tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34995923065732859462024-02-07T01:49:25.337-08:00Uriah Zebadiah's Reality BombZero-Bullshit Futurism.Uriah Zebadiahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17673763450199552220noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3499592306573285946.post-67258613519247950842010-10-15T00:59:00.000-07:002010-10-15T01:05:19.715-07:00Business Idea of the Week: The Crowdsourced Bookstore<i></i><br />
<i><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEis-XJl48DZV5s2AK5YdhlkOCCQiWc6CJRrG2Ahefb_lEqONOmgIVk7wy5wKG_mDelvZ3fI84cBPLleTcXFCpFNpOkpr4t1CduJPA013gz6-W-nRsGKtTMxevEXwG-7rYG8fDRkhHt5x54/s1600/bookstore.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEis-XJl48DZV5s2AK5YdhlkOCCQiWc6CJRrG2Ahefb_lEqONOmgIVk7wy5wKG_mDelvZ3fI84cBPLleTcXFCpFNpOkpr4t1CduJPA013gz6-W-nRsGKtTMxevEXwG-7rYG8fDRkhHt5x54/s320/bookstore.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div><br />
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</div>Business ideas are everywhere. They're like water. If you're a smart person who understands business and pays attention to the world, you will see opportunities constantly. Most of the time there will be dozens of people all having the same brilliant ideas. What actually counts is execution. To prove it, I'm throwing out a totally viable idea each week. </i><br />
<div><i><br />
</i></div><div>This week:</div><div><br />
</div><div><b>The Crowdsourced Bookstore</b></div><div><b><br />
</b></div><div>Look. I love books. I like the experience of a good book, its weight, its ability to dig more deeply into a subject or story than I could ever sit still for online. But I don't like bookstores. I live in Portland, home to the world's largest bookstore, Powell's City of Books. Here I am, wandering through a giant city-block multi-story monstrosity, where I can find virtually any book ever written, and all I can think about is how overwhelmed I am by the sheer range of options I have. I know that most of the books I can choose from are going to suck, and I have no way to know which I'm likely to enjoy, much less want to tell everyone I know about. I can hardly even make up my mind which subject to browse. And the big box stores are even worse, with their slavish devotion to the new and popular, throwing out on display every book I am most likely to revile, with that rare gem of a book among them. The book in the store I'm most likely to enjoy is in the stacks, and yet I have no way to find it amid the tens of thousands of books that just don't appeal to me, because they were chosen for their appeal to the mass consumer market. Or if I go to a Wal-Mart or an airport kiosk, all I have is worthless popular crap, 2010 edition, aimed at an audience with an IQ of exactly 100. </div><div><br />
</div><div>So what we need is a vastly smaller bookstore, where every title is selected as a standout winner, a book that's likely to blow your mind, as only a great book can. The best on every topic that matters, the smartest, the best-written. Curated stores, not warehouses. Trader Joe's, not Safeway. A place with just a couple thousand titles. Something oriented to the increasing demographic of intelligent young creatives who probably spend too much time on the internet. Now, how do you select which titles? Crowdsource it! </div><div><br />
</div><div>See, one thing that the crowd is good at is sifting through vast amounts of information, and pulling out the most interesting stuff. Assign the categories, limit your available slots, and let the obsessive-compulsive book-loving internet people of the world figure out what exactly you should sell. It'll work.</div><div><br />
</div><div>Here's the benefits: </div><div><a name='more'></a>You can sell used books. The book is on the list, or it's not. Because there are so many fewer new titles each month, you will have less to manage.</div><div><br />
</div><div>You can buy in bulk. If you have enough stores using your list, you can negotiate better prices from publishers, particularly since you will be able to lead the industry in reducing the number of remaindered books. </div><div><br />
</div><div>You have less overhead. Fewer employees, smaller space, all without sacrificing sales overly much.</div><div><br />
</div><div>Higher sales. At a Trader Joe's, I'm likely to give almost anything that looks interesting a try, and more things look interesting, because I'm in their target demographic, and because the quality is consistently high. If I'm at Safeway, I'm gonna go through and pick what I know I'll enjoy. Probably there's all sorts of stuff there I've never thought about buying, but which I'd enjoy, but the shopping experience itself is so dismal, and the possibility of disappointment is so high that I'm not branching out. This is why a Trader Joe's can pull the sort of sales volume you'd normally associate with a store four to eight times its size. </div><div><br />
</div><div>A better shopping experience. If you're running a bookstore larger than just a kiosk, you can suddenly afford to have the space for each book to face front, for each book to be featured with a little review posted below the book, perhaps with a QR code so you can use your phone to instantly look up all sorts of information about the book. By not only having fewer titles, but placing a high value on each title being truly exceptional, you have a higher likelihood of employees having read and being able to recommend most of the books in the store.</div><div><br />
