12.16.08
Posted in Economy, Small Business, Society at 22:17 by lnxwalt
This “Buy Local” Thing « The CitySquares Blog
Local businesses drive our national economy, this is a fact. They’re the oil in the nation’s economic engine. Local business is the best ingredient for any community’s success.
Anyway, to tie it all back together, and where we all seemed to agree last night, is on one simple but very important point – ultimately the consumers need to decide. That is very powerful. It doesn’t matter what political party you belong to, you surely still want the same things for your community, for your children, your family, and for your neighbors – your community. At CitySquares we really believe in this. It’s the mission behind the business. It all begins with the local businesses. Supporting your local and independent businesses is critical for your community’s sustainability.
It has been almost two years since we premiered this blog, talking about SLOBs, small, locally-owned businesses, and the reality that SLOBs are the key to freeing American communities from servitude to LOOACs, large out-of-area corporations.
We’ve already seen large corporations giving their managers huge bonuses, then coming to Washington to beg for handouts. Likewise, we’ve seen the way they play our local governments, getting subsidies paid by SLOBs in the community in order to suck funds out of our communities and send them to their headquarters. The truth is, if we want local jobs, local control, and local benefits, we have to refocus our efforts on building and strengthening local businesses–local farmers, local grocers, local manufacturers, local services, local broadcasters, local Internet service providers–or we face more of these bailouts.
CitySquares is in Massachusetts, actively promoting SLOBs in their own communities, gradually expanding to the whole Northeast and the rest of the country. This video comes from their site.
I’d just like to add “go thou and do likewise”.
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08.11.08
Posted in Political, Society at 05:02 by lnxwalt
The Poverty Business
In recent years, a range of businesses have made financing more readily available to even the riskiest of borrowers. Greater access to credit has put cars, computers, credit cards, and even homes within reach for many more of the working poor. But this remaking of the marketplace for low-income consumers has a dark side: Innovative and zealous firms have lured unsophisticated shoppers by the hundreds of thousands into a thicket of debt from which many never emerge.
Federal Reserve data show that in relative terms, that debt is getting more expensive. In 1989 households earning $30,000 or less a year paid an average annual interest rate on auto loans that was 16.8% higher than what households earning more than $90,000 a year paid. By 2004 the discrepancy had soared to 56.1%. Roughly the same thing happened with mortgage loans: a leap from a 6.4% gap to one of 25.5%. “It’s not only that the poor are paying more; the poor are paying a lot more,” says Sheila C. Bair, chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.
In college classes on finance, we learned that reward follows risk. In one particular class, FIN 432: Financial Institutions and Capital Formation, we discussed in great depth the thrift crisis of the 1980s. One of the primary causes was the removal of the interest caps that limited the amount of interest that banks and other consumer finance institutions could charge and collect. Overnight, rates went up and most of their assets consisted of long-term fixed rate real estate loans.
In today’s economy, one of the chief problems is that those caps are not low enough and any enforcement is long after the fact. It does not take much looking around to realize that there is an imbalance. People, like the woman in the article, are placed at a disadvantage versus lending corporations, who control the contracts to prevent individual consumers from having any legal refuge or remedy. Even the extreme remedy, bankruptcy, has been stripped of some of its restorative power, as some debts may survive bankruptcy.
I call upon Congress and our regulatory agencies to immediately act to contain and restrain the actions of all consumer finance lenders. The next US Attorney General should set a goal of marching fifty financial industry CEOs into courtrooms in orange jumpsuits and leg irons in the first eighteen months of the next administration. Already, many people do not vote because they do not see their voices as being heard. They feel that their votes have no effect on the course of this nation or their day to day lives. But fifty no-bail arrest warrants, complete with heavy TV coverage, will do a lot to restore confidence in our system of governance. I suggest that the fifty CEOs be accompanied by 25 CFOs and 25 regulatory agency heads (or employees, where applicable) who stonewalled action against the misbehavior.
