And Now For My Next Trick.......

I am currently living in Michigan at the Innovative Martial Arts dojo. The upside is that I have my kids 1/2 time and live and play with some of my closest friends (extended family really). The downside is that I'm living in Michigan where the economy has been terrible for years (it's also where the Big 3 Automakers are headquartered). If the Big 3 are allowed to collapse (and this seems likely), our economy will hemorrhage another 1.5 million jobs. The most solid hit will be on the chin of already punch-drunk and reeling Michigan.

I quit a solid contracting job in Ohio this summer (prompted by a demand by my ex-wife) and have been unemployed since. I loved the time with my kids this summer as well as my trip to South America, but with the economy in a tailspin I am starting to become seriously concerned for my family's future.

It looks like the U.S.A. is entering it's first depression since the 1930s. I am not going to bother pointing fingers here. Hopefully we can use this as an opportunity for retraining our workforce and redirecting our economy toward sustainable progress (this requires a governmental investment in education and sustainability) .

My personal story (and by extension my kids' story) is definitely complicated by this economic turmoil. I took a serious financial beating during and following my divorce and also had to leave the military to maintain custody of the Crumbgobblers. I had been trying to set up our family's finances to enable me to finally attend college, but lost everything with the divorce. Now with the unemployment rate locally approaching double digits, there are many people here with degrees (even advanced degrees) competing for underpaid work which they are overqualified for.

Many times now, I have been rejected out-of-hand for not having a degree. Most of these employers/recruiters have been unable to articulate what they were looking for that necessitated the formal credentialing (the majority do not even care what course of study was pursued). Of those that were able, most gave a list of traits and experiences that lined up with what I had gotten out of my military service. When I have pointed this out, most of them began looking at their feet and mumbling about policies and their hands being tied. It seems as if most people believe (consciously or not) that anyone who has bypassed college must lack the requisite intelligence or drive. It is amazing how little regard some people have for alternative forms of education, especially considering the number of people who have told me that college did not prepare them for their work or for real life. It's a head-scratcher.

Adding insult to this injury is my inability to simultaneously attend college and provide for my children (financially/ or if simultaneously working and attending school, with my time & attention). I served in 2 branches of the U.S. military (and am now considering a 3rd branch) with 3 specialties [USAF Security w/EST (SWAT) (inactive SECRET CLEARANCE), Army Infantryman, & Army Infantry Medic]. I have traveled extensively on 3 continents and have a very broad personal library exceeding 1100 volumes. After the military I have also been a welder, taxi driver, and salesman in addition to performing other miscellaneous work for fun and profit. For the past 11 years I've been raising children while riding this roller coaster. Recently I have been doing a bit of writing to begin sharing and documenting some of my research.

I would be absolutely thrilled to be able to finally attend college, but am having no luck in coming up with a way to make this a realistic possibility (financially) at present. My credit score is horrible due to the aftermath of my divorce, so loans aren't the answer. I am considering re-entering the military to reinstate my G.I. Bill benefits which expired while I was trying to recover from the divorce and raise small children. My hope is that I would be able to quickly earn a 2 year degree and improve my credit score while serving again. Then I would be able to go back into debt in order to get a bachelor's degree (or higher) and begin working full-time in the field of creative sustainability (my passion), rather than just volunteering and writing about the work of others.

I would love any advice or input on this. Hopefully it doesn't come across as whining, that is not my intent. Perhaps some of you know some things or people that I do not know, which could help me increase my positive impact.

85,000 U.S. Foreclosures in October

The GOP legacy continues. By the time Bush leaves office the US housing market will almost surely exceed 1,000,000 foreclosed homes. It's hard to imagine why Americans said "enough" of the policies and attitudes that created this disaster.

As government and industry scrambled to stem the housing crisis, another 84,868 homes were lost to foreclosure in October, according to a report released Thursday.

Last month 279,561 struggling borrowers received foreclosure filings, including default notices, notices of auction sales and bank repossessions, according to RealtyTrac, an online marketplace for foreclosures. That's a 5% increase from September, and up 25% from October 2007.

"October marks the 34th consecutive month where U.S. foreclosure activity has increased compared to the prior year," said James J. Saccacio, chief executive officer of RealtyTrac in a statement.

A total of 936,439 homes have been lost to foreclosure since the housing crisis hit in August, 2007.

(This was in AMERICAblog.com)

BUDDHA/ How much more will it take before we become serious about rebuilding our economy and our society? There are so many things we can do that will simultaneously reduce our environmental impact and personal expenses while fostering a greater sense of community with our fellow citizens.