</div><div>You can start it up with a website and an Amazon affiliate account. The minimum viable product is very low. Prove that it works, and you can start opening stores in no time. You may even be able to get some significant investment capital to expand throughout the country.</div><div><br />
</div><div>You don't have to be limited by the small number of choices on the shelves. With the size and cost of print-on-demand services dropping every year, you can radically expand your product offerings, allowing you to meet the needs of most anyone who comes through the door in just a couple hours.</div><div><br />
</div><div>You can stand your ground against the rising tide of e-books. In the future, more and more of the ephemeral popular entertainment reading that characterizes most book sales today will be headed to the handheld screen, endangering the entire business model of the big box bookstores, even as economic contraction threatens the buying power of the American people. Yet few would argue that books will disappear; instead, they will increasingly become fetish objects, the sort of expensive, weighty and emotional treasures that people will want to keep forever, to talk about, to share with friends. This model caters specifically to that sort of book buyer.<br />
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In competing with other small curated bookstores, you have less risk that your curator will be making too many idiosyncratic decisions that hamper sales.</div><div><br />
</div><div>But there are downsides, as well. For one, this model does nothing to help with new author discovery, and will likely contribute to the problem. A list of books like this is inherently open, meaning that even if you could control its contents, you can't prevent other bookstores from making use of your list, whether copying your business model or just using it as in-store marketing to highlight certain books on their shelves. And because you're crowdsourcing your inventory list, the more successful you are, the more generic and mainstream your list is likely to become over time. For that reason, I'd want to put in restrictions on how frequently many categories go up for review, and choose locations and marketing efforts that support the preservation of the target demographic, while maximizing buy-in.</div>Uriah Zebadiahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17673763450199552220noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3499592306573285946.post-19262914570313792782010-10-14T06:06:00.000-07:002010-10-14T12:02:42.771-07:00What I Learned From Studying Economics<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4t1u0duzAs775ZqWSIH-FMLs0hgaPokXwVHnw6J1K2CPTarOQNc8rOIF_qMElmOLdfdspFmJczBDVUtrPmm5xGa32jiR-RHm44YtdTkY6mvwMaKLE7TnEhjKdUNSYEUbopbHtfspTqD0/s1600/economics_coins+and+chart.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4t1u0duzAs775ZqWSIH-FMLs0hgaPokXwVHnw6J1K2CPTarOQNc8rOIF_qMElmOLdfdspFmJczBDVUtrPmm5xGa32jiR-RHm44YtdTkY6mvwMaKLE7TnEhjKdUNSYEUbopbHtfspTqD0/s320/economics_coins+and+chart.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I've always been interested in the study of the social forces that shape our lives, whether we're talking business, politics, psychology, religion, technology, anthropology, marketing, all that happy shit. But since commodities started spiking a few years ago, and the economic collapse that followed shortly thereafter, I've found myself with a lot of time on my hands, mostly due to long periods of unintended unemployment. Perhaps out of an interest in figuring out what the fuck is going on in the world, I started reading a lot more about economics. Sure, I took a couple classes in college, and I was always one of those guys who actually paid attention, but it was the great recession that has turned a mild interest into a near-obsession. I've spent between 4 and 14 hours a day reading about economics news and theory for the last couple years now, and I have a few observations I'd like to make which I think can really help illuminate the subject for those of you who have had way too much in the way of employment obligations to do this sort of research.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div style="text-align: left;">What did I learn? </div><a name='more'></a><b></b><br />
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<b><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
Economics is bullshit. <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">No, really. Economics is a field that is still in its infancy. Its principles are poorly understood, and with major divisions over really fundamental questions, it's a wee bit premature to be thinking of it as a science. And it is enormously complex. Yeah, it's all about working with numbers, so you'd think it'd be easier, but most classic and computational approaches to the subject are fundamentally wrong. Why?</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><br />
