From Financing our Foodshed by Carol Peppe Hewitt. 2013

Why do people feel inclined to lend “Slow Money?  This was part of what Seth had to say:

In talking to one of my friends who also had an interest in what happens to money when you drop it off at the bank……, We had so many conversations and discussions about this topic that we elided that we needed to start recording them and put them out for others to listen to and think about.  One thing lead to another and The Extraenvironmentalist was born (extraenvironmentalist.com)…  The show come from the perspective of an outsider recently arrived on the earth, with no prior knowledge or cultural programming who asks why do we do the things we do?  Why do we hurt each other and strive to rule each other?  Why do we wrap ourselves up in complicated monetary systems and create business organisations that disregard the humans it must exploit?  The ideas and topics we talk about are not anything new, but they are often ignored by mainstream media sources.

Using this viewpoint of an outsider, we have begun to dissect complicated ideas surrounding what it means to be a human at the beginning of the 21st century and what the future holds in store.

We often land at the conclusion that civilisation on the current scale is not sustainable.  The historic model go human interaction has always been in small groups, where goods and services are traded between neighbours and supported by local infrastructure.  Knowing where your money is going, where your food is coming from and why it’s important to keep it local leads to a mindset n which the corporate model of exploitation becomes untenable.  When business as usual becomes less about cheap goods from a third-world country on the other side of the world and more about the maintenance of human welfare.

When humans can view themselves not through the lens of nationalism, or capitalism but as brothers and sisters, united on this floating blue ball we call Earth, then the slow money initiative will have achieved.

Those of you who have been following this blog know of Cecil’s interest in the local food movement.  He has recently been introduced to the concept of “Slow Money”.  Here is a primer on the concept.

Thousands of Americans have begun affirming a new direction for the economy. It’s called Slow Money.

Inspired by the vision of Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing As If Food, Farms and Fertility Mattered, published in 2009, the Slow Money Alliance is bringing people together around a new conversation about money that is too fast, about finance that is disconnected from people and place, about how we can begin fixing our economy from the ground up… starting with food.

Through Slow Money national gatherings, regional events and local activities, more than $30 million has been invested in 221 small food enterprises around the United States since mid-2010.  Seventeen local Slow Money chapters and six investment clubs have formed. Slow Money events have attracted thousands of people from 36 states and 9 countries. Over 24,000 people have signed the Slow Money Principles. The first international Slow Money investment—a $20,000 loan to a solar dairy in Switzerland—has been made. Slow Money France is in the early stages of organizing, and inquiries about chapter formation have been received from Canada, Australia and Japan.

At this year’s National Gathering, Gatheround was launched, making it possible for individuals to put their money to work in small food enterprises via small donations.

“Combine poisonous factory-farm tomatoes with disgraced investment banker Bernard Madoff. Throw in a stock market disaster. You get a public spooked by the dangers of industrial food production and investors wary of risky business. This may be the recipe for a Slow Money revolution.”
– David Gutnick, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

“The Slow Money movement is one of the top five trends in finance.”
– Entrepreneur Magazine and Reuters

With trillions of dollars a day accelerating around the globe, invested in securities that no one fully understands, it is time to affirm a new direction:

The Slow Money Principles

In order to enhance food security, food safety and food access; improve nutrition and health; promote cultural, ecological and economic diversity; and accelerate the transition from an economy based on extraction and consumption to an economy based on preservation and restoration, we do hereby affirm the following Slow Money Principles:

1. We must bring money back down to earth.

   II. There is such a thing as money that is too fast, companies that are too big, finance that is too complex. Therefore, we must slow our money down — not all of it, of course, but enough to matter.

   III. The 20th Century was the era of Buy Low/Sell High and Wealth Now/Philanthropy Later—what one venture capitalist called “the largest legal accumulation of wealth in history.” The 21st Century will be the era of nurture capital, built around principles of carrying capacity, care of the commons, sense of place and non-violence.

