I was back on the road last week — driving from Tennessee to New York to speak at Local Solutions to the Energy Dilemma, a wonderful conference hosted by: Peak Oil NYC, Local Energy Solutions, and Five Borough Institute. Very appropriately, my gas purchases topped $50 each time I stopped to fill up the tank along the way. In farming country that’s big news.
See my first Pick of the Week for this blog:
Texans Going To Pawn Shops To Get Extra Gas $$
From CBS 11 News, April 20, 2006 (also archived here)
The conference was quite a gathering, with terrific speakers, vendors, a smart and engaging audience and wonderful sponsors.
On Thursday nite I listened to Matt Savinar deliver an excellent speech. He pointed out if you wanted to do something positive, you should start a business and create a few jobs. What people need are jobs. Excellent point.
Then we headed down to Colors, the new restaurant created and owned by former employees of Windows Restaurant which was previously based at the World at the World Trade Center. The owners have brought together their favorite recipes from over 24 cultures/countries and adapted them for a New York audience. The food was terrific and so was the service.
I spoke on Friday. You can find my slides on our website, just click here. Afterwards, folks gathered outside in the hall to ask questions. This was a very thoughtful, intelligent group of people. Many, many questions on the “real deal.” My good ally Carolyn Baker joined us; we’ve known each other for years but actually never met. Ditto Dale Allen Pfeiffer.
That afternoon, Megan Quinn showed the documentary produced by The Community Solution about the Cuban experience of switching to permaculture and organic farming when their fossil fuel supply dropped when the Soviet Union came apart. It’s called The Power of Community – How Cuba Survived Peak Oil. I strongly recommend it. Anais Starr in Kalispell, Montana will be showing it on May 21 at the Center for Community & Spiritual Development.
On Saturday I gave a two hour workshop that kept growing in number of attendees as it went on. I was delighted to find that people are very interested in understanding how the “Tapeworm” is draining us — including through our finances and the finances around us as well as dirty tricks — and what we can do about it.
Another Pick of the Week:
The Predator State
By James K. Galbraith, Mother Jones Magazine, May/June 2006 Issue (also archived with annotation here).
I found myself recommending Jon Rappoport’s latest audio seminar Mind Control, Mind Freedom and our new story, Dillon, Read & Co. Inc. and the Aristocracy of Prison Profits and website links as a great introduction to the inner workings of the Tapeworm.
In response to many of the questions on learning about the how the money works in our places where we live and work, the Solari team has posted some pointers along with my lecture slides. Many more questions centered around individual investment strategy and risk. As gold and silver were hitting all time highs, learning more about the falling dollar, what was really happening and how to protect ourselves and our families from inflation was a unifying theme. After much rich discussion, I recommended that everyone listen to my audio seminar Solari Portfolio Strategy – The Power of Financial Intimacy, which is a comprehensive step by step primer covering all this in depth.
More Picks of the Week:
Dollar Starts the Big Slide Against Major Currencies,
By David Smith, Economics Editor, The Sunday Times UK, Sunday 30 April 2006 (also archived here)
Prem Dixit, a very talented activist, attended. She is developing a participatory budgeting effort in New York. I believe that participatory budgeting is one of the most important success stories to emerge globally through the World Social Forum. Their slogan “another world is possible” has meaning when and where citizens get down to the business of mastering the cash and credit flows of their place for an integrated “eco-system†look at how to optimize the resources in their place. Participatory budgeting is a powerful step towards citizen responsibility to ensure that resources are well used. A successful participatory budgeting process in New York City could produce dramatic improvement in the benefits New Yorkers enjoy from governmental investment as a result of citizen understanding and input in the process of determining expenditures, credit use and the rules and regulations that guide them. The opportunity is quite significant not only in terms of better use of governmental resources, but in attracting private resources into infrastructure, housing, education, cultural institutions and small business.
See: The Experience of the Participative Budget in Porto Alegre Brazil, MOST Clearing House Best Practices Database
As I left the conference, Phil and I discussed the possibility of me coming back to do more speeches and workshops. I hope it happens. New York has so much talent. And this is a great group, great audience. Lots of good stuff happening here. And given the density, New York City is suprisingly energy efficient. The New Yorker just ran a great article about this.
After the workshop, I headed over to Greenwich Village to have lunch with first rate investigative reporter Lucy Komisar who writes about offshore havens and global money laundering and financial fraud. She was off the Athens for a global meeting of the Tax Justice Network.
I have their latest piece from Lucy and am learning more about this aspect of financial fraud.
I left New York on Saturday, headed for other stops along the East Coast and New England. Something very positive is happening. Something integrating. While the notion that the titanic is sinking can be frightening, the opportunities to build arks are looking more and more energizing. The company we keep in this flotilla of tiny arks gets better, richer, and more diverse every day. It’s like the first days of spring in Hickory Valley. The plants and trees are just starting to come alive and as the first spring shower waters them, life in all its forms bursts forth. The more we come clean, the more things feel “right as rain.”