</span></div><div style="text-align: left;">Decisions aren't actually rational. <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">Yet this is the assumption that underpins the vast majority of economic equations, and all that happy Adam Smith 'invisible hand' stuff libertarians like to talk about. Worse, old-school economists also assume their rational decision-makers have perfect knowledge. And as for that invisible hand of the market fixing flat tires and walking old ladies across the street, that additionally requires the utter fantasy of nonexistent barriers to entry, meaning that anyone who wants to compete on a level playing field can do so, never mind that every single aspect of a launching and running a business raises that barrier a little higher, from the access to capital to the difficulty of building a capable team to the economies of scale the other competitors have. The whole idea is a total fucking fantasy on a truly massive scale. But that shouldn't be a surprise. Because...</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><br />
</span></div><div style="text-align: left;">Media coverage of economics is shit. <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">You might have heard about arguments between Keynesian economists and Austrian economists, right? Keynes being associated with added stimulus, and the Austrians arguing for austerity? Well, that's pretty much bullshit. The reality is that economics has actually come a long fucking way since the macroeconomics 101 textbooks of 1986, when the people writing these articles took that one class in college. Nowadays they call it Post-Keynesian Economics and Computational Economics, now joined by surprisingly illuminating Behavioral Economics and a bunch of other paradigms I didn't bother reading too deeply on. I will say that the whole duality makes for a nice article, very easy to understand, liberals on one side, conservatives on the other. Of course, the need for dumbing it down for mainstream audiences shouldn't be surprising, since...</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><br />
</span></div><div style="text-align: left;">Economics is fantastically complicated. <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">Not that the basic concepts are terribly hard to wrap your head around, but</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"> if you're trying to make predictions with any sort of accuracy, you're dealing with billions of individual decisions, dozens or even hundreds of variables, vast arrays of information that you will probably never be able to fully account for, all working together in a constant systematic flow. Ultimately, all economic predictions are reduced to educated guesses, estimates derived from looking at a mountain of data, expressed in jargon to give it the weight of science. Nobody knows anything. And what does it mean when you have a highly important field where everyone's just trying to make their mountain of bullshit look pretty? </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><br />
</span></div><div style="text-align: left;">Economics is about politics. <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">Economists are there to control people. They're there to act as a sort of modern medicine man, going off into the wilderness to return with predictions for the new year. They're there to pitch for the ruling class, to tell us how unavoidable it is for us to be exploited for the benefit of the wealthy few. Economists in power attempt to direct the flows of an inherently unstable system of interrelated markets, trying to create opportunities for extracting wealth from the more predictable shifts. They know how poorly understood the economy is by the average investor. They know that it is rooted in these intensely emotional decisions, a fickle mob acting from fear and greed in largely predictable waves. And they wield their power as the captains of industry, kings of the 21st century, leading their nations in the currency wars that so characterize globalized politics, wielding subterfuge and all manner of financial machinations, everyone trying to capture resources in a world that has no more to offer the old economics of financial growth. </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><br />
</span></div><div style="text-align: left;">The financial markets are fucked. <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">There's no getting around it. We have built a system so incredibly complex that we have no way to keep track of it, no way to control it, no way to predict it, hardly any way to understand it, though it is increasingly clear that the whole thing is fantastically precarious. And yet, by the nature of its complexity and the accumulated power of the ruling class, we are forced to put our trust in those who use their power to enhance their own position, who institute policies that abuse our trust and actively endanger the lives of billions and our own freedom. The only thing we can do to stop them and break their system of power is to simplify. We've got to adopt new ways of doing finance that make economics a real science, one that's understandable by people who aren't necessarily as smart as guys like Bernanke. That means we need to radically decentralize our economy-- we need to adopt investment policies for the long haul, investing in the productive capacity necessary for building the resiliency and sustainability our economy will need to prosper in the future, as well as pushing the lifestyle changes we'll need to make to get there. </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><br />
</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">What else can we do?</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><br />
