Blog 22 Lettus Rejoice

           Blog 22  Lettus Rejoice

I have toured a greenhouse as big as a football field. It contained a table  which was almost as big as a football field.  You couldn’t see it all that clearly. It was covered with green growing things. They were growing Boston Pizzas.

Growing Boston Pizzas? No, that can’t be right. Not Boston Pizzas. It was Boston lettuce. Yes, lettuce.  Sorry, Boston.

And this is good old Boston,

The home of the bean and the cod.

Where the Lowells talk only to Cabots,

And the Cabots talk only to God.

Yes, sorry again, Boston. I know you have seen a lot of history since J. C. Bossidy spoke those lines in 1910. And thanks for the lettuce.

 Well,  back to the greenhouse. It really was growing Boston lettuce. Along one side of the giant table, workers, mostly friendly ladies, were planting little sprouts of lettuce in boxes. The boxes were moving slowly away from them - very slowly. The mechanism underneath the table took about 30 days for a line of lettuce to reach the other side. There another cadre of workers were lifting full grown lettuces off and putting them in crates. On the way across the moving table the plants had their feet in water scientifically laced with nutrients.

Now I would like to make one point about this before moving on.  Think of the number of heads of lettuce this factory could produce, working all year round, compared with an open farm field of the same size.

That is a fruitful thought in these days when farm land is disappearing because of drought, high speed cultivation, urban sprawl, and other contaminants. And us with eight billion mouths to feed.

It is true that part of our problem is in food distribution. (But that is a topic for another day).

My Boston pizza/lettuce interest has just been further galvanized by a TV news report which seemed to picture not just a horizontal concentration of growing plants, but a vertical concentration, too, as the plants also moved up and down. No, the factory was not floating in the clouds, but, with the set-up pictured, it might have grown 40, or 140, times as many lettuce heads as could be grown in a farm field of the same size!

Now this certainly sounds like good news for all of us, but particularly for climate-change-deniers, real or pretended, who can wash their hands of the whole problem of food shortage, and get on with the tired old routine of “growing the economy”, and “restoring prosperity.” (“What did you say was the name of that grow-op company. Is it listed on the stock market yet?”)

             Finally, our last blog promised to name the two advanced countries that could, if their governments chose, implement a Rowbotham-style program to reduce their national indebtedness to private banks, to cushion the gyrations of the economy, and to maintain a stable prosperous nation. 

Neither one of them is the US. The Fed is owned by a consortium of regional private banks and not by the government, as Woodrow Wilson so sadly lamented (Blog 20).

But Britain and Canada both OWN and control their central banks. Any profits are paid out as dividends.  So for nominal charges the governments could create money for infrastructure and for a basic income.

Will they do it? Probably not, until forced by an enlightened (or enraged) citizenry. But freedom from the power of the global banks has to start somewhere with some exercise of national sovereignty. The current fascist government in Canada, if re-elected, certainly won't do it. But in the British Parliament there have been recent debates sparked by monetary reformers, who now understand the principles of non-debt money creation.