   IV. We must learn to invest as if food, farms and fertility mattered. We must connect investors to the places where they live, creating vital relationships and new sources of capital for small food enterprises.

   V. Let us celebrate the new generation of entrepreneurs, consumers and investors who are showing the way from Making A Killing to Making a Living.

   VI. Paul Newman said, “I just happen to think that in life we need to be a little like the farmer who puts back into the soil what he takes out.”

Recognizing the wisdom of these words, let us begin rebuilding our economy from the ground up, asking:

* What would the world be like if we invested 50% of our assets within 50 miles of where we live?
* What if there were a new generation of companies that gave away 50% of their profits?
* What if there were 50% more organic matter in our soil 50 years from now?

Examples from the North Carolina Chapter of Slow Money will feature in future blogs.

Merrette Moore gives his thoughts on BBQ, and the early stage investment scene in North Carolina. Merrette runs a small investment firm, Lookout Capital.   NC is the tenth most populous state in the USA with just under 10 Million People.  Geographically it runs from the Appellation Mountains in the West to the Altantic coast, with the Piedmont in between.  The Piedmont is the richer area of the state.  Raleigh, the star capital lies in the East of the Piedmont, while Charlotte, NC’s largest city is further west, close to the Georgia state border.

I am an unabashed Eastern North Carolina boy.  I’m all about vinegar-based BBQ (B’s and Skylight Inn are the best eastern style joints in case you’re wondering), chopped cole slaw, pigs in a puppy, sweet tea, Natty Light (well, at least the idea that more of it is consumed here than the rest of the world combined), the Washington Redskins (back in the day, the closest thing we had to an NFL team), old colonial houses, tidewater accents, flat terrain, self-kicking machines (go check out the back of the parking lot at Angus Barn), the coast (especially Ocracoke), and small towns where everyone knows each other.

By Cecil Poole

Barbecue is big in this part of America.  Big in most parts of America.  Barbecue is not what Australian’s would recognise.  Here Barbecue is slow cooking, highly flavoured, often ribs – beef or pork, or pork butt, cooked over ten or more hours then pulled.  No quickly seared steak or chops, no burnt snags, to do that you need a ‘grill’.

I’d been given instructions.  “The delivery will be this afternoon.  Make sure everything is there, that there is no damage, sign nothing until you are completely sure all is in order.  Be careful.  Don’t move it till I get home.”  I doubt he was this concerned with the delivery of his second son and third child just two weeks ago.  Nor, possibly, looked forward to it as much.

So I await delivery, periodically looking out the front window, then the back.  Checking nothing has disturbed the specially prepared place for it.  Months back, while I was still in my antipodean home I got the news – “Dad!, I’ve ordered the new smoker, specially built in Maine.  Look at the web site, check it out.  And, oh, Dad, we are having another baby.  The smoker is called a Half Pint.  And, Dad, I’ve ordered it in ‘cotton candy’* pink.”

I’m still waiting for the ‘special delivery’ when the Daughter in Law (DIL) gets back with the three children.  Would I take the elder boy (nearly 3) in the stroller down to look at the new bike tunnel and see the construction equipment, the diggers, graders, rollers and bobcats?  ‘Of course’ I say, and head off rugged up against the late winter chill.  The boy and I visit the roller, he climbs onto the seat and pretends to drive it.  He climbs all over it, looking for dirt and oily patches, much as a dog looks for vile things to roll in.  He has to sit in the bucket of the bobcat, climb the wheels of the grader, climb the nearby pile of aggregate in a manner designed to spread it out as quickly as possible.  An hour goes quickly by.   Then I remember – The Delivery!

Hurrying back I see a delivery truck with a hydraulic tailgate and a man with a large fork trolley returning from the alley.  Has the DIL accepted delivery without a proper inspection?  I rush to see, and to my relief my son is there with the biggest smile I’ve seen in some time, and a largish cardboard box on a smallish pallet.