We need to become informed and then demand changes in our zoning and planning regulations (and remember to vote with your dollars) to encourage more intelligent resource usage and community development. I am an advocate of civil disobedience regarding stupid laws which keep us from living sustainably and force people to work like dogs to meet their basic survival needs (especially senior-citizens and children). With a shift toward some of the already tested and proven ideas about intentional community and mass transit serving clustered developments we could enjoy a much higher standard of living, coupled with the benefits inherent in reduced fixed expenses and time demands. The range of options and their potential impact is truly astounding!(check out The Geography of Nowhere/ Home From Nowhere/ Your Money Or Your Life/ Communities Directory/ many of the books on voluntary simplicity/ and most of the links on this blog)

I am very interested in reader's thoughts and experiences around this topic. Please feel free to comment if moved to do so.

More inequality' in rich nations according to BBC News.

The gap between rich and poor in most wealthy nations has widened, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has said.

Since 2000, income inequality had risen sharply in the US and Germany and declined in the UK, Mexico and Greece.

The size of the income differentials varies, with the greatest disparity in Mexico, which has a ratio of 25 to one, followed by Turkey and the US.

The most equal distribution of wealth is in the Nordic countries, including Denmark, Sweden and Finland.

"Growing inequality is divisive. It polarises societies, it divides regions within countries, and it carves up the world between rich and poor," he added.

"Trying to patch the gaps in income distribution solely through more social spending is like treating the symptoms instead of the disease," said Mr Gurría.

He urged governments to act to increase education opportunities and job prospects for blue collar workers and to offer welfare-in-work to working-class families to boost income.

(Excerpts from article, for full article click title link.)

Buddha/ Does it seem more than coincidental that the inequality in the U.S. spiked since the year 2000 when Shrub & The Neocons seized power in Washington and Wall Street? I just noticed a caption in the article stating that the gap began widening in the 1980s. Who was in the White House during the 80s? Oh yeah, Ronnie Raygun & Poppy Bush with their neocon buddies puppeteering backstage. It all makes sense to me. Follow the dollars and connect the dots.

Comfort Dollars

Posted to BoingBoing by rushkoff, October 3, 2008 6:21 AM/ Title Link

Here's a great example of what we could easily call a "local currency" - that doesn't involve any of the bloody, anti-corporate revolution that detractors of this idea seem to think will attend any such effort.

A great, tiny organic cafe in my town, Comfort, decided to expand to a second, larger location last year. The owner, John Halko, has been renovating the new space for a year, and - thanks to the credit crisis - has been unable to raise the cash required to finish and finally open. With currency unavailable from traditional, centralized money-lending banks, Halko has turned instead to his community - to us - for support.

Granted, this is a small town. Pretty much everybody goes to Comfort - the only restaurant of its kind on the small strip - and we all have a stake in its success. Any extension of Comfort would bring more activity, vitality, and commerce to a tiny downtown (commercially devastated in the 1970s by the chain stores and strip malls of automobile-friendly Central Avenue).

So Halko's idea is to sell VIP cards. For every dollar a customer spends on a card, they receive the equivalent of $1.20 worth of credit at either restaurant. If I buy a thousand dollar card, I get twelve hundred dollars worth of food: a 20% rate of return on the investment of dollars. Halko gets the cash infusion he needs to build the new restaurant - and since he's paying for it in 20% tab adjustments, it just comes out of profits. He gets the money a lot cheaper than if he were borrowing it from the bank, paying back in cash over time. Meanwhile, customers get more food for less money.

But wait, there's more: the entire scheme refocuses a community's energy and cash on itself. Because our money goes further at our own restaurant than a restaurant somewhere else, we are biased towards eating locally. Since we have a stake in the success (and the non-failure) of the restaurant in whose food we have invested, we'll also be more likely to promote it to our friends. And since we have already spent a big chunk of money on Comfort's food, we're more likely go get food there than dish out more cash for a meal somewhere else.

When it gets really interesting is when other businesses begin to accept Comfort's VIP card and dollars for their services as well. But even in its current, limited incarnation, it's easy to see how the math of an extremely simple alternative currency works, why its existence gets cheaper money into the hands of people who need it, and how it circumvents centralized control over commerce.

Admittedly, this isn't a Boingworthy phenomenon in itself. It's simply not "scalable" the way Internet and tech things are. It's a local activity. But it can be modeled by other communities, and the Internet is a great way to share these experiments in social hacking, measure their results, and mutate them further.

Posted to BoingBoing by rushkoff, October 3, 2008 6:21 AM/ Title Link


BUDDHA/ What a great and simple concept for rebuilding local economies and communities. This is reasonably similar to the way a CSA (community supported agriculture) Farm operates. How many other direct-investment opportunities exist in our own local communities?