</span></div></b>Uriah Zebadiahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17673763450199552220noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3499592306573285946.post-80571848650320003302010-10-12T20:45:00.000-07:002010-10-13T00:36:35.465-07:00We Must Replace Normalcy, Not Just Rebel Against It<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjstcLV5gra3VtfmTpi1fQOleshxlxdlj_e89YhwrpgCeYUn7hzohx67TBHBCZYpkjP0OivdwlRpjkdFtwJIeRkwIUW-2JcAaAKPObUA-y5y1cFpAhie614gav5B79LMbnN3Hdgw4Bkrlk/s1600/dissent.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjstcLV5gra3VtfmTpi1fQOleshxlxdlj_e89YhwrpgCeYUn7hzohx67TBHBCZYpkjP0OivdwlRpjkdFtwJIeRkwIUW-2JcAaAKPObUA-y5y1cFpAhie614gav5B79LMbnN3Hdgw4Bkrlk/s320/dissent.jpg" width="263" /></a></div>I'd like to address one of the problems I see with a lot of people who are deeply aware of the problems we're facing as a civilization: the tendency for well-informed citizens to be considered outsiders. We allow ourselves to be painted as misfits, misanthropes, misguided extremists, the enemies of civilization and the American way of life. Even so-called liberal heroes like John Stewart fall prey to the notion that there is something rotten on the left, that there is a large degree of naive idealism inherent to its professed agenda and rhetoric. The extension of that concept is the marginalization of the left by the moderate majority for being dangerous; not by virtue of ignoble intentions, but through incompetence to wield power in this country without upsetting the precarious tightrope of economic stability and inadvertently causing the widespread collapse of civilization. We are derided as children, sure to get over our idealism as we mature, as though our ideas were examples of overly academic intellectual masturbation, and not searing indictments of the global power structure.<br />
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And we are not helping matters. The sheer scope of injustice in the world divides our efforts, impaling our movement on the rocks of identity politics, trapping us in the pursuit of minor victories through single-issue campaigns, even as we gradually lose political influence and media access over time. There is very little cohesion or unity in the left, with even specifically socialist groups fighting among themselves over the political agenda, with left-wing organization being predominantly characterized as a futile exercise, bogged down in unnecessarily nuanced and lengthy discussions and ineffectual strategies.<br />
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In the cultural movement that reflects these political values, one with the unfortunate tag of 'counter-culture', we gather to celebrate our glorious weirdness, holding it up as a shining example of our superiority, our capacity for rejecting all that is antiquated and useless in society. Far from being an inclusive movement based on a political and social understanding of the world, one with broad appeal across cultural lines and rooted in the expression of personal freedom as a fundamental American value, we are increasingly atomized into balkanized sub-cultures, building identity from our patterns of consumption. It's the clothes we wear and the music we listen to rather than any meaningful difference of outlook. We allow ourselves to be characterized by youth, by drug use, by laziness, by a cultural identity stripped of its political consciousness, and by a politics stripped of its mass appeal to basic moral virtue, lost in the halls of intellectual elitism.<br />
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Most of all, we are bastions of cynicism and apathy, cognizant of the challenges we face, yet crippled with despair at the sheer scope of the problem.<br />
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So where the fuck do we go from here?<br />
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<a name='more'></a>If we need an example of a successful social movement, let's look at what the right has done. While there's no doubt that they have had some number of successful corporate-sponsored protests and done no small amount of organizing, the critical factors enabling their rise in society is their massive investments towards controlling all the most critical structural elements in our society. They own and control the media, enabling them to frame all political discussions. They make sure that not only all consumption, but all taxation feeds their wealth and power, enabling them to increasingly force dissenters to subordinate their will to the demands of the powerful just to ensure continued survival.<br />
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For decades, the left as a people have largely based our survival on the crumbs at the fringes of mainstream society: on donations to non-profits, proceeds from the sale of art and music, jobs in academia, and for those not privileged to find success in those industries, through scavenging and social welfare programs, or through wages earned by working for the benefit of our political opponents. Under the right-wing control of society, all of these avenues are under concerted attack. Wages are down, exploitation is out of control, donations are stagnant at best, the well-paid tenured experts of academia are being replaced by adjuncts that cannot hope to maintain a middle class lifestyle and are vulnerable to the whims of administrators, and the arts are an increasingly precarious industry.<br />
