Sleepycatz

Vote for Coffee

For the seventh election in a row, Pickacup Coffee will be giving out free coffee to anyone who presents their voter’s receipt on Tuesday, February 5th. This isn’t cheap, over-roasted, acidic coffee either, but artisan roasted, organic, fair-trade coffee: the good stuff. On Tuesday, go cast your ballot and stop by for a cup of coffee on us.

American Blackout

This Sunday, 11/18/07, the NorthShore chapter of the Illinois Green Party will be showing Ian Inaba’s film American Blackout at our coffeehouse. The film documents the practices of fraud and voter caging which have occurred in recent elections. There will be a number of Illinois Green candidates attending the showing, as well as people involved in recent suits launched against the Federal Election Commission. We expect an interesting and enlightening discussion following the showing. The film will begin around 4:00 Pm at 1813 Dempster, Evanston, IL. There is, of course, no admission charge — though we’d appreciate it if you bought a cup of coffee or a snack.

Liberty Death

One of the great things about running an independent coffeehouse is the variety of people you meet and the movements you become aware of. A year or so ago, one of our regular customers convinced us to become an exchange point and merchant for Liberty Dollars. The Liberty Dollar is a private currency which is backed by, and minted with, precious metals. Carol and I saw the dollars as a type of local currency and worked to get other local business owners to sign up as merchants. This afternoon our original Liberty Dollar customer came by, somewhat panicked, and took all the literature and promotional materials from our shop. He simply told Carol, something bad had happened. It turns out that federal agents raided Liberty Dollar’s headquarters, in Evansville, IN, this morning and seized all their assets –including gold, silver, and platnium bullion–, its records, and its minting dies. At this point, the Western District of North Carolina U.S. Attorney’s Office, which issued the warrants, has not detailed any specific charges against the Liberty Dollar.

There is nothing inherently illegal with private or local currencies — in fact the United States has a long history of alternative currency models. Private currencies, however, cannot be represented as legal, government backed, tender. This point was always stressed to any of our Liberty Dollar users. Most of our users, however, didn’t care, as they saw the coins — made of silver — as having traditional fungible value. Personally, I have some issues with metallic currency standards, and a number of the folks with Liberty Dollar and I had some heated discussions about the topic. However, I always found the Liberty Dollar people to be very thoughtful, well informed, and committed. So I would be surprised to find that there was any real illegality occurring within Liberty Dollar itself.

It does seem odd that the government would choose this time to act against the Liberty Dollar, and in such a heavy-handed fashion. It may be that some in the government are concerned about the perceived value of the US dollar –presently trading at 1.47€ and $1.02 to the Canadian dollar, a drop of 50% in the past 9 months. If even a small percentage of Americans began to loose confidence in the dollar and began to adopt a commodity based currency, the result could be disastrous: we could easily find ourselves in a period of hyper-inflation and economic depression. Of course, eliminating commodity currencies does not prevent this from happening anyway. If such a downturn would occur it would be the result of the disastrous monetary policies followed for the past seven years, far more then it would be the fault of the Liberty Dollar.