Economics

If you’re planning a garage sale or organizing a church bazaar, you’d best beware: You could be breaking a new federal law. As part of a campaign called Resale Roundup, the federal government is cracking down on the secondhand sales of dangerous and defective products.

The initiative, which targets toys and other products for children, enforces a new provision that makes it a crime to resell anything that’s been recalled by its manufacturer.

"Those who resell recalled children’s products are not only breaking the law, they are putting children’s lives at risk," said Inez Tenenbaum, the recently confirmed chairwoman of the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

The crackdown affects sellers ranging from major thrift-store operators such as Goodwill and the Salvation Army to everyday Americans cleaning out their attics for yard sales, church bazaars or – increasingly – digital hawking on eBay, Craigslist and other Web sites.

Secondhand sellers now must keep abreast of recalls for thousands of products, some of them stretching back more than a decade, to stay within the bounds of the law.

Staffers for the federal agency are fanning out across the country to conduct training seminars on the regulations at dozens of thrift shops.

….

The Resale Roundup is being enforced under the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, which Congress passed and President George W. Bush signed into law last year.

The law has a number of other beefed-up consumer protections, including much tougher standards for selling products that contain lead or lead-based paint. After stalling for years, the legislation gained new life after widely publicized massive recalls of Chinese-made dolls and toys with lead paint that started in late 2007.

The law also restored the full five seats on the Consumer Product Safety Commission for the first time in a quarter-century.

President Barack Obama and Democratic congressional leaders are crafting an appropriations bill that would boost the agency’s funding next year by more than 11.4 percent – to $117 million – and it’s already hiring new inspectors and other employees in anticipation of the funding infusion.

Source/Full Story: Kansas City Star

Find county fairs @ http://www.countyfairgrounds.net/master/masterhome.html

Families who want cheap, close-to-home fun this summer are heading in record numbers to a pastime that dates to the 1800s: the county fair.

"The economy worked in our favor, because so many people were staying home and looking for a lot of bang for their buck," says Linda Zweig, spokeswoman for the San Diego County Fair in California. Attendance for its 22-day run was a record 1,274,442. Previous record: 1,265,997 in 2007.

To attract budget-conscious visitors, the fair offered new discounts, including a $22 pass good for 22 days.

California’s Alameda County Fair drew a record 432,000 visitors, 87,000 more than in 2008. "I think everybody has a ’stay-cation’ attitude this year," says spokeswoman April Mitchell. For the first time, the fair offered a $30 pass for all 17 days.

The Alameda fair added horse races and promoted a balloon ride that had been at Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch.

As fair season nears its halfway point, the trend is likely to continue, says Marla Calico, spokeswoman for the International Association of Fairs and Exhibitions.

"In this type of economy, fairs really shine," she says. "There may be pent-up demand because people have not taken vacations … and fairs are a good value."

Source/Full Story: USATODAY.com

When Nathaniel Roe, 92, died at his 18th-century farmhouse here the morning of June 6, his family did not call a funeral home to handle the arrangements.

Instead, Mr. Roe’s children, like a growing number of people nationwide, decided to care for their father in death as they had in the last months of his life. They washed Mr. Roe’s body, dressed him in his favorite Harrods tweed jacket and red Brooks Brothers tie and laid him on a bed so family members could privately say their last goodbyes.

The next day, Mr. Roe was placed in a pine coffin made by his son, along with a tuft of wool from the sheep he once kept. He was buried on his farm in a grove off a walking path he traversed each day.

“It just seemed like the natural, loving way to do things,” said Jennifer Roe-Ward, Mr. Roe’s granddaughter. “It let him have his dignity.”

Advocates say the number of home funerals, where everything from caring for the dead to the visiting hours to the building of the coffin is done at home, has soared in the last five years, putting the funerals “where home births were 30 years ago,” according to Chuck Lakin, a home funeral proponent and coffin builder in Waterville, Me.

The cost savings can be substantial, all the more important in an economic downturn. The average American funeral costs about $6,000 for the services of a funeral home, in addition to the costs of cremation or burial. A home funeral can be as inexpensive as the cost of pine for a coffin (for a backyard burial) or a few hundred dollars for cremation or several hundred dollars for cemetery costs.

The Roes spent $250.

More people are inquiring about the lower-cost options, said Joshua Slocum, director of the Funeral Consumers Alliance, a nonprofit watchdog group. “Home funerals aren’t for everybody, but if there’s not enough money to pay the mortgage, there certainly isn’t enough money to pay for a funeral,” Mr. Slocum said.

