Russians, who don’t have Americans’ long democratic tradition and thus have contributed millions of energetic refugees to our country, have an old saying, usually said with a sigh: “You vote with your feet.” So on Small Business Saturday last weekend, millions of Americans voted with their feet. They shopped @ local, non-job-exporting, not-too-big-to-fail small businesses. Because small businesses create 2/3 of American jobs and consumer spending is 2/3 of the American economy. And so, as Ben Franklin quipped after he signed the treasonous Declaration of Independence from Mad King George, “If we don’t all hang together, we’ll surely all hang separately.”
During the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt stimulated the economy by making Thanksgiving a national holiday and moving it up from the last day in November to its current date, which encouraged more holiday shopping. And we can stimulate our local economy by doing more of our holiday shopping at local small businesses, which would put more local people back to work. That, in turn, would help local families buy or rent homes and buy goods and services here. (That’s of course why our local governments give a bidding edge to local businesses.)
While we’re shopping, we can use local small banks and credit unions, which are safely Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation-insured for $250,000 per account. Because despite The Not-So-Great Megabank Bailout of ’08, government let hundreds of small and medium-sized banks fail during the Bush Crash, while the too-politically-powerful-to-fail monsters grew even more monstrous. Now, six too-humongous-to-fail Wall Street banks control 2/3 of America’s money (and thereby control too many of its too-well-financed-to-fail politicians.)
But banking on Small Street pumps money back into our local economy, since small local banks lend to our neighbors. Plus, chances are better that you’ll run into a friendly neighbor in line and get to, say, trade recipes for Christmas party “hors d’oeuvres”. (No wonder potty-mouths used to apologize, “Pardon my French.” Even the French term for “finger-food” looks scandalous.)
And mom-and-pop local businesses don’t breed stables of high-priced lobbyists to shovel their finest equine excrement to persuade the best politicians money can buy to keep rigging our republic’s political system against the middle class. Or to, for example – as the U.S. House of Representatives “Ryan budgets” tried unsuccessfully to do the last couple of years – pull the plug on Medicare and short-change seniors by replacing their hard-earned Medicare with baloney coupons for maybe 50% off of hard-to-afford NoMamaCare. Or to rename hard-earned benefits like Social Security and Medicare “entitlements”, to make it easier to sell us on raising the Medicare eligibility age to an age when a lot more of us will already be dead. (Which would be, as our easier-to-get-to-in-an-emergency local doctors would wisely advise us, “unclear on the concept.”)
Mom-and-pop shops don’t throw their political weight around like a lot of big businesses do. Such as PG&E, which spent $46 million from our Sacramento-approved utility bills trying to ram through a proposition to ban local government utilities from competing with its inefficient monopoly and producing our own clean energy. The Sierra Club barely held PG&E off with $90,000 in small donations– a David versus Goliath, 500 bucks-to-1 battle that might have even scared David off.
Like the Sierra Club (and the biblical David), our Assemblyman Luis Alejo, as Chair of the Assembly Environmental Safety and Toxic Materials Committee, needs to recruit all the shoe-leather-and-cell-phone volunteers he can to keep battling such diabolically-well-financed Philistine Goliaths in Sacramento to protect the health of our families. Because who knows what big-spending billionaire like the big-polluting Koch brothers might finance Alejo’s next opponent? And as the great Will Rogers noted, “A fool and his money are soon elected.”
Big, job-exporting corporations’ earnings have recovered from the Bush Crash and have recently been their highest in history. But that’s not helping to reduce our federal, state and local governments’ deficits much, because of a tax system that’s rigged so that a quarter of the biggest corporations, despite each hauling in billions in profits every year, pay no income tax.
But employment has still lagged behind that recovery in corporate profits because, according to every Nobel Prize-winning American economist alive, instead of hiring American workers, huge multinational corporations based in the U.S. are just sitting on $3 trillion in uninvested cash. Personally, we don’t know exactly what our local mom-and-pop shops would do with that $3 trillion in unused cash, but we suspect that either mom or pop would find something productive to do with it.
The handful of heirs to the Walmart fortune own as much wealth as the bottom 40% of Americans combined. Those same Nobel Prize-winning economists say that’s a symptom of why our economy didn’t grow faster than 2% in the third quarter of 2012, (though that moderate growth still beats the hell out of Europe’s negative growth), because what companies lack in today’s economy is enough “consumer demand” for their “goods and services.” In other words, if not enough neighbors have the money to put your heavenly pumpkin pies or your round and delicious pizza pies on their kitchen tables, you just can’t afford to hire more of your neighbors to bake and sell them.
Sadly, as recent books and documentaries document, Walmart and other megabox multinational stores tend to turn thriving family businesses into family plots in a small business cemetery – and small towns like ours into ghost towns. And, “long story short”, that’s why this holiday season, a lot of Americans are, (like Russian-American refugees), voting with their feet – to support small local family businesses.
As for our family, as the song goes, “We’ll be home for Christmas.” Because frankly, (to paraphrase the Wizard of Oz’s confession about, “times being what they were”, his settling for work as a hot air balloonist at a county fair), local business being what it has been lately, we’re too broke to go shopping. So thank God that – as Mom still insists – like our friendly neighbors at our favorite local mama-and-papa pizzeria, Santa Claus delivers.
Karen and Tom Lantz live in Hollister