We unwrap it fast and there it is.  In all its glory.  Built like a cross between a small bank safe and an old refrigerator, heavy hinges, solid door latches and industrial casters.  This thing looks like it is built for business.

Except that colour.  Shocking Pink.

“No, Dad, ‘Cotton Candy’ is the true colour.”

* Cotton Candy is known as ‘Fairy Floss’ in Australia, it is spun sugar.

We have music to go with Saturday’s MDFF, thanks to the efforts of our extraordinary Dispatcher.  (Click on the title below)  

“Drop Kick me Jesus through the Goal Post of Life”

And now for a somewhat blacker dropkick with Mine Tinkit

Ira Maine, our Poetry Editor has exacting standards.  Here is yet another example of his.

Below, a soupcon of sophisticated love poetry from the 20^th century.  Despite my best  investigative efforts, no author can be found for this profoundly disturbing lament.  It deserves an author and I shall pursue this quest, this need to be aware of the poem’s creator, with the utmost vigour, nay, relentlessly, at whatever cost to my already fragile health.  When this mission is fulfilled, when the songbirds once more throng the earth with song, look for me slumped over the baccarat tables at Monte Carlo, consumed with utter joy, and plunking (a coarse honky-tonk tune negligently) on my banjo.

Susanna.

Susanna was a lady with plenty of class
Who knocked ‘em all dead when she wiggled her
Eyes at the fellows as girls sometimes do
To make it all plain that she’s aching to
Take in a movie, or go for a sail
And then hurry home for a nice piece of
Chocolate cake and a slice of roast duck
For after a meal she was ready to
Go for a ride or a stroll on the dock
With any young man with a sizeable
Roll of big bills and a pretty good front
And if he talked fast she would show him her
Little pet dog which was subject to fits
And maybe she’d let him take hold of her
Lily white hands with a movement so quick
And then she’d  reach over and tickle his
Chin while she showed him a trick learned in France
And ask the poor fellow to take off his
Coat while she sang of the Indian shore
For whatever she was Susanna was no bore.

The Real Poverty Trap by Paul Krugman From the New York Times 4 March 2014

Earlier I noted that the new Ryan poverty report makes some big claims about the poverty trap, and cites a lot of research — but the research doesn’t actually support the claims. It occurs to me, however, that the whole Ryan approach is false in a deeper sense as well.

How so? Well, Ryan et al — conservatives in general — claim to care deeply about opportunity, about giving those not born into affluence the ability to rise. And they claim that their hostility to welfare-state programs reflects their assessment that these programs actually reduce opportunity, creating a poverty trap. As Ryan once put it,

we don’t want to turn the safety net into a hammock that lulls able-bodied people to lives of dependency and complacency, that drains them of their will and their incentive to make the most of their lives.

OK, do you notice the assumption here? It is that reduced incentives to work mean reduced social mobility. Is there any reason to believe this as a general proposition?

Now, as it happens the best available research suggests that the programs Ryan most wants to slash — Medicaid and food stamps — don’t even have large negative effects on work effort. There is, however, some international evidence that generous welfare states have an incentive effect: America has by far the weakest safety net in the advanced world, and sure enough, the American poor work much more than their counterparts abroad:

Great! So poor Americans aren’t condemned to lives of complacency that drain their wills — or at least not nearly as much as the poor in other countries.  So we must have much more upward social mobility than they do, as our poor make the most of their lives, right?

Um, no.:

In fact, the evidence suggests that welfare-state programs enhance social mobility, thanks to little things like children of the poor having adequate nutrition and medical care. And conversely,of course, when such programs are absent or inadequate, the poor find themselves in a trap they often can’t escape, not because they lack the incentive, but because they lack the resources.

I mean, think about it: Do you really believe that making conditions harsh enough that poor women must work while pregnant or while they still have young children actually makes it more likely that those children will succeed in life?

So the whole poverty trap line is a falsehood wrapped in a fallacy; the alleged facts about incentive effects are mostly wrong, and in any case the entire premise that work effort = social mobility is wrong.

