Newsletter - April 26, 2022

Dear brothers and sisters,

The Federal Reserve’s decades long experiment in money - pumping has borne fruit: inflation is now at 8.5%.

Trillions of dollars have been created out of thin air; this has led to an enormous stock market bubble and a housing bubble.

Consider the two covid stimulus bills passed by Congress in 2020 and 2021. These pumped more than $5 trillion directly into the economy. Is it any wonder that inflation is beginning to soar?  

Yes the Fed is going to inch up interest rates to try to dampen inflation.

But a 1or 2% rate increase won't do it. If they do raise interest rates to what it will take we will have a massive recession, a crash in the stock market and a crash in the real estate market. Paul Volker, the Fed chairman went to war against inflation in 1980 with an interest rate of 20%. But that would cause a catastrophe because the current level of debt is much greater.After all we are the largest debtor nation in all of human history.               

The Fed is trapped. Their hands are tied.

Hourly wages for employees were up 6.7% in March. That sounds great – until you factor in inflation.With inflation at 8.5%, real wages have dropped nearly 2%. The bigger paychecks aren’t even covering rising prices. No wonder that people are running up credit card debt at the fastest pace since 2001.

Real incomes are  collapsing at an unprecedented rate.

In circumstances such as these we say: Hug the earth. There is no better time to plant a Victory Garden. Come what may, you’ll have an abundance of lettuce, kale, tomatoes and potatoes.

Get growin’, brothers and sisters! Even the smallest step matters more than we know.

Jesse Schwartz PhD
President
Living Tree Community Foods

(Zdnet) What could Unilever and Vandana Shiva possibly have in common? Unilever is one of the 10 companies controlling almost every large food and beverage brand in the world. Shiva is a world-renowned environmental leader and recipient of the 1993 Alternative Nobel Peace Prize (the Right Livelihood Award).

Shiva has a history of actively opposing the commodification and appropriation of natural resources for the benefit of corporate interests. Unilever is at the heart of the international corporate web.

Shiva, a prolific author, just published her latest book: "Agroecology and Regenerative Agriculture: Sustainable Solutions for Hunger, Poverty, and Climate Change". Unilever, whose products need around 4 million hectares of land to grow the raw materials for, recently published a new set of regenerative agriculture principles.

There has to be something about regenerative agriculture. Let's take a look at what it is and why it's important, what the data tells us about it, and how analytics and AI may help going forward.

Read more