George Rebane

[This is the submitted form of my March column in The Union.  It appears in today's (12mar2011) printed and online editions of the newspaper.]

Last Friday many of us attended a well-oiled presentation on the concept of ‘community partnership banking.’   This was given in the Nevada City council chambers by Mr David Rose, CEO of Unified Field Corporation.  It seems UFC has developed a business plan to franchise a series of what it calls Unified Field Banks to communities receptive to notions that revolve around sustainability, transparency, nurturing, holistic, and so on.

The basic idea is a community re-investment program for becoming as independent from ‘the grid’ as possible.  Overall it looks like a bootstrap operation with many parts.  It even includes the creation of a local currency or script.  The argument goes that if we establish a local Unified Field Bank, then the franchisor – Mr Rose and team – will teach Nevada County to become a maximally self-sufficient community through making deposits and “investments” in a bank that in turn lends the money to approved and properly “aligned” enterprises, thereby benefitting us all.

The good people of Nevada City Sustainability Vision Team were sold on the concept, and issued a call for the community to pitch in and make it happen.  In the process NCSVT convinced Mr Rose that Nevada City might be just the right spot from where to launch the entire UFC operation.   One little problem remains – $500,000 – the amount Mr Rose and UFC want before they reveal the community partnership banking secrets that they have been perfecting for the past two years.  UFC will keep half for their own operations and promotional activities, and the other half seeds the new Nevada City Unified Field Bank.

In preparation our Vision Team got word out to The Union and the local leftwing media.  The latter immediately posted articles that were favorable, supportive, and uncritical about what UFC was selling.  It was a true kumbayah moment for folks around here who go for anything that looks like it could be holistically nurtured.  Because this bootstrapping operation sounded too good to be true, I decided to look under the hood and concluded there was less there than met the eye.

It became clear to me that Mr Rose was selling expertise and experience UFC didn’t have about an untested concept to hopefully gullible and inexperienced prospects, who then would have to put it into practice in a business environment about which Mr Rose visibly knew very little.  Don’t get me wrong, UFC is not doing anything illegal, immoral, or fattening.  Mr Rose and his team fervently believe in community partnership banking, even more than his appreciative audiences.  It’s just that, despite their faith, they are in no position to credibly deliver value for the half million dollar launch fee they want us to put up.

Moreover, UFC has never operated a bank or has any proprietary intellectual property that is critical to the success of what they propose – even if you were of a mind to believe that applying their nostrums could make Nevada County the Happy Hollow of the Sierra.   I reported these conclusions in ‘Community Partnership Banking – Worm Farm 2?’, my regular KVMR commentary that aired last Friday with the transcript on Rebane’s Ruminations.  My message was that our local Vision Team could do as well without paying Mr Rose.

This opinion caused the local left to go ballistic.  Since they could find nothing to refute the points I raised, they opted directly for the Saul Alinsky Alternative.  They concluded that my use of “Dark Continent” and “South LA” in the commentary was clearly racist, and it was again off to the races attacking the messenger.   Community partnership banking – the issue at hand – was forgotten.

Today that seems to be the left’s constant counter in the national dialogue.  The issues are immediately abandoned, and personal invective is the comeback of choice by progressives at all levels.  After canning a candid Juan Williams, because he voiced a personal and widely held fear about Muslims, we witness NPR’s latest in this week’s dismissal of two of their top executives.  These worthies inadvertently blew the cover off that “balanced” progressive voice with their blanket assessment of all tea party members as “gun toting racists”, never considering the tea party message.

So let’s get back on subject.  Should any jurisdiction in Nevada County involve itself in the $500,000 community partnership banking package offered by Unified Field Corporation?

George Rebane is a retired systems scientist and entrepreneur in Nevada County who regularly expands these and other themes on KVMR, NCTV, and Rebane’s Ruminations (www.georgerebane.com).