Rebuilding the Great American Community

Ideas for Recovery

The Basics, Food and Clothing localization

Everyone needs food and clothing and right now so much of both come from sources hundreds and thousands of miles away. This needs to change to aid long term economic recovery.

1. Local Textile Rejuvenation

In many cities across the country there are textile companies either shuttered, closed or closing. Here is a great opportunity for job creation. Using stimulus money, banks and local governments are to work together and reopen textile mills and clothing makers to begin to reclaim clothing for our own. Working with local design schools and retail outlets a regional design, manufacture and distribution model can be developed that can be replicated across the country. These for profit coop community owned mills would seed the regrowth of a industry that has all but died in America. Giving us back the dignity of honest work and honest pay done for our own community. The big problem now is all the profit of good consumed in our local communities disappears into a multi-national conglomerate. It is not enough to have the wage remain in the community, we need the producers, the manufacturer, the distributor all feeding the local economy.

2. Local Agriculture Rejuvenation

Just as with textiles this idea addresses locally produced food. Local brands are created coordinated through a subsidized distributor to replace missing wholesome and healthy choices lost to inner city and low income areas. The program would be stratified across from producer to retail. Created with stimulus seed money and backed by government supported banks. (The now Zombie Banks after being split up and made into numerous smaller banks)

Imagine inner city packing plants canning and packaging portions from state and local producers to independent neighborhood stores and shops.

The key is accepting that a little socialization in the right area will reseed what we lost in this past generation. We will relearn our pioneering spirit and teach a new generation the importance of local economic development. In doing so we can bring hope and pride to a rapidly growing population of disillusioned Americans.

We all are not cheering for failure. We want the failure to stop and we are all a lot smarter and have more spirit than we know. If we choose to work and think smaller, locally and regionally we can and will set the stage to long term recovery and a rediscovery of the Great American Community.....

I am sending these thoughts to my local mayor and alderperson as well as representatives and senators. The recovery will not happen unless the fed seeds the local communities to grow with real action unhindered by Conservative "Free Market" road blocks and other irrelevant dated thinking.

We need to show that a localized economic thread can work and set the stage to replicate that model across cities and products.

Amid Abrupt Economic & Environmental Change
CSA Emerges as a Resourceful Strategy
March 10, 2009

"As the economic and natural worlds abruptly mutate around us, food and farms are also, inevitably, in the ongoing thrall of this blitzkrieg of change. Consider the factors in motion: finance, employment, transport, climate, oil, agrochemical and water supplies, human health, and the genetics of our food chain. All of the above, and more, underscore the need for individuals, families, neighborhoods and communities to take steps now to cultivate food security."

(snip)

http://thecalloftheland.wordpress.com/