What’s not to like about Tom Sharpe? “Wielding a glittering rapier — or a hatchet, as he preferred to characterize it — he lustily hacked away at a slew of targets, among them racism, colonialism, Thatcherism, academia and the aristocracy”

He was brought up, mainly in South Africa, by his pastor father as a strong supporter of fascism and Nazism.  He spent the bulk of his adult life fighting these forces, using literature and the stage, humour and satire.  Here is The New york Times obituary to him, written by Margalit Fox, 8 june 2013.

Tom Sharpe, a British novelist whose work was a riotous dark amalgam of Dickens, Waugh, Wodehouse, Rabelais and Benny Hill, died on Thursday at his home in Llafranc, in the Catalan region of Spain.  He was 85 and had lived in Spain, in cheerful dyspepsia, for many years.

A best-selling author in Britain, Mr. Sharpe was considered one of its master social satirists.  Though his books have been widely available in the United States since the 1980s, he remains less well known in this country.

Wielding a glittering rapier — or a hatchet, as he preferred to characterize it — he lustily hacked away at a slew of targets, among them racism, colonialism, Thatcherism, academia and the aristocracy.

To that end, Mr. Sharpe crammed his work with excess, particularly excess involving smut, scatology, savagery and grotesquerie.  Routine plot elements in his novels might include exploding ostriches, dogs high on LSD, inept spousal murder and all manner of inflatable things.

In its obituary, the British newspaper The Telegraph noted, “As the handgun was a crucial motif to Raymond Chandler, and the billet doux to Barbara Cartland, so whole Sharpe narratives could depend on condoms.”

Mr. Sharpe’s best-known novels include five starring the hapless Henry Wilt.  A lecturer at a jerkwater technical college in England, Wilt is condemned to teach classes like Meat One and Gasfitters Two to academically disinclined students.

“The man who said the pen was mightier than the sword ought to have tried reading ‘The Mill on the Floss’ to Motor Mechanics,” Mr. Sharpe’s antihero observes dourly in his first outing, “Wilt,” published in Britain in 1976.

In that novel, Wilt fantasizes about doing away with Eva, his immense, overbearing, sexually voracious wife.  But his dress rehearsal for the crime — a curious incident involving an inflatable doll, a construction site and quantities of poured concrete — goes horribly wrong, and though Eva remains gratingly alive, Wilt winds up accused of her murder.

The novel was the basis of the 1990 film “The Misadventures of Mr. Wilt,” starring Griff Rhys Jones as Wilt and Alison Steadman as Eva.

Mr. Sharpe was equally known for his novel “Porterhouse Blue,” published in 1974 and set at the fictional Porterhouse College of Cambridge University.

On this lofty field, a pitched battle between tradition and modernity rages, with blue-blooded stalwarts accustomed to gorging on roast swan in the campus dining hall confronting an onslaught of female students, prophylactics run amok (inflated, they waft en masse onto the college quad) and other terrors.

But the ribald comedy of Mr. Sharpe’s books was merely a counterweight to their essential darkness, which seemed rooted in an English childhood steeped in fascism and a South African young adulthood amid the brutalities of apartheid.

Thomas Ridley Sharpe was born in London on March 30, 1928.  His father, a Unitarian minister, was a staunch supporter of fascist causes and a great admirer of Hitler.  Young Tom grew up awash in Nazi ideology, and with the outbreak of World War II the family moved often to avoid being interned as enemy sympathizers.

It was only toward war’s end, Mr. Sharpe later said, as he watched newsreels of the liberation of the death camps, that he realized Nazism’s true enormity.

After studying anthropology at Cambridge, Mr. Sharpe moved to South Africa, where he was a social worker in the black townships.  His job entailed collecting black tuberculosis patients from hospitals and bringing them home to the townships to die.

“It wasn’t necessary for them to die,” Mr. Sharpe told The Sunday Express, the British newspaper, in 2010.  “It was because only white people were being given the drugs.”

