Lets create some jobs.

How do we create jobs? An olde fashion tax break for small buisness should do it.

I heard this in Obama's state of the union speech. I heard this in every campaign where the economy was front and center. We have heard this for a long time. Cutting taxes for small buisnesses helps the economy and creates jobs, and for all I know that is true but I don't know.

What I am thinking is what about making the playing field between the small and big companies level. Here is what I mean.

"...fast food chains have accepted hundreds of millions of dollars in government subsides for "training" their workers...chains have for years claimed tax credits of up to $2,400 for each new low-income worker they hired...new jobs were part time, provided little training, and no benifits...Fast food restaurants had to employ a worker for only four hundred hours to recieve federal money - and then could get more money as soon as that worker quit" or was fired "and replaced." It is worth noting that if you assumed a 40 hour work week that person only had to work 10 weeks, a little more then 2 months. That is a lot of money we the tax payers shell out every time a fast food employee is hired, and with the very high turnover rate in the fast food industry that becomes a lot of money very fast. If that kind of money was put in to subsidy programs for small businesses you might see fewer national fast food chains littering every exit on the interstate and a few more locally owned diners and rest areas.

Here is another one.



Did anyone ever see the movie Wal Mart The High Cost of Low Prices. There is a scene in there where this owner of a local ACE hardware talks about Wal Mart was given tons of subsidies to build and expand the plot of land they wanted to put their store on. To keep up the owners expanded their store to offer more to the community and not only did they not get any help with construction costs but also got hit with fees and other infrastructure upgrade costs that Wal Mart never had to deal with.

What I am saying here is that if small business is so important to the growth of our economy then why does our government hand out tons of subsides and tax breaks and tax loop holes to the biggest companies. Small businesses already have a hard time competing against the giants of industry, toss on some unfair subsides and you have a struggle that small businesses will be hard pressed to make it through.

Eric Schlossen, Fast Food Nation, Houghton Mifflin Company, New York NY, 2001 Pg. 72


Get rich quick!!!

A guy that I work with has been talking about this latest opportunity he heard of to start up at home business. I had been listening to him talk about it and I was interested since I am also interested in finding another income to help with the battle. So I was talking with him about it and he gave me a CD to listen to that doesn't explain a thing but makes it all seem so easy.

However, in course of talking with him I asked several times if it was like AMWAY. He would get kind of defensive and swear that it is nothing like that. So I though, cool, cause AMWAY doesn't work I don't know anyone that ever made better then they put in to it. Not to mention AMWAY is only not a pyramid scheme because there is actually something to sell.

This new thing my coworker was talking about is called Team National.

This is a pyramid scheme, at least the way they are presenting it.

Basically it is a group much like Sam's club where being a member gets you discounts on all sorts of crap that you buy every day. Unlike Sam's Club, however, Team National sells them selves to people as a way to make a second income or totally replace your current income. How do you do this? By selling memberships!!! The more people you get underneath you the more you make until you are getting checks every week and the money keeps building up and getting better.

Sounds great doesn't it!

What happens if you can't find anyone to join through you? What happens when the "savings" from being in the membership. What happens if things aren't the same for all and only a few ever reach the top?

It is kind of interesting to notice that the CD I listened to never once talked about how much membership costs. How much you can make on every membership sale. All the things you would need to know to know what you were getting in to.

About the time the CD reminded me that I am not selling memberships, but sharing an opportunity with my friends I knew it was crap. Even more that the majority of what I was hearing was just testimonials from the few people that had made it to the top level.

Why do people keep going for these things. The only people making out from these things are the guys at the top. If you don't know the guy at the top and didn't know him back when things started you are not going to make it, or at least are not likely to make it. Not to mention every person that falls in to these things gets stuck. These things prey on our hopes for a better life and most fall victim to huge personal losses trying to make their hopes happen.

I wish my friend from work the best and hope he is successful but I do not believe things will work out. I also can not be part to anything that uses others hopes and dreams for a better life against them to feel my hopes and dreams.

Rethinking the thoughts I thought before, Community Gardens

This one time on tv I saw this really interesting special being presented by the Sierra Club that was about the struggle to have garden spaces in urban cities. Most of the show focused on a few community gardens in New York City, and the fight the local community was wagging to keep their garden.

In a way I think this program, the community gardens, is a big step towards a better country.

The recent news stories about American Politics makes me think the country is becoming even more self centered and greedy. Health care reform is all but dead, and at best was weak to begin with. Edward Kennedy's seat in the Senate went to a Republican. The Tea Party movement national convention. This rise of new neo-cons, the neo-neo-cons.

Where I am going with this.....simple.

We are losing our sense of community as we all fight and scratch our way to getting ours. The statement, "It is a dog eat dog world." is very appropriate for our society right now. The community garden is an amazing simple, effective, and other wise beneficial solution to this greater crisis that is beseeching our society.

In the tv show I mentioned, the communities where the city wanted to tear down a community garden to make way for developers, the members of the community stood arms locked together in front of their gardens to protect them. This symbol of togetherness brought a community together, gave them fresh produce, increased the property values in the neighborhood, and got everyone to thinking about everyone else a little bit. We need a little more of this.