We could begin very simply by diversifying our local investments, which spreads the risk at the same time it begins to engage investors in strengthening the businesses they support. Think of owner-operated companies and the way workers strive to improve customer loyalty and eliminate waste. With people directly invested in the economic health of the local scene they would have an incentive to work on improving things. This could be an expansion of the phenomenon of homeowners working for better schools, parks, trails, downtown revitalization, festivals, neighborhood watches, etc.

People involved in this would be inclined to assist the business owners by making suggestions and watching out for potential pitfalls. Some people with relevant skills may volunteer to sit on boards or offer their professional services at a reduced rate or even pro bono to increase the odds of their investment succeeding long-term.

There are numerous organizations which network business people to each other and reward them for referring business to one another. These organizations have mechanisms in place to ensure that people genuinely live up to their promises and provide quality and value with a high level of service. BNI uses the motto "Givers Gain" and I feel this sums it up well. These groups already provide the model. It would need some adaptation, but I believe it is a great foundation.

This model, over time, favors unique local businesses, which recirculate their money in the local economy. This is a fantastic step forward in a national landscape dominated by the suburban strip-malls and generic box stores of incomprehensibly large multi-national corporations, which economically strip-mine our communities. In a generation we could have truly unique and identifiable locations and culture replacing "Anywhere, USA".

In closing, we can and should be looking for ways of mutually supporting and uplifting each other. This should be the foundation of our economic bail-out: local networks of inter-dependent (even symbiotic) businesses and customer-investors recreating our national economy as countless interwoven local economies.

Shell sets new UK profits record

I found this on BBC News UK edition (current). (excerpt with title link)(image added)

Much of the rise in profits has been attributed to rising oil prices, which currently stand at about $91 a barrel compared with $57 this time last year.

In dollar terms its earnings are up 9% on the previous year.

But there is concern among analysts that Shell has delayed publishing figures showing its oil reserves.

The oil reserves figure, which shows whether Shell found enough oil in the ground to replace the amount it was taking out, will not be published until the spring.

"The market really has taken this to imply that the figures aren't going to be great," said Nick MacGregor, an oil analyst from Redmayne Bentley.

"If they were that good Shell would be telling the world about it now."

(Buddha) For me this immediately brings up 2 huge issues. I will deal with them separately for now.

First is the issue of continuing record beating profits over and over for the oil companies. Bush and his cabinet set about making plans to invade oil-rich Iraq immediately upon usurping (oops, assuming) office. Now we have an even more unstable middle east, a devastated Iraq with tens of thousands of war casualties, thousands of dead G.I.s (and many times that permanently scarred or crippled), and thanks to the inconceivable monetary cost of the war we have a ravaged U.S. economy.

The oil companies are not the only ones breaking records. We are witnessing record numbers of home foreclosures in the U.S. in addition to record setting job losses. Bush changed the bankruptcy laws to protect the credit card companies from all of the people trying to get out from under crushing personal debt. Educational expenses are at an all-time high with many sane people questioning whether college is even a break-even venture at this point. Personally, I am doing pretty well handling my education on my own and not racking up tens of thousands of dollars in student loans and credit card debt.

I used to work as an insurance salesman and medical expenses were one of the top causes of personal bankruptcy and foreclosure in this country. Many of these bankruptcies were filed by people who had medical insurance which simply proved to be insufficient. How many are unable to obtain insurance in this country? I know that I am still among them.

The Fed (not a government agency by the way) has just lowered the prime to 3% in an effort to jumpstart our economy. This is akin to putting defibrillator paddles on the chest of a long dead person, yelling "clear", and pushing the button. There may be some activity and confusion, but you should expect no positive result. We need to fundamentally restructure our economy!

The second issue is that of sustainability. Shell hasn't disclosed it's oil reserve figures, presumably because they are not very reassuring.

We are at some point in the not too distant future, going to run out of oil for all practical purposes. It will become less and less plentiful and accessible. Due to these factors it will be priced out of reach of most people. It may be approaching that now at over $90 a barrel.

We have before us a crucial decision as to what we are going to base our economic system on. There are many viable alternatives to the oil economy. Many of these would alleviate other problems as well. I will not waste my time repeating much of what I've already posted. Please check out the links I've provided, watch some documentaries with friends, read some books on these topics, and discuss these ideas at your local markets and with your friends and families. If you were so inclined, you could even read some of my archived posts and introduce your network of contacts to my blog. Feel free to respond to my posts so I will know that these rants are serving as more than simply therapy for me.