PARABLE OF THE TOMATO

AN INSPIRING STORY FOR THE NEWLY JOBLESS or those who THINK they might be any day soon! READ these lines AND YOU WILL HAVE THE SPIRIT to create WEALTH, NO MATTER WHAT COMES! THE LESSON OF THE TOMATO VENDOR!

By Anita Sands Hernandez astrology@earthlink.net

A WICKED STAGFLATION has come to roost in AMERICA. Cereals, Fruit, meat, milk have all DOUBLED IN COST OVERNIGHT. Rents have doubled! A two room apartment in Los Angeles now goes for $2,200.00!! This kind of galloping INFLATION is more than a sign of RECESSION, it shows that we are in an actual DEPRESSION. Economic PARALYSIS has come to our shore! MASSES of families are JOBLESS. The UNEMPLOYMENT figures don’t even begin to show the truth. The reason? American Wars (even against a pitiful, under-supplied, third world, sandal-shod soldier,) are costly. Try9 billion a month, total so far TWO TRILLION DOLLARS drained out of US coffers, last few years, for Bush Cheney Rumsfeld pals who run Halliburton and War Toy corporations, so is it any wonder that the AMERICAN working class (like the proverbial Lobster,) is feeling the water begin to boil.

In 2006, we have huge inflation, skyrocketing food and rent costs, nobody can buy a home as interest rates went higher than the huge prices! A family home in the poorest zone of my city today costs over a half million dollars. There are amazing levels of joblessness, no college educations for anyone, bigtime Illiteracy keeping highschoolers out of college scholarships, which almost don’t exist anyway and keeping 50% of our college grad kids jobless, or how about a quarter of our adult men in PRISONS, how about CEO's exporting manufacturing sector creating joblessness here, -- and now China invented the car! The gilly is the end of Detroit! All costly situations. So --as a society, --we have to regroup. We are forced to make little adaptive nips and tucks to our INNER head trip about money!

Having come from two RECESSION EPOCH parents, I mean, Great Depression era parents….. and two separate sets of Great Depression grandparents,-- may I share Some Great DEPRESSION type stories. Like the old "you kids think you had it bad, why in our day, we walked ten miles to school…"

First, My grampa and grandma in GERMANY had to pay for WWI with some serious INFLATION. In those two decades between WWI and WWII, there was this period where you had to BRING A WHEELBARROW full of marks to get a loaf of bread. The mark had gone to pfennigs in value, inflation was towering. (This happened recently when the world bank squeezed poor BOLIVIA for debt. INFLATION shot to10,000% per year there meaning a kilo of the staff of life there, beans, went from a dollar to ten thousand dollars. That's scary if you're landless, can't grow beans which take a lotta space. Name another food group you can survive on that's cheaper if you live in a landlocked country with no fish or clams. There isn't one. ) My grandma had been raised in Vienna and made cakes out of carob tree fruit as chocolate was too costly. I can imagine how they ate well in Germany during that period when my grandparents were very well employed in the Opera. He conducted, she sang. When Hitler was elected (by the German people), Gramps had books he’d written burned in a bonfire, by the government. He walked away from their house, took a ship to the south of France, never learned to spell holocaust, had a great rural life until 1945 when they moved to New York and that is when they found out what really happened to their kind who'd stayed behind.(!)

MY OTHER grandma and grandpa were in San Luis Obispo California for the Great Depression. Granny's mother REFUGIO Esquer Childs had to open a BOARDINGHOUSE in their home. All the women slept in one bedroom and all the other bedrooms went to male strangers! The girls cooked meals for all, got a little extra that way and were able to keep the big house in the family 'til my GRANNY Elena Childs was of marriage age and met Grandpa Edwin Fraser. She didn't marry until she was 39 years old and then she married Eddie the roomer! His income was more up to the standards of the time so they could stop taking in strangers. Point is, I come from penny stretchers who saw the hardest times of recent history and rolled like rubber balls and let hard times make everything good happen in their lives. Spinsters without hope married smart and funny boarders, emigrants in flight from Hell ended up living in Provence like Kings alongside Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas who made hash brownies. You can't get better than that.

