Kentucky Rain keeps pouring down.
And up ahead's another town that I'll go walking through.
With the rain in my shoes.
~ Elvis Presley
I've been driving through small towns in Kentucky and I keep seeing the same thing. Businesses that have suddenly closed or are holding "going out of business" sales.
I'm not a big fan of Ben Bernanke or Alan Greenspan. As John Paulson proved, you can make billions of dollars betting against the advice that Ben and Alan have been dishing out over the last decade.
Ben and Alan are making noises about a "double dip recession." Most who watch the economy closely say the same thing.
To people on Main Street, it's not been a dip. We took a drop to the bottom two years ago and stayed there.
Although Wall Street has done well and paid themselves multimillion dollar bonuses, Main Street has had a hard time.
I blame the bailouts. The country would have been better off letting the "too big to fail" banks fail and rebuild the economy from ground zero.
Instead we are bouncing along in a "lost decade" like Japan had in the 1990's. We had a choice between having a financial heart attack and quick recovery or financial cancer. Washington (and its lobbyists) chose cancer.
I look at the boarded-up stores, high unemployment, higher underemployment, the lack of economic activity and inability for small businesses to borrow even in a low interest rate environment.
The problems of Main Street are not going away soon.
For those of us who are looking to create wealth without Wall Street, I come back to three points.
First and foremost, Move Your Money. You can learn how to do it at http://moveyourmoney.info
Arianna Huffington and others at Huffington Post created a movement that is growing by leaps and bounds.
People are moving their money out of Wall Street banks into community banks and credit unions.
They are encouraging the charities they support and the government entities who get their tax dollars to do the same thing.
People who move their money are making a statement. They are mad as hell and not going to let Wall Street control their lives.
Community banks and credit unions are more likely to be spreading the money around on Main Street. They don't have million dollar bonuses to shell out.
Community banks and credit unions might keep some Main Street businesses from falling over the edge.
The second thing every individual can do is keep on getting rid of debt.
Cut up your credit cards. Pay off the car loans and if you have good credit (and a job); look for every opportunity to refinance while interest rates are low.
The third factor is for people to start creating their own jobs and not depending on big business.
Entrepreneurship is not a new idea. According to Tom Peters, in 1900, 50% of Americans were self-employed. By 1977, that number had dropped to 7% as big corporations ruled.
Now big businesses are cutting back, outsourcing to other countries and slashing wages and pensions.
The idea of lifetime employment doesn't exist in the private sector.
I've seen cases where employees put in a lifetime of service, expecting a good retirement, only to find that the pension they planned on is not available or greatly reduced.
Those of us on Main Street need to protect ourselves.
Moving our money, cutting up our credit cards, and owning our own businesses are the way to do it.
Don McNay, CLU, ChFC, MSFS, CSSC of Richmond Kentucky is an award-winning financial columnist and Huffington Post Contributor.
You can read more about Don at www.donmcnay.com
McNay founded McNay Settlement Group, a structured settlement and consulting firm, in 1983, and Kentucky Guardianship Administrators LLC in 2000. You can read more about both at www.mcnay.com
McNay has Master's Degrees from Vanderbilt and the American College and is in the Hall of Distinguished Alumni of Eastern Kentucky University.
McNay has written two books. Most recent is Son of a Son of a Gambler: Winners, Losers and What to Do When You Win The Lottery
McNay is a lifetime member of the Million Dollar Round Table and has four professional designations in the financial services field.
RIP Elvis Presley.
Follow Don McNay on Twitter: www.twitter.com/Donmcnay
Buy local, buy county, buy state, buy country. Buy what you need and bury your debt. If you can, grow a garden. Take your vacation more locally.
Above all, when Wall Street says you should, remember their advice did what to us?
Those a$$holes have dried up the credit and devastated the economy. Most of the small businesses which have closed it has been because of the instantly disappearing credit lines.
Stay away from Walmart. your money goes to Arkansas and then China. Some businesses are promoting made in America... like Menards. This is not a recession.
I live in Indiana in a town that had a population of 60,000 that had 20,000 GM jobs.
Those jobs are gone now except for one guy that checks the locks on the doors every night. If we are truly going to protect ourselves we have to band together and demand that this government change trade policy that will revitalize manufacturing in this country. Its real tough for mainstreet americans to start their own businesses when they have to struggle each and everyday just to put food on the table for their children. Mainstreet americans understand better than anyone what the real problem is with this economy. It is an economy that rewards investment and job creation overseas while shuttering plants and storefronts here at home.
Corporations have total control of the government, the media, and both political parties.
Here's a transcript on trade policy from 2004:
http://www.brookings.edu/comm/events/20040107.pdf
FREE TRADE IN THE NEW GLOBAL ECONOMY:
A DISCUSSION ON THE STATE OF U.S. TRADE POLICY
I agree with the suggestion that self employment is a good hedge against corporate whims, but unfortunately not evey one is either capable or able to run a business and don't have skills that translate into something you can make money off of.
Krugman predicted an L shaped recession in 2008. Looks like we got it right.