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The only avenue that seems to hold any promise at all is in social enterprise-- profiting by broad feelings of vague guilt over the populace's complicity in social injustice and the destruction of the planet. Yet this is an industry where we have seen one social company after another be swallowed up by the world's largest and most evil corporations in a cynical attempt to profit from growing markets. It's an industry where right-wing executives implement anti-worker policies while presenting a facade of social responsibility. In the case of worker-owned cooperatives, while labor has the power it deserves, business is hampered by a near-total lack of access to investment capital, as well as the expertise and social networks of more self-serving businessmen, contributing to difficulty getting business loans outside of largely inadequate cooperative-specific programs. Thus, without significant innovation on the part of social entrepreneurs, even that avenue is wholly inadequate.<br />
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In a world where the left is on the run, it is more important than ever that leftists embrace the mainstream values that we still have in common; the importance of liberty, justice, accountability, community, integrity, frugality, all are or were core American values. We need to recognize that nuanced and reasoned arguments in the face of incomparable evil is not only inadequate, but actively damages our position among the vast majority of the population, who lack the time and inclination to study the subject in depth, and judge by the appearance of strength and clarity of message. We should not be afraid to call out evil where we see it, to shame it and obstruct it. We need to make it perfectly clear that propaganda that flies in the face of scientific fact is nothing but lies, that there can be no greater threat to the security and prosperity of this nation than the enemies of science who seek to consolidate power over us all. We have to get tough if we're going to prevail.<br />
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But most of all, we need a clear vision of the future we want. It has to be achievable. More than that, it has to appear realistic and practical even to the people who have happily spent their lives in the corporate world, watching television and going to the mall, both the working class and the middle class. I would argue that it's no longer possible to gain power in this country without addressing the popular mythology inherent in the idea of normalcy pushed by the right wing of both parties. In fact, we would do best to make it perfectly clear that the maintenance of normalcy depends entirely on the obstruction of the corporatist agenda, that it's primarily because of the corruption we are burdened with that some things about America will have to change rapidly. We definitely do not want to be associated with the destruction of the 'American way of life'. Instead, we need to be the agents of the American resurgence. We need to present a vision of renewal, of a brighter tomorrow, of a great American renaissance, based not on propaganda and empty rhetoric, but achievable, concrete plans.<br />
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Rather than positioning ourselves as being opposed to capitalism, we should be champions of the free market, seeking ways to make our markets more competitive by reducing barriers to entry, shaping our tax structure to favor investment in productive capital, investing in the infrastructure necessary to maintain and improve both our productivity and our standard of living, abandoning GDP as a false measure of economic health, choosing to nationalize only those industries that lack adequate competitive pressure for market efficiencies to come into play, according to sound business theory. This is a message that can play in the middle class, that demonstrates sound judgement, that makes room for people to see themselves in the world we're building, while demonizing those that need to be demonized. We need a plan for building a new normal, one more fulfilling, more equitable, more economically sustainable than this nation has ever known. Rather than setting ourselves up as the opponents of American values by letting the right wing frame the debate as one between social justice and economic viability, we should recognize that it is our leftist values that will naturally arise from any commitment to economic efficiency and American freedom.<br />
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One of the largest advantages to this model of leftism is that by prizing business acumen and sound economics while playing to many mainstream values, it makes it possible to gain the investment capital necessary to build meaningful alternatives to the critical infrastructure monopolized by the right wing. And it is that activity that is most necessary for achieving lasting success in the war for America's future.Uriah Zebadiahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17673763450199552220noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3499592306573285946.post-47285432667767354472010-10-12T01:44:00.000-07:002010-10-12T01:44:35.751-07:00The Seven Evil Industries<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJiKQMISf_IUOMeULUM2BlghS-pda3c7l3_lo_lB37oMnD_m_pn3Qfdkfc70i0DJyYJgcQYn40QDzReZc_EbEZkyZzZ_xO2MF6QIYiEdpt3iGmJILrXtwKw7TsCTgoF-1BS9PYLMiet8o/s1600/Goldman+Sachs+Giant.