Buy local for Christmas

Want to make an impact with your Christmas spending this year? Skip the national chains and buy local goods. Whether you’re planning to spend $10 or $10,000, your Christmas dollars can help make next year a better year for your entire community when you put it into the pockets of your neighbors. Here’s 5 buy-local gifts to help you make a real impact on your local community this Christmas – with specific suggestions for fellow Worcesterites.

1. Support local artisans. Annette Powers at Worcester’s “The Prints and the Potter” is representative of the kind local gallery owner who is enthusiastic about supporting local artisans and crafters. The store features handmade pieces of all sorts from framed art to hand-knit mittens, many of them made by Massachusetts artisans. For budget shoppers, Powers suggests a handmade bag, hat or pair of mittens from Rennie and Rose, a textile firm based in the Berkshires who feature 100% American-made goods. Powers also suggests checking out The Futon Company, a Highland St. neighbor that features beautiful furnishings and home accessories.
2. Buy dinner for a friend. Gift certificates to a locally-owned restaurant help support a job creator in your neighborhood — and the neighbors she employs. Worcester’s got a plethora of dining options, and nearly all of them offer gift certificates.  You can buy a Dining Gift Card good at three of the area’s finest restaurants — The Sole, the One Eleven or VIA.
3. Give the gift of learning. The Worcester Center for Crafts is enrolling for the winter 2011 session. For as little as $80, you can give your beer-loving hubby the experience of making his own beer stein in the glassblowing workshop or introduce your darling daughter to the art of the potter’s wheel for $45.
4. Pamper the total package. When you think “luxury spa,” chances are that Worcester is not the first city that springs to mind. Surprise! Worcester features a few full service spas. Hit the gift certificate page at Paul Conzo Day Spa for special spa packages designed for men, moms-to-be and teens. Gift packages at Tu Moda start at $128 for an hour and a half Executive Escape that includes massage, manicure, scalp massage, shampoo and blow dry. St. Cyr Salon on Park Ave is a Worcester mainstay, in business since 1965. Their Famous Makeover includes a designer haircut and style and make up application, and is still only $50. $350 will get your loved one a full day of tip-to-toe luxury.
5. Say it with flowers. Flowers, centerpieces and plants are always a welcome gift. You can call 1-800-Flowers and they’ll route your order through a local FTD florist, but why not eliminate the middleman and create a relationship with a neighbor? Sprout Flowers is a little local florist with a big local impact. Proprietor Cathy Walsh designs fun, funky, elegant and, most importantly, gorgeous arrangements for any occasion. Call her at 508-757-5300 to place your Christmas or holiday orders.

photo credit: Myrone

• The Board of Directors underwrites all fund-raising and staff expenses so that 100% of all contributions from others go directly to the foundation’s charitable programs.
• Robin Hood attacks the root causes of poverty by funding programs that fundamentally change the paradigm – education, good nutrition, health services and economic security.
• The foundation also funds survival programs to help those struggling in poverty right now.
• The foundation’s programs are supported with professional expertise and pro bono help from those who are best equipped to give it.

$100 Million Challenge Grant

On Tuesday, May 26, 2009, the Robin Hood Foundation’s Annual Dinner raised over $56 million for charity in a single night, and laid the foundation for further donations. George Soros, one of the wealthiest men in the world, laid down a donation challenge: he will match every donation raised by the foundation’s Board of Directors in 2009 and 2010 up to $50 million. The Board of Directors stepped up the challenge further with an additional $50 million in matching grant money to effectively double the first $100 million in donations from givers.

The following Sunday, Verena von Pfetten, a senior editor with Air America Media, mused at the Huffington Post that she had spent part of the evening looking for some sort of smug, self-congratulatory air at the dinner, and found it remarkably absent. It was, she declared, “absolutely, utterly, and undeniably inspiring.”

And she is right. There is no denying that such devoted acts of charity are inspiring. Nor is there any questioning that those who make those gifts – whether for $1 or $100 million – are good people who want to help others rise out of poverty and get their share of the American Dream. At the very least, they are good people who cannot bear the thought of a child going to bed hungry if there is something they can do to help. And yet, hundreds of thousands of people of good conscience – these same people who would give half of their last dollar to another in need – close their minds tightly when they hear the words “economic justice“.

Philanthropy vs. Economic Justice

In the face of such incredible generosity, it may be considered uncharitable to wonder how many of those generous people have made their millions off the backs of working people who did not get a chance to share in the profits of their labor. How many inherited fortunes made by ancestors who exploited workers by underpaying them or exposing them to risks they would never take themselves? Even as society applauds the goodness of those who give charity to others, one has to wonder if it doesn’t make more sense to pursue economic justice in the form of fair wages, universal health care and a guarantee of basic human needs.

