Results tagged “capitalism” from Green Mesh

No one wants to touch the sacred "free market" concept that is no longer free in the face of a world controlled by aging monopolies.

Corporations like profit and consumers like cheap goods. We are all locked in step pending a tipping point.

There was worry about "Made in America" stipulations built into the new stimulus package. It was said that it would touch off "trade wars". How can we have a trade war if we make nothing. When was the last time other than food, that you saw "Made in U.S.A." on anything you purchased.

The current stimulus package is just continuing the cycle of large corporations borrowing wealth from the future of taxpayers. If anything, it's consolidating the banks and corporations into BIGGER ones that will need BIGGER stimulus as they hold us hostage with fear of failure.

It all has a feeling of paying off Frankie more every month so he doesn't come into your Deli on Avenue Q in Brooklyn to break your knuckles after he has already broken your nose.

What will have to happen as the course continues is that the standard of living in the U.S. will have to erode to a point where salaries can compete with China and then the transportation costs will exceed the benefit. That process hardly makes an economy grow.

So we borrow from our future and we continue to accept white collar crime that continues without meaningful prosecution. There is no deterrent in a society where capitalizing yourself is above all else. The stock market is proof that people don't trust investing in such a system.

Maybe it's time to look the depression in the eye, reset the free market, and hope the next generation of American business leaders born from poverty can rule the world with a sustainable moral order.

During the Great Depression, the Miles Bank in Delta, Pennsylvania collapsed and closed. People lost their jobs. Times were lean. The bank had been in existence since 1890.

The building again saw jobs and prosperity as an early "tech center".

Operators working for The Delta Telephone Exchange and later under the York Telephone and Telegraph Company were busy switching calls for the thriving quarry industry in the area.

Delta was famous for it's decorative green marble and hard slate that lasted on roofs for a century.

Manually placed calls and people pushing jacks into a control board gave way to the rotary dial and eventually the push button phone with computerized central switching. Jobs were lost and an industry changed.

The inventive minds that created technology that gave new life to the building also took it away.

Today, ReConnect, a cafe', gallery & spa, calls the building home. It's a place where locals and curious visitors can experience an independent Main Street eatery with healthy food and good conversation for the same price as a burger combo at a chain store.

The old bank building tells an ongoing story of transition between success, devastation and rebirth.

Businesses like ReConnect hold a key to rebuilding the U.S. economy.

Small Main Street businesses, with faces that you can see in your community that you can make a judgment to trust or not to trust; giving you a service you can see, invest in, nurture, care about and watch your money work in your community.

The consumer is given the opportunity to endorse a Main Street business based on first hand knowledge of their practices and not be held hostage by a huge monopoly that fixes prices and then needs taxpayer bailout money because it has become so large it's failure will doom our existence.

Globalism, monopolies and people without morals grabbing money will always be part of a free market landscape and so will consumers with the potential to change that landscape with the choices they make.

ReConnect is on my short list for a motorcycle ride through the rolling farmland of southern York County.

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America didn't become the greatest nation on earth by spreading the wealth, we became the greatest nation on earth by creating new wealth. (McCain at last night's debate.)

This is a key phrase motivating both campaigns and the undercurrent of voter despair.

Before globalization, creating new wealth meant capitalization resulting in more domestic jobs. Today that end more often means "spreading" wealth and power to China, and other developing nations with cheap labor pools and sending our energy dollars to oil producing nations in a global oil market.

It is no longer a simple formula of trickle down economics. It's more rolling pin economics where the roller pin has an oval shape and the dough is spread thin where it is least profitable.

That is the reality of global free trade and the dough in the United States is getting thinner. As some of the bakers get stronger and beat away the other bakers, a few fat bakers roll all the dough.

However, the free market in the United States has always been balanced with a democracy that once the majority believes it is no longer prospering, moves to conserve it's resources.

The old-school conservative thinking that motivated my grandparents to save rolls of string and hoard things in their basement long after the depression was over is different from modern conservative thought.

My "conservative" grandparents would have been repulsed at people who drive huge SUV's and demand drilling when the future of oil is a one way downward spiral. My grandfather would be in the garage retrofitting a bicycle with a lawnmower engine when gasoline got over $2 a gallon. He was a successful small business owner whose employees worked for him for decades and never desired a union even when they were petitioned by a local.

Beneath the blind moral eye of the fat bakers who rule a "free market", those who eat the cookies are always the one who call the shots in the end.

What we use and don't use - in our innovation we change the play of the game.

Last week I went into Action Motorsports, in York, for a new pair of winter riding gloves. I asked John, the owner, how the economy was affecting him and he said, when people can't do anything about the economy, they ride. It seemed to be better advice than murdering yourself and six family members as a California man did yesterday over his financial problems.

I was sitting in this big, uncomfortable chair in the Adirondack Park yesterday on a random motorcycle ride north and I came to a conclusion about the economy. Maybe it has to all come apart and return to local economies where people know each other and know who they are doing business with, paying and sustaining each other with work, responsibility and respect.

Globalization and monopolies seem to be killing each other and the base they feed off of. We live in a broken economy that operates on credit, and we are attempting to repair it with more credit.

An illusion that cannot be sustained.

I decided to dump my credit cards as much as possible. I have never used them for credit. I just use the dividend cards and I don't like change. I am considered a "deadbeat" customer by the credit card industry because I don't get into debt.

Today, the average family owes roughly $8,000 on their credit cards. This debt has helped generate record profits for the credit card industry -- last year, more than $30 billion before taxes. pbs.org

Adding to that, I am giving my local merchants a 2..3..%? stimulus in a weak economy on every purchase that credit card companies charge them for the service on my credit card purchases.

I feel free. None of my purchasing history is tracked. As the change piles up, I take it to a self checkout at a local retailer and dump it in.

Going back to cash has been a rewarding exercise of simplicity in a complicated economic environment.