In interviews with members of the community they talked about how the gardens were so plentiful that not all the produce could be consumed by the community members and they actually had to give away large amounts of produce to local shelters or watch the food rot on the ground.

I have thought so many times about how starting community garden programs could do so much good. It still amazes me that this idea does not catch on in more places. Plant some broccoli. Plant some spinach. Plant some zucchini. Plant some tomatoes. Plant some squash. Plant some green beans. Talk to your neighbors about it. Save a little space for them the grow something they are interested in. Then watch as you all get closer, grow as a community with your plants, and celebrate the harvest of good friends and fresh foods.

Just something to think about.

It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine

I would like to start off by giving a shout out to The History Channel.

Thanks. You turned my parents to in nut cases totally obsessed with the coming rapture. Somewhere between "Life After People", "Nostradamus", "Mega Disasters", and "Signs of the Apocalypse" you got my parents hook line and sinker that the end is near.

I get that the ratings are probably pretty good for those shows and that they are easy and cheap to make. (All you need is an "expert" that will talk on camera about the science behind a theoretical event and BAM!! you got a show.) However, why do you have to put so much of that on. It's not even history, it hasn't happened yet and may not happen either. What about a useful show like the history of labor unions, or the history of the American banking system. Any thing that doesn't end with the narrator saying, "It's not a question of if but when it will happen."

Anyway

This Sunday in my small town the fever of doom has gotten so bad that an international group based in Brittan did a presentation at the township hall all about what will, I repeat WILL, happen when, I repeat WHEN, the worlds oil runs out, climate change destroys everything, or just a plain olde great depression. (I live in a town of about 600 people, nearest actual city is about a half hour drive, and yet they came to our rural community with their songs of doom and preparation.)

I say doom because they are resigned to this fate. Nothing in the literature they handed out says anything about prevention or saving our society. Everything they have to say is about how to live in a world without gasoline, a monetary system, ect...

I also heard that shockingly similar is peoples reaction to the movie, Avatar. I have not seen this movie yet although I am planning for next weekend, but I have heard that people are leaving the movie feeling depressed and suicidal because the movie shows this Utopian world and people leave realizing how shitty their lives are and how they will never see anything like that they think about killing them selves. If you life is that meaningless that 3 hours in a movie theater does that to you maybe it is time to make a change, but not kill yourself.

Why is it everyone is so willing to resign to a doom and gloom fate when there is so much we can do to make things better. Several leading scientists have said time after time that we have the ability to prevent these things from happening. We know how to prevent climate change, we have the technology to shift from an oil economy to a diversified energy economy, we can even fix our global economic systems to prevent global economic collapse.

The only real question is will we.

Can we find the will to change the way we do things. Can we stop urban sprawl and the daily 60 mile commute. Can we seriously shift eating habits to less processed foods and less meat.
Can we cut fossil fuel consumption and replace it with a combination of wind, solar, geothermal, hydro, and biofuel. Can we stop destroying virgin habitat for the sake of industry. Can we make recycling a national obsession.

Al Gore said, "We know and have everything we need to prevent this from happening but political will. But, in America political will is a renewable resource."

Biodiversity the new Global Warming

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8449506.stm

There is a really good story on the BBC about the lost biodiversity over the past decade.

Did you know that there was a conference on it in 2002 where goals were set to protect undeveloped land and thusly the habitat needed to support greater biodiversity. In the article from the BBC it is clear that the goals, which were set for the year 2010, will not be met.

The issue of biodiversity effects us all and in many ways effects us all to a greater extent then global warming. Here is a short compare and contrast on the issues of global warming vs. lost biodiversity.

Global warming is still consider as a controversial science in the main stream, at least in America.

The losses of biodiversity is well established and measurable.

There are many people that do not believe humans are a direct contributor to global warming.

It is an accepted fact that the massive increase in the rate of species extinction has as a cause the massive losses of natural habitat due to land development projects. (The loss of coral reefs due to bleaching and increased water temperatures caused by global warming is also a factor.)

The threats of global warming have a direct and dire set of consequences to humanity. I.E. rising ocean levels, sever droughts, sever floods, sever storms, and lost supplies of drinking water.

The threats of lost biodiversity are harder to understand and less scary to contemplate. I.E. If some species you never heard of goes extinct will you notice?

In some ways you could argue that the solutions to both global warming and protecting our planet's biodiversity are interlinked. After all, both the global warming camp and the biodiversity camp argue for protecting the world's rainforest's, swamps, and other natural habitats.

The one part of the biodiversity picture recently in the news, although not in the US national news that I have seen. Is the current back and forth legal preceding over shutting down some section of locks in Chicago. The fear is that the locks are the only block between some invasive species of fish and the natural fish species of Lake Michigan. Every state in the United States that touches on one of the great lakes, except Illinois, is in support of closing the waterway that links the infected rivers to the great lakes. In many similar cases the trouble of invasive species is as much a problem as the human action of deforestation. Invasive species being very difficult to clear out, makes it a very dangerous problem.

