Bartering in the Triad

With local unemployment rising, it’s more and more every man/woman for themselves. A credit deflation means alternatives to the dollar will become more necessary for trading goods and services. Googling brings us Velocity Trade Exchange, which is located in the Revolution Mills business incubator, also known as the Nussbaum Center for Entrepreneurship.

Of course, there are lots of non-local providers of bartering services. From Wikipedia:

Modern trade and barter has developed into a sophisticated tool to help businesses increase their efficiencies by monetizing their unused capacities and excess inventories. The worldwide organized barter exchange and trade industry has grown to an $8 billion a year industry and is used by thousands of businesses and individuals. The advent of the internet and sophisticated relational database software programs has further advanced the barter industry’s growth. Organized barter has grown throughout the world to the point now where virtually every country has a formalized barter and trade network of some kind. Complex business models based on the concept of barter are today possible since the advent of Web 2.0 technologies.

SourceForge has lots to choose from. But it’s too soon.

From Wikipedia:

Local Exchange Trading Systems (LETS) also known as LETSystems are local, non-profit exchange networks in which goods and services can be traded without the need for printed currency. In some places, e.g. Toronto, the scheme has been called the Local Employment and Trading System.

LETS networks use interest-free local credit so direct swaps do not need to be made. For instance, a member may earn credit by doing childcare for one person and spend it later on carpentry with another person in the same network. In LETS, unlike other local currencies, no scrip is issued, but rather transactions are recorded in a central location open to all members. As credit is issued by the network members, for the benefit of the members themselves, LETS are considered mutual credit systems.

Back to SourceForge. That’s more like it.

Before I go to the trouble of downloading and installing, I need to investigate.

From Frances Moore Lappe‘s Time for Progressives to Grow Up:

We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy – from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses – that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high. Besides, few of us – unless we’re scared into it—are prepared simply to take orders.

Green Apple is making it work in Pittsburg:

Green Apple works through a credit card system. If someone with a Green Apple credit card buys goods or services, those are offset against what they can sell to someone else with the card.

Green Apple charges retail prices, so there is no price break when using the Green Apple credit card.

The company also has a string of brokers who spend their days on the phone trying to hook up potential trades. Last week the Green Apple brokers had $2 million worth of John Deere commercial equipment they were looking to unload.

Ithaca Hours are available in New York:

Over 900 participants publicly accept Ithaca HOURS for goods and services. Additionally some local employers and employees have agreed to pay or receive partial wages in Ithaca Hours, further continuing our goal of keeping money local.

From Riding Out the Credit Collapse by Douglas Rushkoff:

The more connected you are to the real world, and the more consciously you reject the lure of the speculative ladder, the less of a willing dupe you’ll be in the pyramid scheme that’s in the process of collapsing all around us at this moment.

Think small. Buy local. Make friends. Print money. Grow food. Teach children. Learn nutrition. And if you do have money to invest, put it into whatever lets you and your friends do those things.

Victoria, BC deals with the shortage of Canadian dollars:

Members open an account by paying a registration fee.
When members sell goods or services they earn Green dollars, and their accounts are credited. When members buy goods or services they spend Green dollars, and their accounts are debited.

The World Prout Assembly says a “community currency” is better than a LETSystem:

A community barter system – like the LETSystem, which is not community currency – is usually based on voluntary organisational sharing of information about goods and services available from individuals in an area. The accounting is usually based either on time or the nationalised currency (pounds, dollars, etc).

Such a system has three basic weaknesses:

- It tends to be limited in scope to a handful of dedicated practitioners, usually in largely rural or semi-rural areas.

- It does not cater for transactions outside the community.

- It encourages hoarding, rather than the circulation of wealth and energy, and can only expand by recruiting new producers – there are no ‘built-in’ inducements to encourage the circulation of goods and services.

A community currency, on the other hand, can be used by anyone in the community as a ‘means of payment’ for any commodity or service.

The only limit to the expansion of its circulation is its acceptability, so it encourages all forms of economic activity. If suitable provision is made for ‘convertibility’, it can facilitate transactions with people and organisations outside the community, and indeed encourage community ‘import replacement’.

From Keith Hart at The Memory Bank:

Money, conceived of as a commodity with its own value to be hoarded and deployed as an instrument of power, as capital, is the opposite of open money. Nor is the collectivization of such capital in the manner of twentieth century socialist regimes remotely appropriate either. Rather, the wealth to be mobilized is the human creativity in all of us, resources that have been ill-used for too long, because of the money regime we have been forced to live by. This creativity belongs to each individual, but it can only be realized in society, together. Society should be conceived of as a multitude of levels of association and many of these could take the form, as one of their dimensions, of a community with its own circuit of exchange and money. Economic democracy in this limited sense would point us to more inclusive forms of polity; and then perhaps the dream of abundance that has long inspired humanity would be realized as more than just the riches of a few.

I’m loving it. This scratching my itches for Class Warfare and Neoliberalism. I gots to have me some Natties. You can tie them to the US dollar or think of them as hours of labor.