BU encourages all who read this blog to step up by doing two things 1. attend the meeting and 2. email this link to all and sundry. The time has come for us to step up!

Somewhat off topic, but still relevant, I think, is the following post at the The Archdruid Report (excerpt below) which seems to quite concisely explain the current economic malaise affecting many, if not most, of the world economies.

To my mind it also provides some rational for protecting our areas of arable land and having it available to grow our own food, thereby playing the role of lifeboats in a foundering and possibly sinking regional or world economy.

The eminent world leaders, orthodox economists and local politicians assure us that all will be well if we can just hang on a bit longer through the tough times while they apply some more quantitative easing and central banks loan a few more billions into existence out of nothing, and by the way, why don’t you sell off some more of your prime arable lands for housing to prime the local economic pump and provide some employment, are like like the captain and crew of the Titanic telling the passengers to chop up their already way too-few lifeboats to make firewood so they can make fires to keep warm while the crew stops the leak down below and/or rescue arrives from passing ships.

The Twilight of Investment

It’s been a few weeks since the conversation on this blog veered away from the decline and fall of American empire to comment on points raised by the recent Age of Limits conference. Glancing back over the detour, I feel it was worth making, but it’s time to circle back to that earlier theme and take it one step further—that is, to shift from how we got here and where we are to where we are headed and why.

That’s a timely topic just at the moment, because events on the other side of the Atlantic have placed some of the crucial factors in high relief. A diversity of forces have come together to turn Europe into the rolling economic debacle it is today, and not all of them are shared by industrial civilization as a whole. Still, a close look at the European crisis will make it possible to make sense of the broader predicament of the industrial world, on the one hand, and the way that predicament will likely play out in the collapse of what remains of the American economy on the other.

snip

In 1929 and 1930, panic selling in the US stock market erased millions of dollars in notional wealth—yes, that was a lot of money then—and made raising capital next to impossible for businesses and individuals alike. In 1931, the crisis spread into the banking industry, kicking off a chain reaction of bank failures that pushed the global money system into cardiac arrest and forced the economies of the industrial world to their knees. The world’s central bankers set out to prevent a repeat of that experience. It’s considered impolite in many circles to mention this, but by and large they succeeded; the global economy is still in a world of hurt, no question, but the complete paralysis of the monetary system that made the Great Depression what it was has so far been avoided.

There’s a downside to that, however, which is that keeping the monetary system from freezing up has done nothing to deal with the underlying problem driving the current crisis, the buildup of an immense dead weight of loans and other financial instruments that are supposed to be worth something, and aren’t. Balance sheets throughout the global economy are loaded to the bursting point with securitized loans that will never be paid back, asset-backed securities backed by worthless assets, derivatives of derivatives of derivatives wished into being by what amounts to make-believe, and equally valuable financial exotica acquired during the late bubble by people who were too giddy with paper profits to notice their actual value, which in most cases is essentially zero.

What makes this burden so lethal is that financial institutions of all kinds are allowed to treat this worthless paper as though it still has some approximation of its former theoretical value, even though everyone in the financial industry knows how much it’s really worth. Forcing firms to value it at market rates would cause a catastrophic string of bankruptcies; even forcing firms to admit to how much of it they have, and of what kinds, could easily trigger bank runs and financial panic; while it remains hidden, though, nobody knows when enough of it will blow up and cause another financial firm to implode—and so the trust that’s essential to the functioning of a money economy goes away in a hurry. Nobody wants to loan money to a firm whose other assets might suddenly turn into twinkle dust; for that matter, nobody wants to let their own cash reserves decline, in case their other assets turn into the same illiquid substance; and so the flow of money through the economy slows to a creep, and fails to do the job it’s supposed to do of facilitating the production and exchange of goods and services.

That’s the risk you take when you try to stop a financial panic without tackling the underlying burden of worthless assets generated by the preceding bubble. Much more often than not, in the past, it’s been a risk worth running; if you can only hold on until the impact of the panic fades, economic growth in some nonfinancial sector of the economy picks up, the financial industry can replace its bogus assets with something different and presumably better, and away you go. That’s what happened in the wake of the tech-stock panic of 2000 and 2001: the Fed dropped interest rates, made plenty of money available to financial firms in trouble, and did everything else it could think of to postpone bankruptcies until the housing bubble started boosting the economy again. It doesn’t always work—Japan has been stuck in permanent recession in the wake of its gargantuan 1990 stock market crash, precisely because it didn’t work—but in American economic history, at least, it’s tended to work more often than not.

Still, there was a major warning sign in the wake of the tech-stock fiasco that should have been heeded, and was not: what boosted the economy anew wasn’t an economic expansion in some nonfinancial sector, but a second and even larger speculative bubble in the financial sphere. I discussed in posts late last year (here and here) ecological economist Herman Daly’s comments about shortages of “bankable projects”—that is, projects that are likely to bring in enough of a return on investment to pay back loans with interest and still make a profit for somebody. In an expanding economy, bankable projects are easy to find, since it’s precisely the expansion of an expanding economy that makes a positive return on investment the normal way of things. If you flood your economy with cheap credit to counter the aftermath of a speculative bubble, and the only thing that comes out of it is an even bigger speculative bubble, something significant has happened to the mechanisms of economic growth.

Full article at:
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2012/06/twilight-of-investment.html

The issue is even larger than arable land for agriculture. The government has as a key strategic push to roll out an “alternative Energy program’. Is it therefore reasonable to expect that ALL decisions must have at its core this strategic focus? Is it sustainable to build houses NOW and in the FUTURE which consume acres and acres of good land without integrating alternate energy features and new housing designs?

If we see such reflected in implementation we can accept the trip to RIO.

@BAFBFP

It is all about results. If this administration can demonstrate that it is serious about land use and alternate energy then as stated we can accept the process to get there. We are not there yet.

Anyone care to give some driving instructions on how to get to the open area where the meeting will be held?

Anyone see the release about the meeting in the Nation or Advocate or on VOB or CBC?

@Notradamus

It is adjacent to the Blue Shop on the main road going east past the Boarded Hall police station.

The Nation has a small embedded on p.4A.

Gasp!!!
What would the Jones think.

Based on reports it came off. Will monitor to post outcomes.