One of the basic tenets of economics in the “free market system” is that the responsibility of an organization’s board of directors is to make as much money as possible for the corporation’s shareholders. One might suggest that the major responsibility of the Board of Directors should be to make decisions that are best for all of the corporation’s stake holders, and that those stake holders should include not only the shareholders, but also the employees and the overall community. Profits for shareholders must be balanced by meeting the concerns of employees for a living wage and the community for fair business practices that don’t harm the world.

What happens when corporations ignore the needs of their workers in the interests of making more money for their owners? History offers a few examples:

• Hundreds of thousands of workers dying of conditions caused by exposure to toxic chemicals and substances like asbestos
• Buildings and bridges collapsing because of the use of substandarnd (cheaper) materials
• Widespread outbreaks of salmonella poisoning caused by corner-cutting in the inspection process
• Lakes and waterways destroyed by the spillage of millions of tons of toxic chemicals

Big business has fought reforms and regulations to ensure safe operations of their facilities for decades. It is and has been common practice to ignore the common good in the interests of making more money. One effect of this in today’s economy is the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs, not to countries where the tax burden is lighter, but to those countries that have yet to feel the disasters brought on by devotion to the bottom line.

Those who give generously to charity are to be applauded. Those who, like the Robin Hood Foundation, couple their charity with work that supports economic justice, are to be doubly applauded. Until those who support unregulated free-market capitalism understand, though, that a fair sharing of profits is the only way to a profitable world, philanthropy will never be enough to cure poverty.

Creative Commons License photo credit: Patrik Hamberg

Way back when I used to go out to poetry every Sunday night, an 18 year old friend had a performance piece called “You’re too young to be so cynical”. The poem itself is lost to me, but the title has stuck in my mind- and I find myself thinking it far far too often these days.

We have become a nation of cynics – worse, a cynical nation. Like a sulky teen who has only recently realized that mom and pop sometimes lie to him, who has trusted in his own invincibility only to get smacked upside the head by his vulnerability, we have decided that no one is to be trusted, not even ourselves.

We are so convinced that everyone is out to screw us that we can’t recognize good news when we hear it. At one and the same time, we demand that the government FIX THIS MESS and decry every effort made to do so. We chant, “I’ll believe it when I see it”, but when we’re shown, we insist that it’s just smoke and mirrors.

The danger to this unbridled cynicism is that we fail to recognize when something is in our best interests. We let ourselves be confused by counterclaims and words and numbers taken out of context. For example:

Taxes – How often have you heard that the top 1% of income earners in the country pay 33% of all taxes? A tidbit you don’t hear as often – in 2004, they owned 33.4% of the wealth and assets in the U.S. The top 1% also received 57.5% of capital gains income and 17% of earned income.

More on that top 1% – inheritance taxes. Usually called “death taxes” by opponents, inheritance taxes are a huge hot-button issue. Ask most people why they oppose the estate tax, and they’ll tell you that they don’t want to end up owing money because their parent died. Most of them couldn’t tell you how much they’d owe in estate taxes if they inherited their parents’ estate tommorw – but I can. Once you take the deduction from anything inherited by the decedent’s spouse and exempt the $2 million that is exempt from being taxed, most Americans will not pay anything at all in estate taxes.

The Recovery has been in the news, usually accompanied with the words “failed” or “jobless”. The media – who give a lot of airtime to controversy because people are, yes, cynical, and don’t trust good news – focus on letting people go on and on about no jobs, not fast enough, not hard enough, no money going out – and they do it despite the absolute FACTS that show a different story.

The facts: hundreds of contracts approved for millions of dollars in infrastructure repair and improvements. Thousands of jobs saved that would have been lost. Millions of people getting assistance with daily needs while the jobs efforts ramp up. Thousands of workers in communities that will NOT see the return of their old factories entering into training programs to learn new skills for jobs that will fill those contracts, skills that will translate in a new economy.

In global warming, too many are so distrustful of government edicts that they’d rather listen to studies being funded by a handful of coal and oil industry shills than the literally hundreds of sources that show how damaging carbon emissions are to our environment.

Cynicism is dangerous. It stands in the way of our progress as a country. We don’t have to be naive. We don’t have to be fools drinking the Koolaid. We just have to step back and let a little reality in – and we might find that just like the sunshine, it brightens up the whole world.