He became a photographer to capture what he saw on film and a playwright to set it down on paper.  After one of his plays indicting apartheid was produced in Britain in 1960, Mr. Sharpe was thrown into a South African prison.

Deported to Britain the next year, Mr. Sharpe taught at a technical college that would become the model for Wilt’s milieu.  His first two novels, “Riotous Assembly” (1971) and “Indecent Exposure” (1973), were scathing, grotesquely comic attacks on South African society.

Mr. Sharpe had a brief early marriage, orchestrated in his telling by his socially ambitious mother, which ended in divorce.  “This girl had inherited seven houses,” he told The Telegraph in 2004.  “Which was as good a reason for getting rid of her as any.”

His survivors include his second wife, the former Nancy Looper, an American whom he married in 1969; two daughters; and a stepdaughter.

His other novels include “Grantchester Grind” (1995), a sequel to “Porterhouse Blue”; “The Wilt Inheritance” (2010); and “The Midden” (1996).

Though Mr. Sharpe’s books sold millions of copies in Britain, they were not to everyone’s liking.  Perhaps the best summary of the divided reception they provoked appears in The Sunday Telegraph’s review of his 1978 novel, “The Throwback,” a sendup of the gentry:

“If getting a taxidermist to stuff your grandfather and blowing up a neighbor’s house by pumping gas up his lavatory pan are your taste in jokes, then Mr. Sharpe is your man,” the review said. “If not, not.”

“The Worsfield Show is one of the more pleasant occasions associated with that unattractive city.  It takes place on Worsfield Heath, not far from the by-pass. (It can be said in favour of Worsfield that it is surrounded, and to some extent immunized, by the countryside.)  It is true that the factory chimneys, now almost hiding the Cathedral tower, are visible from the site, but once a year they are fronted by sideshows, show-rings, horseboxes and sheep pens.  The beer tents are open all day and there farmers mix with commuters.  Girls from Tesco’s and the biscuit factory mingle with pigmen, stockmen, bingo-callers, fortune-tellers and dedicated showjumpers.  Huge quantities of Simcox ale are drunk and great rivers of bubbling urine course down the troughs in the flapping lavatory tents and manure the common.  Children in jodhpurs and hacking-jackets are mounted on midget ponies and forced over jumps by relentless parents greedy for rosettes.  Worsfield Show is a place where you can still bowl for a pig, buy a horse or a pound of homemade marmalade, and watch a calm girl in a fringed cowboy suit being picked out by quivering knives hurled by her nervous chain smoking-husband” from Paradise Postponed, John Mortimer, Penguin London 1986 (p 184)

John Mortimer hold a special place in western literature and television.  He continually championed the poor, the disadvantage, the mischievous, and the drinking of rough red wine.  There is a lot to like about this man.  Oh, he died in 2009.

And this obituary posted in the blog “Wha Happen?” by Robert Boyd on 17 January 2009

One of my favorite writers, John Mortimer, died Friday at the age of 85. He was best known for his short stories about Rumpole, a criminal defense lawyer working in the Old Bailey. As far as I know, it is the only long-running series about criminal defense, and certainly the one most sympathetic to the trade. Mortimer saw defense lawyers as essential guardians of the rights of all citizens, and as persons who operated in the face of skepticism and hostility from the police, prosecutors, judges, and much of the public. (John Grisham approaches defense lawyers similarly, but his writing has never appealed to me that much.) 

It seems to me that in these days of Law & Order, we worship prosecutors too much. We’ve seen the tragedy of this attitude in Texas and in Houston in particular. I would like pop culture to re-elevate the defense lawyer, as it did in the days of Anatomy of a Murder and To Kill a Mockingbird. And if this could happen with the same wit that Mortimer brought to the Rumpole stories, all the better.

For another more detailed obit try this from the New York Times

Here is John Mortimer (left) and Leo McKern who played Horace Rumpole in Rumpole of the Bailey

Tomorrow we look at another satirist, Tom Sharpe