It would be too much to hope for public hangings. If that woman saw the person who arranged her exploitive auto loan hanged, she would begin to have hope that justice will prevail, and so would numerous others who have experienced similar situations. However, we will have to be content with prison sentences for the scumbags getting rich by targeting lower-income people with take-it-or-leave-it financing contracts. This, even though they risk turning us into one of those third world countries where they change leadership as often as we change our underpants.
I also want to take this opportunity to praise the honestly-run, small locally-owned businesses (SLOBs) in your community. There are plenty of scammers, large and small, but the honest SLOBs deserve your business. They deserve your support. They deserve your advocacy. They are the businesses that will hire your nephew, your brother-in-law, and the kid down the street. While the big guys lay off more people than they hire, smaller businesses are the ones that keep the economy going. Shop the local stores, buy the locally-produced products, hire locally-owned companies for your service needs, do at least some of your banking with a locally-owned bank. Celebrate your small, locally-owned businesses (SLOBs), for they are real American heroes.
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06.05.08
Posted in Economy, Society at 02:42 by lnxwalt
PlexNex: Wind Will Power Our Future
According to the report, the DOE expects coastal states to harness 50,000 megawatts of offshore wind in shallow water depths of less than 100 feet. The report notes for some coastal states (like Massachusetts) shallow water offshore wind can provide 100 percent of the electricity supply.
The DOE further states that increasing the use of wind power to supply 20 percent of the nation’s electricity would reduce carbon dioxide emissions (that contribute to climate change) from the electricity generation sector by 25 percent while creating up to a half million new American jobs.
Those of you who read this blog regularly know that I have been harping on the need to act for some time. Being a California resident, I have seen how our state and local leaders are harming our economy by waiting until they are forced to start moving us toward energy independence.
I think of the proposal to build a wind farm in the hills Northeast of Apple Valley. The Town council spoke up against it, fearing that the appearance would keep people from buying homes in the part of the Town nearest that area. We’re talking about a place that has occasionally suffered blackouts because of California’s lack of power capacity. Even the slightest bit of common sense would say that having local generation capacity is a good thing in times of scarcity.
Maybe there is a silver lining in the fuel price increases. If the price increases force our governments and our society (including individuals and families) to seek out alternatives to fossil fuels, then that part, at least, is good.
What we have been doing is unsustainable. Our homes are large, with large expanses of glass, and poorly insulated. We make up for this by turning up the furnace or air conditioner. We live in places that are distant from where we earn our livings, so we spend a lot of time getting to work and back home. Because we are so far from our workplaces, there aren’t many people following exactly the same routes, so we almost have to use private vehicles to commute–sure, we could take the bus or the train, but we’d add an hour or more to our commute time.
We need to change, but not just as individuals. We need change society-wide. We need to have our leaders behind these changes, whether it means public financing or changing regulations and zoning to make sustainable living allowable and in fact preferred. That our state and local governments have ignored this for the past thirty years is tragic. If they continue their present policies, there will be a very painful time when the lights go out and the tanks run dry. At that time, we will all suffer unbearable anguish, although wealthier and better-connected individuals might escape the effects longer or suffer less than their neighbors do.
It’s Time To Change
Sam has found an important editorial in support of these ideas. I am not an East coast resident, and have no opinion as to the desirability of the “Cape Wind” project. However, we can either do something, even if it isn’t a perfect solution, or we can sit on our hindquarters until the lights go out and we are trying to survive a breakdown of society. At the very least, we’ll learn more as we proceed, including whether existing technology is sufficient or we need to develop new technology.
Technorati Tags: alternative energy, economic development
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05.15.08
Posted in FLOSS, News and Announcements, Political, Society at 01:01 by lnxwalt
Standards attorney Andy Updegrove announced the creation of the Hague Declaration recently. The Hague Declaration is a statement of human rights on the Internet. But it is more. Without being overly verbose about it, the Declaration also promotes free software, where “free” is not about the price of the software, but about the freedom that the user of that software gains.
I want to encourage you to visit Mr. Updegrove’s blog to read his statement, and then to go to the site to sign the Hague Declaration. As a follow up, write your elected representatives to encourage them to require government agencies to use vendor-neutral, open standard file formats, such as ODF.
