March 16, 2009

Why I'm Planting A Garden by Shirley Braverman

 

March 15, 2009

A wonderful lady named Shirley contacted me the other day because she had been to my Surviving the Middle Class Crash website, and wanted to share what she is doing to help in the coming economic depression that we are facing. What she shares comes from 77 years of experience.

She has experienced as a child, what we are about to go through, and we need to listen carefully to what she has to say to make it through the hard times ahead. So, please read the following, and take her advice to heart. We need her, and more people like her to help us in this time of great economic hardship.

Why I'm Planting A Garden

By Shirley Braverman

In 1947, two years after world war II ended there were 20 million small gardens in the United States. They provided 40% of the produce in the American Diet. The gardens started during the depression. During the war, they were called "Victory Gardens." Even the first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, had a garden.

I grew up in a garden; we grew tomatoes and zucchini. By age seven, I knew how to remove the suckers from the tomato vines, how to pull weeds and how to pinch off the multiple yellow blossoms. Blossoms had to be 4 inches from each other to get the largest fruits. 

The people in Kirkwood, Missouri liked large tomatoes and zucchinis. When the depression started in 1929, the city fathers' got together and declared that "No one in Kirkwood would go hungry." They organized the town and, "though," as my grandfather said, "the whole damn town of 18, 000 didn't have $500 between them," no one went hungry.

Next door to me was the lettuce lady. In her flowerpots, she grew all the lettuces, spinach, chards and greens. She used flowerpots to keep the snails and caterpillars off her plants. When we wanted to make sandwiches or a salad, my mother would send me off with a scissors to Mrs. Ball's house and I would carefully snip off the outer leaves and bring them home to wash and put on the sandwich or in the salad. The shortest food chain in the world. I never saw lettuce in a ball 'till I was a teenager and a supermarket came to town. What's more, Mrs. Ball just loved my tomatoes and zucchini. I was so proud when I took them to her. They were my greatest accomplishments in my young life. Across the street was the onion lady. She grew every onion, chive, shallot and garlic known to mankind at the time. She sprouted them in her basement and people picked them up for their own gardens in the spring. Grandpa Van raised chickens and rabbits and had fruit trees - apples, apricots and a cherry tree that was in the back of the chicken yard. Every time a cherry fell off the tree, the chickens would race over to eat it. Gustof Franks had the two cows and we traded him eggs for milk and butter.

 

No one threw anything away. Table scraps and other uneaten food would go in the "slop" bucket. Neighbors came by and threw them to the chickens while they picked up a few eggs. The tops of carrots and lettuce scraps and greens went to the rabbits.

There was a trading system. A basket of apples could be traded for a skinned rabbit or a basket of grapes or apricots. An apple pie could be traded for milk or eggs. Another man grew corn. He had about 10 rows and he cracked some for my grandfather to feed to the chickens. He also gave it to the women who headed the canning committee. For his fresh corn, he could get canned peaches, applesauce, canned corn, potatoes or apricot syrup. Oh yes, we had potato people. They had raised beds and raised potatoes better than any I've ever tasted in my life. And there were peas, beans, and herbs. Everyone grew something, raised something and traded something. My other grandfather, although a natural stone quarryman, also kept beehives. A pint of honey went a long way in trade, as did a full honeycomb. Once every two months our butcher would take some meat or fish:  pig, calf, chickens or rabbits into Saint Louis and trade for salt, flour, coffee, paraffin and soap. 

 

And then there was hunting. The men went hunting on Saturday and whatever they shot, quail, rabbits, possum or deer, was eaten on Sunday. There was also the Merrimac and Mississippi river to fish in. Catfish, Sunfish, and Perch. They could be traded for canned fruits, vegetables, eggs, you name it.  

 

I don't think I ate an orange till I was almost twelve, after the war, and I marveled at this miraculous fruit, and then I was even more astounded with bananas. I was so used to this culture that after the war when I heard that the Greeks and the Russians and the Chinese were starving, I wondered, innocently why they didn't plant gardens. Even today, when I hear that one in 8 children goes to school hungry, when I hear pleas for food donations for the poor, I wonder why we don't have community gardens. Instead of talking on phones or watching TV or playing video games, couldn't the children use their energy to weed the garden and harvest the food?

So, plant a garden and tell your neighbor to plant a garden and share. Mobile Home Parks and Apartment Complexes could create community gardens. Why waste the gas to have your tomatoes shipped in from California or Mexico when they can be grown just as easily in your backyard and taste much better picked off the vine.

They say dark days lie ahead for the economy. But, whatever happens, we don't have to go hungry. We can feed ourselves. Come on my Beloved Country, let's get organized. Let's start digging. Let's do something economically beneficial, wonderful, brilliant and powerful. Let's all plant gardens. 

Shirley Braverman

 

About the author: 

Shirley is 77 years young, and was a nurse for 25 years. She used to write health articles until the editors just wanted her to rave about whatever their advertisers were hawking at the time. She watches for the newly developing diseases and watches in fear as TB and MERSA spread like wildfire and no one pays attention. She saw Morgellon's a while ago and it scared her. She has 8 grandkids and worries about them. She is starting gardening projects to help. This is her first community article to go in the mobile home parks newsletters.