Source/Full Story: NYTimes.com

His website is @: FeedMyWheels.com

Josh Winston is a self-described problem solver. From his spacious office on the seventh floor of a high-rise building in Bethesda, Maryland, he fills out tax returns and keeps the books balanced for a number of his accounting clients.

“Everything on the left always equals everything on the right. For math-oriented people and musicians like me, that’s very satisfying,” he says.

Four years ago, Winston was watching a late-night news program and saw a segment about converting diesel vehicles to run on alternative fuels. That night, Winston was hooked. He ordered a conversion kit for $900 and proceeded to convert a truck to run on used vegetable oil — just to see if he could.

Soon after, he converted his 1998 Jetta and affixed a sticker to the rear bumper that said, “This vehicle runs on straight vegetable oil.”  Source/Full Story::  CNN.com

On a bit of a downbeat note, if you do convert your vehicle to use vegetable oil, the government just might come after you for taxes.

Consider, David Wetzel, a 79 yr old retired chemist from Decatur IL. He’s been using recycled vegetable oil to “gas up” his 1985 Volkswagen Golf diesel car for 7 years. He has shown off his car in energy fairs, universities and exhibits. In Jan, the IL Dept. of Revenue sent 2 “special agents,” Gary May and John Egan to his house.

The two agents threatened the couple with felony charges and asked them to post a $2,500 bond! Why? What did these alleged criminals do?

Mr. and Mrs. Wetzel had the nerve to go to local restaurants, collect the used veggie oil, and make his own biodiesel (gasp) for his car! Since, they did not pay for the gas at a pump, they were paying no taxes. Hence, a bill for about $244.24. Mr. Wetzel agreed to pay it.  Source/Full Story:: Daily Kos: Use Vegetable Oil for Your Car? PAY UP OR ELSE! (with poll)

I’ve also heard that the Amish are doing great business in the salvaged food area.

Rummaging around for some good news in this recession? Try your local thrift store.

At a time when most retailers are begging for customers, second-hand shops are thriving as the laid-off, and those worried they will be, turn to them for less expensive clothes, furniture and household items. But many thrift shops are also running low on merchandise as fewer people are able to donate.

“Resale has historically been a recession-proof industry,” says Adele Meyer of the National Association of Resale and Thrift Shops. “Consumers … are turning to resale as a way of providing for their families while still staying within their budgets.”

February revenue at Goodwill Industries stores was up 7.2% over last year, spokeswoman Lauren Lawson says. The Salvation Army doesn’t have national figures, but its Western district, which includes six states, saw same-store sales for the six months starting Oct. 1 rise 8%, says Dawn Marks, the group’s regional marketing consultant.

“People who wouldn’t normally shop in a thrift store but who’ve lost jobs or had their hours cut back are looking for ways to save,” she says.

People aren’t donating the way they used to, either, she says. Salvation Army donation pickups in California, Arizona, Colorado, Oregon, Washington state and Hawaii for the first eight weeks of 2009 were down nearly 13% from last year. Donations of furniture and major appliances are down the most because fewer people are remodeling or moving.

The quantity and quality of donations has changed at Goodwill. “The two-bag donor is now bringing in one bag,” Lawson says. “The high-end retail donor is bringing in cheaper things.”

Source/Full Story:: USATODAY.com

Each and every family should strive to become a fully functional economic unit in itself. What this family is doing is returning to the practice of becoming producers, and not simply consumers. In good times or bad, this is the best way to go…and you don’t need 40 acres to do it.

When the economy started to squeeze the Wojtowicz family, they gave up vacation cruises, restaurant meals, new clothes and high-tech toys to become 21st-century homesteaders.

Now Patrick Wojtowicz, 36, his wife Melissa, 37, and daughter Gabrielle, 15, raise pigs and chickens for food on 40 acres near Alma, Mich. They’re planning a garden and installing a wood furnace. They disconnected the satellite TV and radio, ditched their dishwasher and a big truck and started buying clothes at resale shops.

“As long as we can keep decreasing our bills, we can keep making less money,” Patrick says. “We’re not saying this is right for everybody, but it’s right for us.”

Hard times are creating economic survivalists such as the Wojtowicz family who are paring expenses by becoming more self-sufficient.