There is a similarly joyous Internet story circulating, also about hard times. It goes like this.

THE WISDOM OF THE TOMATO - A factory worker is suddenly jobless when the factory is exported to Guatemala. He has four sons and four daughters so they're in danger of starving, his wife peels off her last ten spot and says honey, your pants are torn, go get a decent pair of jeans, then go to that big corporation and ask for a job.Instead of buying new jeans, he goes in as he is.

They see his rags and say "the only job we can give you is entry level, 6$ an hr, you can sweep floors. The man is downhearted, drives home. Along the road, he sees a farmer picking a fine crop of tomatoes. "Mr. Farmer, those are the prettiest tomatoes I ever saw. Could I buy a box. This is my last ten dollars. The farmer says, that will get you two boxes." They load the car. "Anytime." The farmer says happily, waving the ten spot.

The jobless man turns around, goes back to the city, sets up on a corner and sells three for a dollar, the two boxes yield roughly 200$. Next day he goes to the farmer gets 40 boxes of tomatoes. He has his son sit on the corner with 2 boxes, takes the other 38 to all the markets he sees, unloads them all. He does this all summer long. Winter comes, he switches to oranges. Spring comes, he switches to strawberries. All year long he sells something. Now his other son turns of age to drive, Dad buys each of them a ten yr old truck, sends him to another nearby city. They now work two cities, twice the markets and corners. They put their boys on the corners, their girls do the bookwork and billing as now they're billing markets for thousands of crates of tomatoes, berries, oranges, everything.

He gets a fleet of new trucks, soon he is the biggest produce wholesaler on the West Coast. One day he and his wife and eight kids are dining in a fine, French café, he in his jeans, but with a French silk shirt, his wife in her Cashmere sweater set and designer linen skirt. He sees BILL GATES at the next table and goes over, saying 'Bill, like many in this world, I owe my fortune to you!" Gates is intrigued. "You like Windows, do you?" "I think my daughter uses it, the man replies, but it's this. Your personnel manager offered me a job sweeping floors so I opened FINE FRESH FOODS, you're eating my tomatoes right now, and so is the entire west coast. Thank you for that."

There is one, last story. I like to tell my yuppie clients "don't buy convenience foods. Save your money. That pckg of frozen corn succotash at WHOLE FOODS is $2.89. Instead, get four ears of corn on sale, when they're 20c, make that succotash dish yourself, with a single dime carrot and home grown limas (peas are not avail. In summer,) now you take the extra 2.39$ and put it into buying CORN SEED to grow a field of corn. Get a free plot from the city. Plant your seed and when it is up, Sell the 400 ears of corn in AUGUST for 50c each and take that 200$ and put it in 99c store stock, which was 30 bucks a share, now with recession it's 12$ per share. SO then when it returns to 30$ which it will, proven value, your 200$ becomes nearly 600$. NOW TAKE that 600 and make a downpayment on a LOT in the countryside, where some farmer is dividing his back pasture. SO THAT PCKG of corn you DID NOT BUY bought you a piece of land which you can sell for 50 thousand one day. Or buy Chinese, Vietnamese or Malaysian oil stocks.

Those stocks will turn into hundreds of thousands. Or if you buy lad, BUILD a farmhouse on it with kids and you pouring foundation and you can sell the cottage there and the land make 150 thousand or if you wait ten years, probably a quarter mil so with very little effort NOT BUYING ONE BAG OF succotash produces enough money to buy a mansion in town or if you're smart, a commercial bldg which you can rent so that you make a million a month from it renting spaces at 100$ a square foot! All from a bag of succotash!

ETHNICS: It is a known statistic that ethnic women can get high paying jobs after college but their men rarely do or do at HALF the rate of the women. A penalty of this is that ethnic women rarely get married! Or if they do, they get punished, abused for their success and cash raising ability. However, it is possible to fund a smart, strong fiancé in a business and pray that he forgives you as Men do not like to take from women. I suggest many easy start-up biz concepts at the LEGACY WEBSITE, like AIR REPAIR, or as above, FARMING even in the ghetto, on a vacant lot. LET THE RECESSION COME! You're ready for it.

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