Check out "A Statement From Congressman King on Tuesday’s Special Order." on FairTax Nation

 
Check out "A Statement From Congressman King on Tuesday's Special Order." on FairTax Nation, to be on CSPAN at 6PM

To view this Blog Post, visit:
http://fairtaxnation.ning.com/profiles/blog/show?id=2636007%3ABlogPost%3A33684

Banking and the Federal Reserve

The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and The New World Order

- By William Blase

For those who may be confused by the controversies surrounding the "New World Order", a One-World-Government, and American concern over giving the UN more power; those unaware of the issues involved; and those wishing more background, I offer the following. ...

 

...The Bank of the United States (1816-36), an early attempt at an American central bank, was abolished by President Andrew Jackson, who believed that it threatened the nation. He wrote: "The bold effort the present bank had made to control the government, the distress it had wantonly produced...are but premonitions of the fate that awaits the American people should they be deluded into a perpetuation of this institution or the establishment of another like it."

Thomas Jefferson wrote: "The Central Bank is an institution of the most deadly hostility existing against the principles and form of our Constitution...if the American people allow private banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered."

Does that not describe the situation in America today?

The U.S. managed to do without a central bank until early in this century, when, according to Congressman Charles Lindbergh, Sr., "The Money Trust caused the 1907 panic, and thereby forced Congress to create a National Monetary Commission." Headed by Senator Nelson Aldrich, father-in-law of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., the Commission recommended creation of a central bank.

Though unconstitutional, as only "The Congress shall have Power...To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof..." (Article I, Section 8, U.S. Constitution) the Federal Reserve Act was passed in December 1913; ostensibly to stabilize the economy and prevent further panics, but as Lindberg warned Congress: "This act establishes the most gigantic trust on earth...the invisible government by the money power, proven to exist by the Money Trust investigation, will be legalized." The Great Depression and numerous recessions later, it is obvious the Federal Reserve produces inflation and federal debt whenever it desires, but not stability.

Congressman Louis McFadden, House Committee on Banking and Currency Chairman (1920-31), stated: "When the Federal Reserve Act was passed, the people of these United States did not perceive that a world banking system was being set up here. A super-state controlled by international bankers and industrialists...acting together to enslave the world...Every effort has been made by the Fed to conceal its powers but the truth is--the Fed has usurped the government."

Although called "Federal," the Federal Reserve system is privately owned by member banks, makes its own policies, and is not subject to oversight by Congress or the President. As the overseer and supplier of reserves, the Fed gave banks access to public funds, which enhanced their lending capacity.

Peter Kershaw, in "Economic Solutions" lists the ten major shareholders of the Federal Reserve Bank System as: Rothschild: London and Berlin; Lazard Bros: Paris; Israel Seiff: Italy; Kuhn- Loeb Company: Germany; Warburg: Hamburg and Amsterdam; Lehman Bros: New York; Goldman and Sachs: New York; Rockefeller: New York. (That most, if not all of these families just happen to be Jewish, you may judge the significance of yourself). The balance of stock is owned by major commercial member banks.

According to Devvy Kidd, "Why A Bankrupt America?" The Federal Reserve pays the Bureau of Engraving & Printing approximately $23 for each 1,000 notes printed. 10,000 $100 notes (one million dollars) would thus cost the Federal Reserve $230. They then secure a pledge of collateral equal to the face value from the U.S. government. The collateral is our land, labor, and assets... collected by their agents, the IRS. By authorizing the Fed to regulate and create money (and thus inflation), Congress gave private banks power to create profits at will.

As Lindberg put it: "The new law will create inflation whenever the trusts want inflation...they can unload the stocks on the people at high prices during the excitement and then bring on a panic and buy them back at low prices...the day of reckoning is only a few years removed." That day came in 1929, with the Stock Market crash and Great Depression.

One of the most important powers given to the Fed was the right to buy and sell government securities, and provide loans to member banks so they might also purchase them. This provided another built-in mechanism for profit to the banks, if government debt was increased. All that was needed was a method to pay off the debt. This was accomplished through the passage of the income tax in 1913.

A national income tax was declared unconstitutional in 1895 by the Supreme Court, so a constitutional amendment was proposed in Congress by none other than ...Senator Nelson Aldrich. As presented to the American people it seemed reasonable enough: income tax on only one percent of income under $20,000, with the assurance that it would never increase.

Since it was graduated, the tax would "soak the rich", ...but the rich had other plans, already devising a method of protecting wealth. As described by Gary Allen in his 1976 book "The Rockefeller File," "By the time the (16th) Amendment had been approved by the states, the Rockefeller Foundation was in full operation...about the same time that Judge Kenesaw Landis was ordering the breakup of the Standard Oil monopoly...John D...not only avoided taxes by creating four great tax-exempt foundations; he used them as repositories for his 'divested' interests...made his assets non-taxable so that they might be passed down through generations without...estate and gift taxes...Each year the Rockefellers can dump up to half their incomes into their pet foundations and deduct the "donations" from their income tax."

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