We just “fix the banks” by giving them money to lend to people so that y’know, they’ll do what we expect them to do and lend the money to people. The only problem is… because we didn’t put the money into education and health care and infrastructure and state governments, there’s no people to lend the money to.

And another thing – those folks screaming that the market keeps falling because they don’t like Obama’s spending plans? How can they, on the one hand, blame Wall Street excess and greed for the economic tailspin and on the other hand, believe that a falling market signals a failure of attempts to rein in those excesses and that greed?

See, I understand that when the market tanks, people lose money in their 401ks and retirement funds and it’s PAINFUL. But that money? It was earned in a climate of unregulated greed that pushed values of things way way out of proportion to their actual value. Now that those illusory values have collapsed, those values are returning to where they should have been. I’ll tell you this – if you support clawback (and frankly, I think we should be calling it “reimbursement”), then you should also accept that yes, those profits got clawed back from your 401(k), too.

You also need to understand that those folks on Wall Street? They’re not going to be happy with ANYTHING that makes it harder for them to make the kind of money they’d got used to making. Right now, they’re crying like babies that didn’t get their accustomed mid-afternoon candy bar. They’re stomping their feet and holding their collective breath until we give them back their bon bons – and the Republican party is standing there demanding that we promise them their candy to make them breathe again.

Now, as a parent, I can tell you this. If you give the kid back his candy, you just taught him that if he holds his breath long enough, you’ll give him candy. Here’s the truth – your kid may turn blue, but holding his breath isn’t going to kill him. You just have to wait it out, because eventually, he’s got to take a breath. His body will make him. Likewise, the markets will NOT stay stuck forever. Remember, kids, those big sell-offs? For every person selling off their stock, SOMEONE is BUYING. And when someone starts buying, the prices start going back up.

That’s what’s going on today. All day, I’ve been hearing that the markets are gaining in the triple digits because Citi announced that they made a profit in the last two months. Uh huh. Maybe. The market certainly rises and falls on rumors, hopes and fears. But the market turns on money. Anyone who studies market charts – without paying the LEAST bit of attention to the news – could have predicted today’s upswing for one basic reason – the market hit another support level yesterday. When that happens, the market does one of two things – it either totally plunges – or it trends back up because all the folks who’ve been waiting for the stock prices to hit those bottom lines are jumping in to buy. And when they do that – well… the market perks up because more demand means higher prices. See?

And the truth is that no, most of the time most of the people really do not hear what “he” just said. Oh, we hear the words, but we don’t understand the subtext. Like when they ask, “Isn’t saying you want Obama to fail saying that you want the country to fail?” Most people don’t get the fact that the “failure of the United States” means something different to conservatives than it does to liberals.

To the true conservative mindset, capitalism – naked, greedy capitalism – has not failed us. When they say that the “fundamentals of the economy are strong”, that’s exactly what they mean. The fundamentals of capitalism DEPEND on the scenario that we are currently living. It’s all part of the cycle. A company grows until it is too large – or too stupid – to sustain itself any longer. At that point, it fails and its assets get gobbled up at bargain prices.

The only real solution to the banking crisis is to leave the banks alone, let them collapse and let new banks step in to pick up the business that the fallen banks can no longer service. The solution to the real estate boondoggle is to let housing prices fall until people can afford to buy them again. The solution to the auto makers crisis is to let them go out of business so that the plants can be bought by people who will run them “more efficiently” – read, pay workers lower wages because they’ll be happy to get a job paying -anything- by that time.

In their eyes, the success of a country is not measured by the average standard of living of ALL of its people. It is measured solely by the growth of the GDP, and if the bulk of that growth goes into just a few pockets, that’s what capitalism is all about.

Somewhere along the line, there’s a disconnect. Things got reversed. Instead of capitalism being a tool that serves the country, the country and its people became a tool that serves capitalism, a money-making machine for a privileged few.

Hey, wingnut!!
We didn’t call him Messiah. YOU did. We know damned well and always have that Barack Obama is not the Second Coming. He never pretended to be. That was a tag you hung on him. The funny thing is, if he could actually get things passed without your wing-numb-knockers tripping all over yourself and spitting up on it, you may turn out to have been ironically right.

