Preparing for a “Black Market” Alternative Economy: Flea Markets, Swap Meets, Community Bartering

by Brian Shilhavy
Editor, Health Impact News

With the world’s economic system currently on a pace for a total collapse, with the Globalists’ stated goal of replacing currency and cash with Central Bank Digital Currencies, it is time to start thinking about an alternative “black market” that operates outside “the system” for those who do not want to become slaves to the Globalist billionaires and bankers.

Civil Eats published an article today about “Buy Nothing” community groups that rely on bartering and shared resources.

Yulia Koudriashova is a single mom and teacher living with her two daughters in San Francisco’s Outer Richmond neighborhood. Her parents moved in with them in March when they were evacuated from Kiev after Russia invaded Ukraine. With Koudriashova’s salary as the household’s only source of income, the family has come to rely on the boxes of food they pick up nearly every week from a neighbor’s garage.

“For my parents, it’s very helpful because they see the support of the members of our community,” Koudriashova said. “They have nothing, they don’t have money, and we are sharing the same budget for five people.”

If Koudriashova can’t make a pickup, which typically takes place on Saturdays, she will likely receive a text message from host Priscilla “Cilla” Lee to make alternative arrangements. For the last 15 months, Lee has hosted a weekly food pantry out of her garage for the community of people she connects with through the online platform Buy Nothing. The neighbors share everything from food to clothing and furniture.

Lee is the administrator for the official Outer Richmond Buy Nothing group, which has more than 700 members on Facebook, and she recently launched an unofficial Buy Nothing sister group that also includes a nearby neighborhood to accommodate residents who wanted to participate. Within a month, it had 350 members, and now it’s close to 500.

Lee envisions her hyperlocal food pantry as a feel-good familial event, where members can meet their neighbors and build community. Members must RSVP to visit the food pantry to ensure Lee has enough food, but she has noticed that spaces are filling up faster these days.

At a time when inflation has skyrocketed across the country, making everything from groceries to clothing and services more expensive, members of the group view the food pantry as a valuable resource that helps feed their families while preventing food from going to waste.

Documentary filmmaker Liesl Clark launched the Buy Nothing Project in 2013 after spending time working in the Himalayas. She was fascinated by how the region’s remote villages operated as cashless economies without much of a retail footprint. “They all take care of each other through a true gift economy model, and so I wanted to see if we could do something similar to that in our own community.”

Back at home on Bainbridge Island, west of Seattle, Clark and friend Rebecca Rockefeller used the Facebook Groups platform to invite friends and friends of friends to their inaugural Buy Nothing group. It was an experiment: Before you buy something at the store, consider asking the group for it first. If you have anything in abundance from your garden or home, offer it here first. And when the giving and receiving starts to feel good, share your gratitude.

Neighbors began sharing odds and ends. Someone asked for—and received—a missing part for their coffee maker. A woman needed a spring for her toilet paper holder; lo and behold, a neighbor had one, and the two met and became close friends. “Those were funny little matches, but then the human matches were happening,” Clark said. “And we were starting to come to know our proximal neighbors and really connecting with them. And the easy part was the food.” (Full article.)

While the “Buy Nothing” movement is based on good principles and ideas that non-compliant members of society need to start thinking about if they don’t want to be slaves to the “New World Order” that the Globalists intend for the masses, I do NOT recommend it for one simple reason: it is dependent on technology, specifically, Facebook Groups.

So if the technology goes down, like the Internet or the power grid, the whole system collapses.

And aside from this simple fact, being dependent on any of the corporate social media sites like Facebook, is to basically give your entire battle strategy over to your enemy and allow them to shut you down at any time they please.

I hope to do another whole article on this topic soon, but the technology is failing, not advancing, and any plans to resist the Globalists and their tyranny have to take into account the coming post-technological society and how to survive WITHOUT the technology.

Technology can be both a wonderful thing, and a terrifying thing, but its lifeblood is electricity, which needs fuel to operate. No fuel, no electricity. No electricity, no technology.

This is such a fundamental, basic fact of life, that it seems to escape almost everyone’s notice, both in the corporate media, as well as the alternative media.

But that is a topic for a future article.

One of the most pressing needs today, is to start planning community micro-economies, independent of technology.

So while the concept behind the “Buy Nothing” movement is sound, its current implementation is not.

Fortunately, most of the technology we use today has only been around for a short time, and there are still remnants in our American culture that can be revived and used to survive the coming post technological crash, and also be an alternative economy to the one the Globalists have in mind.

These are things like local farmer’s markets, flea markets, and swap meets, where bartering can happen where people exchange goods and services.

But to participate in this alternative “black market” economy, you need to have something to barter. This can be tangible items you own or produce, or it can be services you are trained to provide that most others do not have the training for.

Those who know how to fix things and have abundant supplies of spare parts for things, are going to flourish in this kind of economy.

Communication is going to be important, and high traffic areas in your community will probably become communication hubs, as the technology will not be stable enough to ensure digital communication, and even if it is available, our enemies will be monitoring it all.

And just be prepared to have the Globalists declare everything you are doing as “illegal.” We already got a foretaste of this starting in 2020 where “pandemic emergency” measures allowed tyrants to issue edicts that completely ignored the Constitution and rule of law.

So the Second Amendment is going to be very important, and local militias and private security firms will be needed to allow your community “black market” to operate.

Start with your County Sheriff, and make sure he (or she) is on board, and if not, boot him out of office and get one who is.

You may have a difficult time at present to start implementing this as the masses are still sleep walking and will not fully wake up until the grocery store shelves are bare and they experience real hunger for maybe the first time in their lives.

But when that point is reached, there will be riots and chaos in the urban areas. Those in the less affluent urban areas, the “ghettos” and “slums,” will survive because they already know how to survive, and buck the system.

Those in the middle class or affluent areas who never give a second thought about whether or not the goods and services they depend upon each day will be there tomorrow, will have to either learn fast, or go hungry and possibly die.

Many will probably end up in FEMA camps, because they will learn that their “wealth” which only exists as numbers that appear on an electronic device and can only be accessed with a plastic card when the technology is functioning, is useless.

So the time to prepare is NOW!