Source/Full Story: USATODAY.com

Our latest shipment of seed arrived yesterday and along with it came a nice letter from the company (which in this case was Fedco) explaining their current state of business affairs.

“…we are setting new records.”

They have experienced a growth rate this year of 42.5%.  Outstanding!

“And this stands on the shoulders of last year’s 20+% growth rate.”

Additionally, they say:

“The economic downturn appears to be affecting behavior to an unprecedented degree.  Interest in self-reliance, local food systems and gardening has never been greater.”

I won’t say that my faith in humanity has been restored as a result, but it is encouraging to see the number of people who are developing a sincere interest in a more self sufficient lifestyle.  I have only one concern…

This turn towards a producer based lifestyle, one that runs contrary to the synthetic, consumer based existence most people know today, must be of a more permanent nature and not simply reactionary, if it is to provide any lasting, long term, multi-generational fruit. 

My intuition tells me however that, should the economy reverse it’s course tomorrow, people would be stumbling all over themselves to resume their gluttonous, consumption based habits, and be relieved to be able to do so…to be so graciously allowed by the System that has brought them to the brink of destruction to be allowed to return to digging their graves, with their teeth.

The economic upheaval that is running amok across the globe is a direct result of disobeying God’s law, plain and simple.  Only the fool cannot see this.

Fiat currency (divers weights and measures) is an abomination according to God’s Law, and because we have allowed this in the land we are not to share in the rewards of obedience, but are subject to the punishments fit for sons of disobedience as detailed in Deuteronomy 28…only the fool cannot see this.

<Note:> If you are looking for a list of survival items, well, the internet is full of lists.  The Big List, over at Survival-Center.com is a compilation of lists from various sources, such as FEMA and the SAS Survival Handbook.  </ Note:>

Here we have a somewhat witty (or is that snooty?) piece from the The Independent, which in turn led to to read the following piece on one of Russia’s first millionaires who gave up his life in business and finance to milk cows and chop wood…3 years ago.

As a result, I am reminded of reading of Barton Biggs and his book, Wealth, War and Wisdom , and wonder how many people of “substance” had seen our hard economic times coming and made preparations for it well in advance, as Biggs recommends.

Hit & Run: The survivalist shopping list

If your blithe assessment of the recession runs to a couple of years of belt-tightening and the sacrifice of your favoured pancetta in favour of bacon bits, Gene Lange has news for you. You’re screwed, and you’re probably going to get trampled to death in the street.

Not Gene, though. Gene’s going to be fine. Gene works at a hedge fund in New York and, made wary by the increasingly erratic behaviour of his colleagues as the credit crunch has worn on, he is battening down the hatches. He’s stacked his basement with canned food, bottled water, and a decent supply of washable nappies for his baby. He’s fixing his car up so it’ll run off-road – presumably, massed ranks of crazed bankrupts will have taken to the motorways – and he’s taking good care of his collection of guns.

Gene’s not saying a rabble of crazy stockbrokers is absolutely definitely going to come round to his house and try to bludgeon him to death with his own wind-up torch so they can get at his baked beans. He’s just saying, “I don’t think it necessarily makes a guy crazy to prepare for the potential worst-case scenario.” That’s why he plans to purchase an inflatable speedboat. Everyone needs an escape plan.

Well, that’s just crazy Americans, right? But over here, the crunch is making people a little bit tense, too. Consider Michelle Fitzsimmons, “a businesswoman from near Cardiff”, who has planted a hazelnut tree in her garden. “They are a low-maintenance, highly productive source of protein that is much cheaper than meat,” she explains, and thus great in a financial squeeze. Fitzsimmons is also considering the purchase of a pig.

Full Story

Source: Happiest peasant: a Russian tycoon: Mark Franchetti – Times Online

AFTER becoming one of post-communist Russia’s first millionaires at the age of 24, German Sterligov lost no time building a financial empire with offices in Wall Street and Mayfair. Now, at 39, he has tired of life in the fast lane.

He has given up the two private planes and the fleet of luxurious cars, the four-storey Moscow mansion and the Manhattan penthouse.

In their place he has acquired a horse and a tractor, and moved his wife and five children into a three-bedroomed wooden house with no electricity or gas on a patchwork of fields surrounded by forbidding forest. Sterligov the international whiz-kid has become a humble peasant.

Until recently he brokered lucrative deals and tended a fortune which, at its peak, stood at hundreds of millions of dollars. Last week he was looking after pigs and sheep.