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12.16.07
Posted in Political, Society at 05:00 by lnxwalt
The San Francisco Chronicle scores again with its revelation of the cause of the whole mortgage mess: misconduct within financial companies.
Over and over, the commentators keep telling us that it is the fault of the buyers, and that the lenders were totally innocent, tricked by those deceitful borrowers. The problem with that is that we know it isn’t true. For nearly a decade, we have been treated to story after story about financial companies’ complicity in misconduct that harms consumers. From the homeowners who got left holding the bag when their insurance companies refused to cover their damages from Hurricane Katrina, to the individual stockholders who lost out when mutual fund managers got preferred access to trading, to the consumer finance agencies that got caught trying to squeeze people after bankruptcy discharged their debts, to the people whose identities have been stolen but their banks do little to protect them, the financial industry as a whole has made a practice of preying upon individuals and families.
In my opinion, a test of how much the next administration’s Attorney General is doing his job is how many CEOs of the top 1,000 publicly-traded companies (plus the top 100 financial companies, public or private) are led past television cameras in shackles and orange jumpsuits the first two years. If it is less than 10%, we have to wonder just how well the person is doing his/her job.
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12.06.07
Posted in Political, Society at 06:24 by lnxwalt
At first, high speed rail (HSR) was just an idea promoted by dreamers and idealists. Then the Japanese actually built high speed passenger rail lines. Magnetic levitation (maglev) passenger rail was a techno-fantasy, until the Europeans and Chinese developed reliable, high speed maglev systems. The question is, why haven’t we done anything like this in this country?
Popular Mechanics has a vision piece that can help us see where we should be heading. Their maglev article is light on the technical and economic details, and completely ignores the social and political transformation that will be required in order to establish maglev and high speed rail as important components of our national transportation infrastructure. Even so, I recommend that we read the article and that we seriously consider its points.
Living where I live, I fairly often see traffic backups on the main Los Angeles to Las Vegas route, I-15. On some Fridays, traffic heading Northeast backs up all the way to the junction of the 210 and 605 freeways. On some Sundays, traffic heading back toward the Los Angeles area will be backed up all the way into Victorville. Why? Because the leaders of California and Nevada have not yet decided that it is worthwhile to invest taxpayer funding in eliminating that traffic congestion.
Driving around Southern California, I get to see traffic tie-ups along the 15, the 215, the 210, the 605, the 10, the 5, and the 805 (all of which are Interstates, so should be I-15 and so on), along with the 91, the 57, and the 60 (all of which are state highways, so should be CA-91 and so on), the 395 (which is or was a US highway, so should be US-395), and (to a lesser degree) a host of surface streets and highways. For the local traffic, neither HSR nor maglev offer the convenience and flexibility that commuters require. But for longer-range commuting, such as traveling from Southern California to Las Vegas for a weekend, or traveling from Rancho Cucamonga to Anaheim as a daily trek, a well-run rail system is the future.
All we are waiting for now is for our political leaders to have the nerve to declare that this is a priority, including a funding priority. We’ll grumble for five years or so of taxes, but once we get to cut our daily commuting time by half, and the occasional fun trip’s commute time by two-thirds or more, suddenly those very politicians will be heroes.
Infrastructure investments that Southern California Must Make Now.
This is part of a series of articles meant to highlight the fact that our present course is unsustainable. The primary issue in this article is commuting time, which is unbearably long. In a recent workplace, I was staying just twenty miles away, but it took over an hour to get to work. Fifteen to twenty miles, by the way, is about how fast a reasonably fit person can travel on a bicycle in one hour. My present workplace is about six miles away from where I’m staying, and it took me about fifteen minutes from driveway to driveway this morning.
For those who maintain that maglev and HSR are not practical, we can see that they certainly are practical just by looking at the examples of Europe and Japan. Yahoo recently linked both of these articles and this search from their front page, part of a special focus on maglev trains and HSR.
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Tags: infrastructure, transportation, mass transit, political
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