Hey, nutjob!!
Your heroes have been lying to you for the past 40 years. Let’s get something straight, knucklehead – or is that dittohead? Your big mouthed hero doesn’t know dick – or maybe the problem is that he knows Dick way too well. Rush is the L. Ron Hubbard of the Conservative Right world. He figured out a way to make a fortune by feeding your hate and your ignorance – and then like an idiot, he started to believe his own lies. Get this through your freakin’ noggin. Since Raygun Ronnie, this country has been heading for the toilet, heading back into the Third World and you were too fucking blind to see it because you bought into the totally anti-Christian notion that God will make you rich if you’re good and if you’re poor it’s because God thinks you suck. Remember Job, anyone? Yeah, fuckwit. You’ve been misled by a bunch of tools who got rich on your donations and promised you that if you kept giving them money and kissed their asses enough, you’d get rich too.

We had built a Great Society, one respected across the world, because here, in America, if you worked hard, if you saved your money, if you busted your butt, you got treated RIGHT because the gubmint made sure that you got treated right. We had rules about how much you had to be paid, and they were fair. Here’s how you know they were fair. All those years that the auto companies and big business were screaming about the Unions holding them up and squeezing them out of business? Yeah. Not many of them failed, chilluns. In fact, they did pretty damned well. And they did pretty damned well because the people that worked for them did pretty damned well. It wasn’t until we started stripping away the regulations that everything started swirling around the crapper.

Let’s get it straight, okay?
You don’t repair the economy by giving more money to the assholes that fucked us up in the first place. Or better yet, the ONLY way to rebuild the economy is to put money in the hands of people who spend it and big business has proven time and again that they’d rather starve their base than part with a few extra pennies of profit. Look.

Taxes are taxes, okay? It doesn’t fucking matter if I pay it as taxes on my income or if I pay it as salary taxes or if I pay it as sales tax or property tax. No matter how I pay it, it’s money that I earned and am paying out into the government coffers. When you cut the amount of taxes that I have to pay, you give me more money to spend. And trust me, it WILL get spent. And it won’t get spent on shoddy-ass products made by some big company that moved its factory to India or China because the government there hasn’t yet figured out that killing people with pollution just ain’t good for your country, okay? It will get spent on food at the supermarket, which will then not have to close its doors or lay off a dozen cashiers and a pair of butchers and two managers because there are 20,000 or so more people like me spending an extra $25 a week at the register. Oh, and they’ll be ordering more milk from the local dairy and more bread from the bakery across town and more cookies that have to be trucked across the country so the truckdrivers stay in work and the gas stations? Well, they get to stay open, too.

And that’s just one aspect of the plan and the ripple effect it will have.

Hey, numbskull — yeah, you over there, bitching about the $2 million to some city in Indiana to build a public golf course and calling it pork and saying it won’t help stimulate the economy, and besides, why the fuck should we be funding a golf course in Indiana? Let’s start with the 53 people they say will get put to work immediately. Every single one of those 53 people will be another person not collecting unemployment – and probably not food stamps either. Every single one of those 53 people will be spending money in the community AND paying taxes into the Fed, got that much? Okay. Now. Once that golf course and clubhouse is built, it’s not going to run itself. It’s going to need greenskeepers, and staff, and golf instructors, and folks to work at the snack bar and the restaurant, and it will also generate revenue, yes?

Now here’s the part that I just don’t get. Those things are so freaking clear and obvious – why the HELL isn’t SOMEONE explaining it that way? Why the hell aren’t the idiots on the cable and network TV challenging the idiots who claim the big lies like “spending doesn’t stimulate the economy, tax cuts to corporations do” and “this whole thing is the fault of the Community Reinvestment Act” and “Glass-Steagall was passed by a Democrat” Okay – the last one is half-true. It was passed by a Republican Congress under Clinton – a veto-proof Republican Congress.

Since when does bipartisanship mean “I’ll use your lousy ideas even though I know they won’t work”?

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Well, no, sweetheart, we’re not kidding. And I seriously long for your father to give you one of those scathing, “Your knowledge of the situation is so stunningly superficial that you’re an embarrassment to me” comments. Because seriously, if you think that an increase in the budget for food stamps, unemployment benefits and Medicaid is “only stimulative in the long term” then you have no fucking understanding of how economies move. But then, that shouldn’t be surprising at all. After all, you sit next to morning Blowhard every morning and listen to his know-nothing bluster.

What’s not stimulative in the LEAST is cutting capital gains taxes. It has not EVER proven effective before. EVER. The only tax cuts that have any remote chance of having an immediate effect on loosening up the economy are payroll tax cuts for working families who are barely surviving – and here’s the reason why. Those folks are not going to put an extra $20 or $30 or $50 a week into a bank account or a sock under their pillow. They’re not going to save it up till they have the ideal conditions to invest it in a new shopping mall (which will fail because no one has the money to shop there and none of the businesses that would have rented there are in business any longer because y’know, we concentrated on giving the mall developer a capital gains tax cut and ignored the folks that put money in his pocket).

