Gee, Scott, I signed on to this list after LL had copied that message of mine from SANET - and great perseverance brought me to find your message at the end of that toilet roll of digest material!! :-) Hope I haven't missed response from others.
Dennis this is the same dilemma that German farmers found themselves in Germany back in the 1830's which led to the formation of Financial Co-ops which evolved into what we know today as Credit Unions We chose this model when we founded the Permaculture Credit Union.
I also visited a unique banking system in Thailand which was a Farmer's rice bank, in which all the Farmers of a region place a certain percentage of their annual crop into the co-op, where it is stored and can be used by other farmers who have had a bad year as a loan. Basically both of these systems are user owned and because of their structure there is little to no incentive for usury.
I think that this is a great subject and is often neglected in pc conversations - this is the invisible part that is so critical to the sucess of the visible.
Scott Pittman
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