Because we did not nationalize and recapitalize most of the banks, it will take them about ten years to repair their balance sheets before they will get back to prudent (by American standards, not Canadian ones) levels of equity. So expect the pain to last another ten years.
She said the banks had to raise their rates because of the damaging legislation enacted, that forced them to get all their percentages raised in the 45 days before the banking legislation that was to limit interest rates. According to this banker, the government forced them to raise rates - and I said "Also the fraudulent fees banks are having to give back now?"
I mentioned the huge bonuses and she said she doesn't care how much money somebody has. I told her I didn't care for how little money most people have thanks to her banks and $40 million dollar bonuses.
As I left, I said, "Do you honestly believe you'll be one of those with all the money someday? So, how's your pay here, I heard you're getting cuts". I turned my back on her at that point.
Main Street, listen up: Sales clerks make the sale. Cash registers are used to complete the transaction of the sale. Security guards make crappy salespeople.
I shop at specialty stores where I can get answers to my questions. Places like Wal-mart, Home Depot, Best Buy frequently have sales clerks that know little about the products they sell, although I've found some exceptions.
I avoid the self-checkout systems because of the problems they sometimes have, requiring 1-3 people to fix.
Wealth Distribution
SOURCE: Prof. G. William Domhoff, University of California, Santa Cruz, 2010:
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/
Specifically:
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html
The Wealth Distribution:
In the United States, wealth is highly concentrated in a relatively few hands. As of 2007, the top 1% of households (the upper class) owned 34.6% of all privately held wealth, and the next 19% (the managerial, professional, and small business stratum) had 50.5%, which means that just 20% of the people owned a remarkable 85%, leaving only 15% of the wealth for the bottom 80% (wage and salary workers).
In terms of financial wealth (total net worth minus the value of one's home), the top 1% of households had an even greater share: 42.7%. Table 1 and Figure 1 present further details drawn from the careful work of economist Edward N. Wolff at New York University (2010).”
But the government doesn't need to provide tax breaks for offshoring and corporate welfare like the little-known Overseas Private Investment Corporation:
http://www.opic.gov/
OPIC: Overseas Private Investment Corporation
Wealth Distribution
SOURCE: Prof. G. William Domhoff, University of California, Santa Cruz, 2010:
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/
Specifically:
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html
The Wealth Distribution:
In the United States, wealth is highly concentrated in a relatively few hands. As of 2007, the top 1% of households (the upper class) owned 34.6% of all privately held wealth, and the next 19% (the managerial, professional, and small business stratum) had 50.5%, which means that just 20% of the people owned a remarkable 85%, leaving only 15% of the wealth for the bottom 80% (wage and salary workers).
In terms of financial wealth (total net worth minus the value of one's home), the top 1% of households had an even greater share: 42.7%. Table 1 and Figure 1 present further details drawn from the careful work of economist Edward N. Wolff at New York University (2010).”
manufacturing technology news foia bls ilc
and then looking at the cached version:
The Federal Government Refuses To Disclose Why It Wants To Kill The Only Program That Accurately Compares U.S. Workers' Wages To Those Of Mexico's, India's And China's
The ILC is the only government data program that tracks manufacturing labor compensation rates across countries. It is the program which disclosed that Mexico's manufacturing workers have salaries ($2.92 per hour) that amount to 12 percent of manufacturing worker salaries in the United States ($25.27), a figure that includes wages, taxes, benefits and health care. The program is the only one in the world that accurately compares all aspects of labor compensation. It recently conducted an assessment of China's manufacturing worker compensation, which was $0.81 per hour (2.7 percent of the average hourly compensation costs of manufacturing employees in the United States). More recently, it found that total compensation per manufacturing worker in India averaged $0.91 per hour.
Those familiar with the program say a reason it is being axed is because the U.S. government does not want Americans to know about the massive global economic and foreign labor forces against which they are competing — and losing to the tune of tens of millions of jobs.
At the time of the termination announcement in February, 2010, Manufacturing & Technology News asked Bureau of Labor Statistics program managers and agency spokesmen why the ILC data series was being singled out.
As long as voters continue voting for Democrats and Republicans, owned and operated by corporations, job destruction will only get worse.
There is a FREE Job Destruction Newsletter at:
http://www.jobdestruction.com/
It's almost impossible to get a third-party on the ballot:
http://www.thelibertyvoice.com/ralph-nader-ron-paul-agree-ballot-access-laws-are-rigged-against-independent-third-party-candidates
Ralph Nader & Ron Paul Agree: Ballot Access Laws are Rigged Against Independent & Third Party Candidates | The Liberty Voice
Perot waned us about the sucking sound of job destruction:
http://www.youtube.com/v/EHSnXFEzE4E&hl=en_US&fs=1&
Perot on NAFTA
Get your money in local community banks and credit unions and spend your money locally and in the US wherever possible.
It is you only protection from multinationals that could care less what happens to you or your town.
I take it you also were not personally worried about being in the 20+% of the unemployed who would have resulted from the "financial heart attack".
I take it also that you consider about 10-11 years to be a "quick" recovery, since that's how long it took for the U.S. economy to recover from the "let 'em fail" financial heart attack of 1929.
Did he not get the Summer of Recovery memo??