And can we stop calling this a stimulus package? WE don’t call it a stimulus package – we call it a recovery package. We can’t fucking stimulate a dead economy – and if we don’t stop the goddamned bleeding by preventing the loss of hundreds of thousands more jobs we’ll have a freaking dead economy and nothing to stimulate.

Provide money to the poorest, I suppose, so that they can spend the money, and then as they buy goods it will somehow encourage businesses to produce more goods, and so on and so forth.

Since when does the bottom create jobs and produce goods?

Simple fact is that the creation of jobs and products comes from businesses, not from the bottom income earners. And the people who own businesses are in business to make a profit.

It’s kinda like the rhetorical question that goes “When did a poor person ever give you a job?”

The answer is – every time they buy groceries. Every time they pay a utility bill. Every time they buy a lousy cup of coffee at Dunkin Donuts, they are increasing demand which must be filled by supply which must be met by investing in creating new positions because you can’t keep up with the demand for your product with the people you’re already employing. It’s Econ 101, folks. You start a business in your garage making widgets. You can make 10 widgets a day by yourself. Thing is, people really really like your widgets. You can doodle along making 10 widgets a day and make a little money – or you can bring in a couple more people so you can make 50 widgets a day and make MORE money. And of course, you need more of the stuff that you make widgets out of, so the companies that make that stuff need to hire more workers and buy more raw materials and… you can see where this is going, right?

But no, says the Pistachio Patriot (I know it’s a patriot writing because of all the American flags on the background of the page). More quote:

The theory is that they will buy products, which will then theoretically put people to work to produce more products, and so forth.

People, however, don’t live like that. They live to their means. They buy everything on credit, sort of like the government does. So I am willing to bet you that what is going to happen when everyone receives their Obama Stimulus Checks from the IRS is that they are not going to go running down to their local Wal-Mart, or their local electronics store, and start gleefully buying things they had no interest in buying in the first place. They are going to apply those funds to their credit cards to pay down the balances, or they are going to pay down their furniture loan, or pay down their car loan, or pay down their mortgage line of credit, or they may just simply stick the extra money underneath their mattress and save it for a rainy day.

Here’s the thing. First, we’re not talking about “Obama Stimulus Checks” here. We’re talking about reducing payroll taxes to put more money in people’s pockets every week. We’re not talking about fancy shmancy electronics – most of which are now being made overseas to cut costs and increase profit margins because why make $5 on something when you can gouge workers, expose them to toxic substances, not pay any health care or Social Security costs and make $8 instead? We’re talking about, oh, I don’t know – food. And laundry detergent. And shampoo. And rent and gas and heating oil. Not as glamorous as imagining us all running out to buy microwaves and coffee pots and gadgets – but those are the things on which our economy actually runs. And when the grocery stores and clothing stores and corner coffee shops start failing (oh, wait – I mean the ones that Wal*Mart didn’t already KILL), that’s when we’ll be in some serious trouble.

So yeah. Trickle down economics doesn’t work. You can’t build a top-heavy economy where all the money gets sucked up and siphoned off out of the country in a huge reverse sucking toilet drain because – well, to quote the Pistachio Patriot again, “the business owners will just pack up and take their businesses out of the country where they feel they can make more profit.”

That’s not what WILL happen – that’s what’s BEEN happening. The fact of the matter is that big business has no loyalty or patriotism. They’re not in it to make America great again – they’re in it to fill their pockets, and if they have to do it by starving the country until the middle/working class gets down on its knees and accepts the natural dominance of those who have more money, then by jingo, they will. They’ll come stomp on our faces again when the other countries in the world decide that they don’t want polluted sludge for water and half their population dying of diseases related to unregulated exposure to toxic wastes and start regulating emissions and worker rights. By that time, we should be hungry enough to beg them to come spew their toxic shit all over our landscape and air and waterways again.

Then again, he also believes that business owners will increase supply which then will increase demand because more supply means lower prices – without realizing that when no one has money to buy, you end up with parking lots full of cars that no one can afford to buy. Wait. Don’t we already have that? Money put into food stamps and extended unemployment benefits goes RIGHT back into the economy. It keeps the supermarkets and diners and gas stations open. It keeps more people working – that’s SAVING jobs, which costs a lot less than creating them and negates the need for creating some of them. It keeps people from panicking and stuffing their nuts in their pillowcases and greases the wheels a bit so that business owners can see a reason to increase their supply – because, y’know, people have jobs and money to spend.

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