than individual journeys into the web. Viz: William Greider, Ellen Brown, Bernard Lietaer, Tom Greco. The second is that the topic is so branching, so bottomless, so, so, uh, sticky, that no amount of study gets one ahead faster than hands on experience. This is why my project at the outset dropped the idea of study and proposed instead a fifty person six month trial of a working currency based in Bellingham. I still think that should be done and that it would be an invaluable contribution to study at Vashon College. Final comment, a bad penny perhaps, be careful with the word currency. To the extent that a narrow meaning is conveyed so is the main benefit of a community currency forgone: the main benefit is a...

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By Tom on 3/9/2010 9:47 AM

While many of you are bravely manwomaning the bully pulpit, the trenches, the streets, or the odd freeway overpass in the cause of salvation I in contrast recede into a morass of despair. I have followed the guidance of Chris Hedges to comprehension yet slacked off on his command to fight anyway. As they say in the shipyard, my purchase on the ascent to salvation is two-blocked. Yep, I’m a late comer to reality. I want off. Like that character in the Michener book, a pottery expert who got wrapped up in Zionism (The Source?). One day she had had it and decided to go back to Chicago and just be a woman. Well, I just want to stay in my workshop helping my wife do stuff. The reason I did not title this post after Michener, some cute phrase combining pottery and sex, is that for years I have been irritated by those freeway advisories for next exit that read “Tourist Activities”. Finally, here’s a chance to ridicule those signs. I need to piddle away some time. I want to pretend for a day or so that everything will...

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By Tom on 2/28/2010 7:42 PM

  The following went to the Loop Feb 28 At the present time true healthcare at the national level is impossible because what is called reform is hampered not only by the immense power of the established way but also by a warped idea of what health care is. The following describes the warp and goes on to suggest an about face alternative for Vashon. As now practiced, “healthcare” is insurance against failure of our health. Like auto insurance it pays for repair. Like auto insurance costs rise relentlessly as technology inexorably finds new ways for drugs and surgery to muck about with God’s image. Like auto insurance the primary objective is profit. Consequently, when a community attempts to wrest control from the insurance industry it finds itself a pauper in an expensive hightech system. It dosn’t have to be that way. The community has two powerful concepts with which to bring about sensible healthcare for its members. They are community currency and preventive care. These will be sketched followed by...

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By Tom on 2/24/2010 8:19 AM

As 2010, two-oh, one-oh, rhymes with Apolo Ohno, gropes its way onward my gut revolts. The feeling is somewhat like one gets from television when some inane clip is repeated like a dripping faucet. But the images and words that have me this morning were not on television and were not inane. Nor were they strictly repetitious, as the details were new. I had thought I could read carefully for ever, but my gut revolts. I know that hundreds upon thousands upon hundreds of people are being killed and worse because of high muckety muck planning. I know that children are being thrust into hell not youth. I know that veterans are being discarded like used cars. I know that we are being lied to as a matter of course. I have needed to read the daily versions of these, these, demonic churnings because I was writing a weekly column and could tell myself I was doing my part in protest. And yes, I read before as well, but that was before the full force of the enormity of evil hit me. I would jokingly refer to the unfolding...

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By Tom on 2/23/2010 8:56 AM

The first characterization of nondollar money is that it’s anything but funny. What it is, is endlessly fascinating. Money, as you know, trumps political theory, morals, religion, economics, and gunpowder. Money controls society the way blood controls the body. And that control resides with the issuer, just like the genie in the bottle said. Alternate currency is a poor name, instead try alternate existence. Also, you may want to think twice about entering into a study of money for if you start you will never finish. Take Tom Greco. He’s not finished yet, and I wish he would finish so he can end his serial bookage. Vashon needs funny money primarily for the blood reason and also against hyperinflation. You see, we are already ill, and the flood of corruption from Wall Street, Pentagon and Congress here in Vashon is still a trickle. Illness symptoms divide into the physical and the mental. The long semis carting off wastewater and short semis carting off unprocessed solid waste are prominent lumps in the ferry...