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="208" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJiKQMISf_IUOMeULUM2BlghS-pda3c7l3_lo_lB37oMnD_m_pn3Qfdkfc70i0DJyYJgcQYn40QDzReZc_EbEZkyZzZ_xO2MF6QIYiEdpt3iGmJILrXtwKw7TsCTgoF-1BS9PYLMiet8o/s320/Goldman+Sachs+Giant.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>We all know that there are serious problems affecting our economy. Obviously there are many causes for the plight of the middle class and the general economy: there's the slow assault on wages and benefits, the dwindling of the manufacturing sector, thirty years of rising home values driving up the cost of housing, and now the rapidly increasing cost of oil driving up the costs of food, heat, and transportation, even as outsourcing's downward pressure on the cost of consumer goods artificially suppresses inflation. As a nation we're vastly poorer than our parents' generation, yet for the most part, addressing the problem seems too massive to even approach. Who is really responsible?<div><br />
</div><div>It's obvious that big business is guilty of outsourcing jobs, keeping wages low, externalizing costs to the greater society at every opportunity, and spending millions on lobbying for their own interests. Yet there are certain industries which really push the boundaries, forces of corruption that actively impede the change that's necessary for our nation to prosper. They spend billions on subverting the government officials, influencing elections, buying airtime for candidates, dictating policy to the regulatory bodies meant to oversee them, disrupting competition, acquiring no-bid contracts, gaining monopoly rights over their industries, continually expanding the budget through waste entirely directed towards the pockets of their shareholders. They are a drain on society; anti-democratic, anti-competitive forces that not only impede progressive change, but the efficient functioning of free markets as well. They endanger our civil rights, the stability of the economy, and the legitimacy of the republic. And due to their massive power in our government, and their controlling interest in most of broadcast media, they are the principle obstacles that must be overcome if we are going to restore democracy, and preserve any measure of prosperity in the decades to come. </div><div><br />
</div><div>Frustratingly, most of these industries are integral to maintaining our standard of living; they gain wealth and power through us simply living the lifestyle we're accustomed to. The question is how can we overcome them? Some of these industries can be circumvented by cooperating within our communities, making change and voting with our dollars. Others will require gaining power in our state and local government. And in the case of a couple of these, nothing short of gaining control of a majority in congress can hope to bring us back to sanity.</div><div><br />
</div><div>So here's the big seven:<a name='more'></a></div><div><br />
</div><div>1. Finance. 40% of GDP is now centered in the financial industry. They run up bubbles for their own benefit, are largely responsible for the massive increase in executive pay across all industries, and contribute next to nothing to the rest of the economy. Ideally, they are a useful tool for preserving wealth by investing in the common interest of the nation. Sadly, the reality is that they are a massive drain on society, an exercise in gambling on an unprecedented scale, and the dominant cause of economic instability in the world. They spend millions each year on influencing government, and are wildly successful. The White House financial advisory staff is a revolving door for the titans of Wall St and their cronies in academia. They have perpetuated the single largest scam in history, holding the economy hostage in a successful attempt to extort more than a trillion dollars to cover their gambling debts, even while constantly pushing for shifting the tax burden further onto the middle class, even if that means destroying the nation entirely. There's no doubt, we're talking about Public Enemy #1 here.</div><div><br />
</div><div>2. Energy. They poison our oceans. They level mountains. They pollute our communities. They actively lobby against the scientific community, promoting ignorance and confusion on the state of scientific consensus. The fact is that we have reached peak oil, meaning an ever-increasing cost of energy. Peak coal, peak gas, and peak uranium will all be reached before 2030, meaning we have less than 20 years to completely redesign our energy infrastructure if we are to have any hope of continuing our way of life. These companies actively stand in the way of the technologies that can ensure our nation a prosperous future, and will do everything in their power to make sure we don't transition to a post-fossil fuel economy until this nation's wealth is bled absolutely dry, making it nearly impossible for us to avoid catastrophic collapse of the system, meaning massive food shortages and an unprecedented level of economic hardship. This network of oligopolistic companies enjoys massive tax breaks, subsidies, and exclusive government contracts. They are the single-greatest enemy of the environment, and a long-term threat to our economic security. And they will spend millions each year to keep getting their way. </div><div><br />