The family bakes its own bread and instead of champagne, Sterligov and Lena, his wife of 17 years, drink milk from their own cows, and kvas, a brown alcoholic brew made with birch-tree juice.

In summer their small corner of countryside 100 miles south of Moscow is infested with mosquitoes and in winter, when temperatures can drop to
-45C, the house is heated by a wood-burning stove and lit with candles.

Full Story

Technorati Tags: Barton Biggs, German Sterligov

Vegetable Seeds

The headline above and the paragraphs below are from the most recent edition of Fedco’s seed catalog.  As we have been suspecting (and Fedco confirms) seeds prices have risen dramatically.

Oct. 10, 2008: We are in the midst of the deluge now: a financial hurricane the likes of which I never would have imagined. Commodity price fluctuations I have not seen before in my lifetime. Oil, shooting up from $60 to $145 a barrel, then back down in just a few months to $80. Gasoline prices up and down like a yo-yo.

And now, seed prices. I’ve been 30 years in this business and these are the highest increases to us I’ve ever seen. The ethanol boom diverting land to corn production has had a tremendous impact on farm commodity prices including vegetable seeds. Wholesale prices for pea and bean seed are up 30-50%, for corn and squash 20% or more. Even so, wholesalers could not find growers for all crops so several varieties are missing from our catalog. Horrible growing weather this summer has exacerbated the shortage.

With the collateral damage only beginning to ripple out from the broken
financial centers to our communities, this is a hard time to have to raise our prices. We are a lean operation and are doing our best to absorb what we can.

This is exactly what we have been expecting.  Now, that being duly noted, purchasing vegetable seed and growing your own food is still by far a superior, healthier and more cost effective way of providing food for the family than relying on one of your local grocery stores.

Here are some general numbers:

• The average American household allocates approximately 13-14% of it’s income for Food. This is sure to continue to rise, as it has over the past few years.
• In 2006, American families spent 44% of their food budget eating out and the average household spends roughly $5,000 a year on groceries.

Food inflation has been going on all summer, as far as I have noticed, and it’s done not by necessarily raising prices alone, but also by reducing the overall size or portion of the food product itself.  So what happens is that you end up spending more money for even less product.

Put a stop to it now, and start growing your own food, it is imperative that you do so for the future, for the survival of your family.

Technorati Tags: seed prices, famine, food crisis, gardening

It’s interesting that, as time went on, many of the offspring of the people who lived through the depression retained fewer and fewer of the skills and values that would be necessary to successfully cope with difficult economic times.  This is in part due to ignorance, greed, the inability to delay gratification, and most importantly, manipulation by a greedy and corrupt system.

The “System” has developed numerous means by which to separate the individual from their capital.  An excellent treatment of this is an article called “The Gospel of Consumption.”  Understand this!  And do not allow yourself to be milked like some stupid cow.

We will learn these lessons of depression-era living again it seems, but maybe this time, after the dust settles and we count the heads of those remaining, we can retain them and pass them on to future generations so that they will not be so dependent on an increasingly fragile and complex system that is just itching to shear them like sheeple.  Do this for yourself, but more importantly, do it for your children.  Teach it to them, and do so primarily by example….that’s what they will be paying most attention to anyway.

• Avoid debt like the plague it is.
• Make due or do without.  If you cannot afford it then you cannot have it.
• Be happy with what you already have.  It’s called “Thankfulness”
• Be good stewards of the resources you currently possess
• Run your household like a business, because it is a business.

Source: CNN.com

Memories of salvaging and stealing to avoid going hungry are part of the legacy of the Great Depression. Some iReporters say they can’t help but look at the current economy and feel the past holds lessons for the present.

…

Donna LeBlanc of Waxia, Louisiana, says she carries no credit to this day as a result of the frugality and self-reliance instilled in her by her family. Her husband keeps the couple’s credit card and maintains a zero balance.

The Great Depression meant scary times for many households as a period of economic downturn spread throughout the world. Historians trace its start to the “Black Tuesday” stock crash on October 29, 1929, and argue that the resulting global desperation set the stage for World War II.

LeBlanc said her grandparents were fortunate that they didn’t have investments and could grow — or catch — their own food during the Depression years.

Her grandfather Lester was a “Cajun cowboy” often seen wearing a cowboy hat, and her grandmother Ida was a resourceful woman who spent much of the 1930s working as a store clerk. LeBlanc, always told never to keep credit card debt, heard frightful stories from Ida

Full Story…