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By Tom on 2/20/2010 8:36 AM

The first collateral evidence that Greener Times is no more is that I no longer know what day of the week it is. In addition, or rather, more importantly, GT leaves a Nation in disarray. It's difficult to find words to express the dread emotion with which I see on the tube nice people talking about a well-meaning, functioning US government while at the same time that government is sanctioning assorted crimes against humanity. Vermont wants out. California is reaching for a sky hook to get real health care. North Dakota  has its own State bank. But Vashon, sweet Vashon, is in clover.  The Thriftway lot is full, our Gardens are Toured, and our bistros rock. Unify against Patty Murray the war goddess of Easter Island? Unify against Glacier? Unify against the Federal Reserve? Unify against the most regressive tax system in the USA? Hey, smell the lavender, you'll feel better.

By now, given the unmistakable warning signs, we could have had a dual currency and self-paid health care working in synergism. K-2,...

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By Tom on 2/2/2010 1:27 PM

The acceleration of bad news that is now pulling G’s in our National Cockfight Pit make it increasingly difficult to compose a decent message to the menwomen of Vashon. That’s because Vashon persists in thinking it is immune from, or using its language, cannot affect, national chaos. Do I therefore start writing in capitals with color and hold down the exclamation point key? Possibly. So read carefully now lest I do: Vashon society is dysfunctional, and here’s what the tea leaves in my last cup at the Luna have to say about that. We’re dysfunctional because our bond with youth and our bonds with neighbors are broken. A prominent example is K-2 wherein a few elite and a cloistered Community Council never got beyond thinking the problem was how to make money off it. They should have asked how K-2 could be used to prepare Vashon for the coming economic and social challenge. Another example, we adults wring our hands and twist our knickers over this or that misbehavior in the young. Please PLEASE PLEASE uh-oh, please...

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By Tom on 1/26/2010 8:33 AM

Ellen Brown, who seems to be everywhere all at onecet writes today on how Canada came to fund healthcare with a public bank. The model was the island of Guernsey over there in the English Channel, and it was the cows that figured out how. She also explains the recent onset of degradation of the Canadian system, itself most interesting. Anyway, while musing over what she wrote one could not help recalling all the stuff that William Greider and Tom Greco and that genius Bernard Lietaer have written on the nature of money. All of a sudden it clicked: money other than specie money is simply trust that you will be compensated for something you have done or transferred. Funny, I've read that a dozen times but this nth time it had a clicking sound with it. Here is the click version of saying that money is trust:  In order to get something beyond your means accomplished, you organize a group of people to do it. Then the  arrangement by which those people get compensated is money. Money is trust. The clicking sound got...

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By Tom on 12/27/2009 7:57 AM

The last Greener Times of 2009 suggests that US salvation could be won on the streets of the District of Columbia, and accordingly paints a picture of one million seriously pissed off souls occupying it. That's a lot of urine. Thinking about the logistics has turned up the obvious:  Island mobile units complete with medical, food, and sanitation. Composed of neighbors and friends, a unit once formed could respond to a variety of emergencies as well as that ultimate. Having this come to mind clicks with Joe Ulatoski's  NERO strategy for earthquakes etc.. Making a socio-political unit from a NERO would be unwise if the "politico" element became partisan, but if you read the GT piece you see that its idea of street presence is precisely to abandon political affiliation. So some of the NEROs might in fact become nuclei for street work. Off island, you understand. Anyway, the idea of fairly permanent mobile units for "street work" would have collateral impact on island life. Yeah, I know the Beachcomber is 100% for...

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By Tom on 12/21/2009 12:34 PM

Let’s marvel at industry’s attention to breast cancer and menopause only where profitable. Let’s marvel at the back of hand misogyny of a Congress whose palm is out for the healthcare industry to salve. And let’s marvel at the spectacle of senator Ben Nelson making sure women cannot get care for a basic female need. Let’s recoil from all that callous hypocrisy to honor what women do in addition to supplying half the brains on this planet. I hardly know where to begin, so might as well start with the two mammaries, those wonderful hug bumpers. Industry has interfered with their primary purpose by sly promotion of bottle feeding here and by criminal promotion of bottle feeding in the third world. Industry has hijacked their secondary function of attraction to create an unhealthy fixation on fake standards of beauty. All of this contributes to the noted travesties. Anyway in regard to mammaries I am reminded of a story about cows my wife told her grandaughter the other day. My wife grew up on a dairy farm in Oppdal,...

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