Invasive species are foreign species not common to an area that typically crowd out the indigenous species of that area. The invasive species thrives on an area where it's common predators are absent making its population explode. (Like that episode of the Simpson's where Bart goes to Australia to be kicked in the ass and sets his pet frog lose, then at the end of that episode all the frogs are eating all the crops in that country.)

Given the serious nature of both global warming and biodiversity I would think linking these too global problems together and tackling both of them at once would be a much better way to solve the problem. Both groups want to prevent the destruction of natural habitat and find a more sustainable way of life, it would be a marriage made in heaven for both groups.

One thing I personally think the United States should do on this issue is to get serious about fighting the urban sprawl epidemic. So many of our great metropolitan areas are letting their cores rot while the wealthy and businesses keep building up all the outlying land. A strong reinvestment in the decaying infrastructure of America's great cities would bring business and people back to a city center making each city stronger. It would also make public transportation more effective getting more cars off the roads and saving more on emissions. It would save on energy, large amounts to electricity never make it because efficiency problems cause large amounts of energy to be lost just getting somewhere, a more compact city would have a smaller electrical gird that would be more efficient if designed correctly. It would make our country stronger.

So lets bind the issues of global warming and protecting Earth's biodiversity, and lets get serious about sustainable living.

It's the new year, lets be ignorantly optimistic

It is the new year and already, the solutions to our problems are well in hand. (Buuuuulllllllll Sssssshit, excuse me my allergies must me acting up.)

I live about20 miles west of Kalamazoo MI. The big news that is going to solve all our problems. The jobs are coming.

I will believe this when I see it.

Supposedly there are a bunch of jobs on tap to be created in 2010 in the Kalamazoo area, which would be great if it was true. However we have heard this before. If anyone from the Kalamazoo area reads this do you remember back in the fall of 2008 when the governor came around and it sounded like the area was going to become a hub for life sciences research and production. Here is a list of some of the notables if you forgot.....

MPI, 3000 jobs in Mattawan for animal lab testing
MPI, 300 to 500 jobs in Kalamazoo doing, it had something to do with a contract with Pfizer
Parker (I think) they hired like 120 people in Kalamazoo, actually happened
Fabri-Kal, 200 jobs the same ones they are talking about right now
Perrigo, I think it was like 300 jobs in Allegan to handle their expansion of sales of over the counter generics, they make the Wal-Mart brand for several things, along with Kroger, Meijer and others.

There were others job announcements at the same time in the fall of 2008. It was just a big deal that they put up billboards touting the fact that four thousand some odd jobs had been created. The reality is that the plans for them had been announced.

Then.......

The economy collapsed and none of it happened, although I remember seeing lines for people that were applying for those 120 jobs that I think were Parker but I can't remember what the name of that company was for sure. I do remember it was in the middle of downtown.

Not only did most of it not happen, but MPI wound up laying lots of people off and getting others to take early retirement packages. Perrigo laid off all the workers on temp contracts through other firms. As for all the other jobs, well no one really said anything about it after the announcements but you would think that if someone was still hiring 200 people it would of had some kind of measurable effect on the unemployment numbers.

So now we are recounting some of those jobs as new jobs for 2010 even though they were supposed to be here already and the bulk of them, the 3000 MPI jobs, still aren't being filled. We are counting the chickens before they hatch on this one because any sense of optimism, even when it is ignorant to the facts of the situation, is enough right now.

The real stupid thing about this, which I happen to know a lot about because I know someone that works for the city of Mattawan, not spelling the name of that city right, is that those 3000 jobs are dependent on expanding an over pass and off ramp on I-94. The over pass is one lane each way and it is busy. There is a big truck stop and weight station there. There is a trailer park there. There is a big Go Kart and putt putt golf area there. Not to mention it is the only off ramp for that entire town, including the hundreds, if not thousands that already work for MPI at that location.

Instead of getting money from the economic stimulus to rebuild that over pass, they spent stimulus money to resurface the curb further up the freeway. Why not invest in a public works project that is needed to help a company and a town create thousands of new jobs, instead of resurfacing the freeway. Even better is that the area where the resurfacing took place was the same location where, just the year before, they had expanded the freeway to three lanes.

This ignorant optimism is going to ruin us, because we are not looking at things in a rational manner. I could go on forever about it but know this, The Status Quo Does Not Work when it comes too health care, education, the environment, and especially science. (I know there is no real answer to this but ask yourself how much money and talent left the United States to do stem cell research in other countries. Fuel cell research? Cancer research?)

No one ever won a fashion show with last years shoes and no country ever maintained economic strength on outdated technology!

Lets be rationally optimistic and rebuild and modernize America's infrastructure. Flood our research universities with the money, tools, and innovation friendly laws that will put us back in the top spot of scientific and technical innovation. Create a universal health care system that takes the burden of health insurance premiums off the backs of American Companies and the American people, almost all industrialized countries besides the US have universal health care. Regulate the damn banks, its our money they are playing with and they should be held accountable for it at all times.