By Tim Keim

first published in The Chapel Hill Herald Sun

Where is the bottom to the current economic crises? Many of us have been asking this question for months. The simple answer: we don’t know. As unsettling as that might be, it can be seen as a supreme moment of opportunity, our chance to step off the economic treadmill.

And just how shall we do that?

With PLENTYs!

What’s PLENTY?

According to B.J. Lawson, PLENTY Currency Cooperative Board President, the PLENTY is a local currency that can help a community “sustain itself through whatever shocks and turbulence the increasingly globalized yet fragile economic system throws our way.” Lawson identifies with the Austrian Free Market philosophy. He’s also a doctor, student of engineering systems, and software entrepreneur. He got involved with the PLENTY because of the future he hopes to see for his three children.

Lawson describes our debt-based system as “inherently unstable, an addiction. It’s the physiological equivalent of a person addicted to amphetamines, speed”. He describes what we’re doing as borrowing from the future at an endlessly compounding rate of debt, and the government is trying to produce one last hit to satisfy our craving. Albert Einstein marveled at the power ofcompound interest calling it the “eighth wonder of the world”.

The first incarnation of the PLENTY failed because it was issued under the same faulty strategy used by the Federal Reserve. However, the PLENTY couldn’t exert the police power of the government to enforce its use.

The relaunch of our local currency, in a few weeks, will initially be pegged to the dollar at a fixed rate of exchange. Capital Bank will honor and back the PLENTY, sort of like a foreign currency.

Go to Capital Bank, plunk down $9.00 and get a colorful ten PLENTY note and vice versa. The original PLENTY did not have that backing, and much of it ended up at Weaver St. Market; and they were left holding the bag. Now the PLENTY is completely convertible into dollars.

As a brief historic note, local currency, or scrip was a strategy used by communities during The Great Depression to stimulate neighborly commerce.

Because it’s a “local” currency accepted in our area, it doesn’t leave the community like the money you spend at Walmart, which drains community prosperity. It promotes local business, supports your neighbors and builds a local economy. That’s why Capital Bank whole heartedly backs the PLENTY.

Grant Yarber, CEO of Capital Bank in Raleigh says, “We make our money in small and medium size towns. We want to see small business grow. When people try something new and it keeps money local, we want to try to support that. When that PLENTY is used to pay employees, that money stays in the community”.

If the PLENTY catches hold, it can be backed by locally produced commodities rather than the dollar. This is how we create an independent local economy that is actually founded on something real. Fuel, food, housing, clothing, medical care et cetera could be the bases of our currency. That’s the way stable communities once operated independent of external forces.

The Federal Reserve, a monopoly, is the biggest Ponzi Scheme on earth. The bankrupt finance industry is now extorting money from us, so they can lend it back to us, so we can pay it back to them. How crazy is that? We are being manipulated by financiers who pull the levers of credit availability. As Lawson queries, “How is more debt going to fix the problem? It’s back to the amphetamines analogy. We’re trying to cure our hangover with another hit”.

My question is: do we in Chatham have the essential independent human spirit to take this safe offramp to a sustainable future? President Obama is both smart and well-intentioned, but informed, serious voices of dissent are challenging Secretary Geithner’s bank bailout strategy. Let’s exercise a local option as protection from possible bailout failure. Building a local currency, based on local prosperity will ensure not lack but PLENTY.