The first article, by Paul Jorion is in French, and claims that the date of March 18, when Obama decided to allow quantitative easing, i.e. the unbacked printing of money by the Federal Reserve, will be known in history as the beginning of the death of capitalism, the end of the fiction of any worth of the dollar, see http://www.pauljorion.com/blog/?p=2354

This article links to a second in english, see http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China_Business/KC18Cb01.html, where the Asia Times explains how China has finally started to divest itself from its dollar holdings, in a way that also guarantees its dominance in the next historical era

People operating in network commons based economic systems are thriving right now, despite the meltdown.

One aspect of this is http://localfoodsystems.org, which is now ramping up. One of our tasks will be to make replicable patterns for complete local food systems, from food growing, to processing, distribution, consumption. This is actually an area of growth (not unlimited growth).

Local food systems will thrive when participants figure out that they stand a better chance of surviving by getting involved with others in the system. This helps sustain those who are in the “mid section” of the “long tail” of local food system economic production, it also makes more room for new entrants, as niches are created by existing system participants. Part of the wealth in this system is commons-based knowledge, and abundant infrastructure building blocks.

Today, myself and others involved in localfoodsystems visited with young people in different vocational education environments (culinary, agricultural science, horticulture). We realized that these young people are being trained for “jobs” in a dying economy, and are lacking the education and insight that they would need to realize how they can participate in local food systems. They are not seeing how they fit into larger systems, this is not being taught to them. Plus, they are drastically underserved in terms of access and knowledge about how to use information technology to create and produce, work together, and learn. Still, at the same time, they express tremendous interest in having this kind of access and learning. They inuit and sense that this is the knowledge they will need in the coming years, and that old institutional and hierarchical problem solving is less and less useful for them.

The sad and unrealized potential is that open knwoledge and open source technology and software make creating hybrid and flexible training more in reach of educators than ever before in human history.

(source: http://futurismic.com/2009/03/18/rushkoff-on-the-economy-let-it-die/)

Futurismic:

‘Unsurprisingly, everyone everywhere is talking about the economy. The usual twist on the topic is to ask “how can we fix it?”, but Douglas Rushkoff would like to suggest that the global financial collapse is a blessing in disguise and that we should just let it die, as it gives us a chance to reassess the assumptions that our monetary systems were built upon:

… it’s even more important for us to come to grips with the fact that the system in peril is not a natural one, or even one that we should be attempting to revive and restore. The thing that is dying—the corporatized model of commerce—has not, nor has it ever been, supportive of the real economy. It wasn’t meant to be. And before we start lamenting its demise or, worse, spending good money after bad to resuscitate it, we had better understand what it was for, how it nearly sucked us all dry, and why we should put it out of our misery.

His point is that, at every level, the system was designed to benefit those who set it up at the long-term expense of everyone else – it’s almost miraculous it’s lasted as long as it has:

An economy based on an interest-bearing centralized currency must grow to survive, and this means extracting more, producing more and consuming more. Interest-bearing currency favors the redistribution of wealth from the periphery (the people) to the center (the corporations and their owners). Just sitting on money—capital—is the most assured way of increasing wealth. By the very mechanics of the system, the rich get richer on an absolute and relative basis.

The biggest wealth generator of all was banking itself. By lending money at interest to people and businesses who had no other way to conduct transactions or make investments, banks put themselves at the center of the extraction equation. The longer the economy survived, the more money would have to be borrowed, and the more interest earned by the bank.’