Guest View: Why Not Be Neighborly and “All Hang Together?” (3.0)

Ben Franklin – that long-haired revolutionary on holiday shoppers’ $100 bills – had just signed the treasonous Declaration of Independence from Mad King George. Like Continental Congress President John Hancock, delegates might be scrawling their “John Hancocks” on their own royal death warrants. (And wind up royally – well, regretful.) Ben cheerfully advised, “Now, if we don’t all hang together, we’ll all hang separately!” (No wonder the delegates were always adjourning to Philadelphia’s City Tavern.)
Neighborly Central Coast shoppers will “hang together” by voting with their feet and pocketbooks November 30: the fourth annual Small Business Saturday. They’ll shop at small, local, often mom-and-pop (or mom-and-mom), non-job-and-profit-exporting businesses. (That aren’t “too-politically-powerful-to-fail”; Will Rogers got it right that “A fool and his money are soon elected.”)
Small businesses create two-thirds of American jobs. Consumer spending is over two-thirds of America’s economy.
So here goes our third annual “why not shop small, not just at the mall” column. But Thanksgiving comes late this year. So why wait until Black Saturday to “shop small?”
It helps put our neighbors back to work. Then they can hire us and buy our stuff. (That’s why well-advised local governments don’t buy the short-sighted “false economy” of exporting government jobs. AKA, “Will the last family fleeing the county please turn off the lights?”)
Job-exporting multinational corporations’ profits are as healthy as our old economics student, Ferris Bueller was on his Day Off. Corporate profits gobble up the biggest slice of America’s economic pie since the stock market crashed in 1929.
But Americans’ paychecks are their smallest slice of the pie since that market crash cratered into President Hoover’s Great Depression. Nobel Prize-winning American economists and corporate CEO’s agree that’s what prolonged the Depression – and why there’s not enough “consumer demand” to create jobs much faster than we create job-seekers.
Not enough “consumer demand”: If our neighbors don’t have the dough to buy Mama’s absolutely “Heavenly” Christmas cookies, Papa won’t have the dough to hire our neighbors to bake and sell them.
So veterans’ unemployment is stuck at 10%. (Now more vets have died from suicide since 9/11 than died in combat.) Overall unemployment bungee-jumped back up from 7.2% to 7.3% in October, thanks to the Tea Party’s “Mad Hatter”: Canadian-born (but-anti-economy-boosting-immigration-reform) Senator Ted Cruz. And his “TP” Gang That Won’t Shoot Straight’s Shootout at the No Pay Corral.
Surprised? The original Tea Partiers vandalized the economy, too. And polluted Boston Harbor. (Then Americans learned that taxation “with” representation is no “day at the beach” either.)
Because the Bush Crash made the rich richer and the middle class poorer, the six born-lucky heirs to the Walmart fortune have as much “dough” as 40% of American families combined. Fifty million American families. Because Walmart trained its hard-working but shockingly underpaid employees to collect $3 billion a year in welfare checks, Medicaid, food stamps and public housing assistance.
Welfaremart’s heirs inherited the gold mine. Their employees and the taxpayers get the shaft.
Welfaremart’s employees confide that its TV blitz bragging about their great jobs is like Gallstate Insurance’s endlessly-expensive commercials: “All” you’ll really get paid by is the “State.” If other big box retailers win their campaign to slash our neighbors’ wages and benefits to match Welfaremart’s, taxpayers will pay $15 billion dollars a year for big box “corporate Walfare.”
But the law modernizing California’s minimum wage that our busy bee Assemblyman Luis Alejo wrote and ushered through the Legislature, and persuaded budget-conscious Governor Jerry Brown to sign, can save taxpayers billions in corporate Walfare. And help level the playing field for businesses, large and small, that pay a “living wage” to attract better workers and reduce their turnover/need to train replacements. And at that income level, every $1.00 is re-spent as fast as ink dries on paychecks, until it pumps about $1.70 into the local economy.
Our family? Since the Bush Crash cratered into Mad King George’s Not-So-Great Depression, we’ve been “too broke to even pay attention.” TV phone-in financial guru Suzie Orman would emphatically decree that our requests to O.K. gifts are all “denied!”
So – echoing our last two years’ columns – as the song goes, “We’ll be home for Christmas.” And Hanukkah. And Thanksgiving. And probably the winter solstice and lunar New Year, too.
We might get out to “hang (out) together” again – with friends observing “all of the above” holidays. Because we respect all believers and non-believers. (Even if it looks like we’re just “hedging our bets.”)
From our family to yours, neighbors, happy holidays:“All of the above.”