</div><div>3. Defense. In 2009, we were responsible for 46% of the world's military spending, more than tripling the spending of our nearest competitor. More than one trillion dollars is spent every year keeping us in our two wars and countless military bases around the world. And no industry is more rife with corruption, inside dealing, and government waste. Fully 25% of spending in Iraq and Afghanistan is unaccounted for. No-bid contracts are the norm here. The demands of this industry alone are responsible for dictating our foreign policy, and as Bob Woodward's new book shows, even the President has very little control over the agenda. This industry is completely out of control, a threat not just to our economy, but to global security. And don't forget, we're talking about a group of people with no moral compunction about making a policy of condoning torture, assassination, and wholesale killing of civilians perceived to be opposed to American foreign policy, despite the obvious evidence that these practices are actively damaging to national security. </div><div><br />
</div><div>4. Health Care. There are millions of hard-working Americans who work in health care, and really want to help people, and by and large do a damn good job of it. Then there are drug companies, insurance companies, and the 'cooperatives' who control the purchasing of medical supplies. We spend twice as much as anyone else on earth, yet can't even break the top 20 for life expectancy. Drug companies actively pervert scientific findings, suppress research on unpatentable natural medicines, spend billions on advertising, redirect research dollars away from cures and towards symptom treatment, away from life-threatening illnesses and towards highly marketable and dubious treatments for marginal and widespread cases of depression, anxiety, ADD, and sexual dysfunction. Little attention is paid to the rise of superbugs due to overuse of low-potency anti-bacterials, the deaths of thousands due to malpractice and inadequate use of communication technology, and the role of lifestyle on health. Meanwhile, drug and insurance companies are literally writing the laws set to govern their industry, ensuring that despite massive increases in the number of customers, nothing is done to reign in the massive increase in costs since Clinton failed to implement a single payer system, to the point that our nation's nods to intelligent socialized medicine are prevented from negotiating prices with these jackals.</div><div><br />
</div><div>5. Food. Apart from a few tiny island nations that subsist almost entirely on Spam, America is by far the most obese nation on earth. And why is that? Many Americans can no longer afford to choose healthy food. But primarily, it's due to a system of subsidies that favors meat production above all else. We are the world's leading exporter of corn and other feed grains, and we pay dearly for the privilege. Draining our nation's aquifers with wasteful irrigation techniques, eroding our topsoil with unneeded tilling, poisoning our waterways with outrageous amounts of petroleum-based fertilizers and pesticides, endangering food supplies with untested genetically modified organisms. We pay billions each year to preserve the profits of a junk-food industry that is literally killing us, indirectly through obesity-linked diseases like diabetes, heart disease, and cancer, as well as direct causes like increased incidents of salmonella and e.coli outbreaks. The constant search for profits absent of any sense of moral value, combined with the industry-controlled structure of farm subsidies has led to giant factory farms, seething hell-holes too gruesome to believe. It's led to a country where you can get a day's worth of calories for a couple dollars if you eat processed garbage, but you could at best hope to gather a meal's worth of healthy vegetables. Once again, we have a situation where anti-competitive actors subvert both the needs of the nation and the healthy functioning of market forces.</div><div><br />
</div><div>6. Prisons. Here in the US, we have 5% of the world's population. Yet we have 25% of the world's prisoners. We are in the top 5 for executions. These industries wield surprisingly massive influence, contributing to the increasing tyranny we suffer under. They, inseparable from the evil bastards in the defense industry, contribute to a culture of fear and authority. They block the relaxation of drug laws. They contribute to a punishment mindset that does nothing to reduce crime. The police, bundled in here for convenience' sake, operate without accountability, capable of murdering citizens at will, knowing they will never be sent to prison. Then there's the corruption. Judges who get bonuses for sending inmates to particular prisons. Companies who gain massive profits from the slave labor. Cops who rob drug dealers and rape sex workers. FBI raids on peaceful protestors. Massive companies selling guns and equipment for top dollar at taxpayer expense. An unprecedented level of authoritarianism, and all just to mitigate the social effects of the corruption from these other industries.</div><div><br />
</div><div>7. Telecommunications. Hopefully we all know that more than three quarters of all broadcast media, our newspapers, our television stations, our radio stations, they are all owned by fewer than 10 companies, which even now are consolidating their positions. These companies are in turn owned by the same wealthy industrialists found in the board rooms of all of these other industries, and consequently, media consistently reflects the needs of all of these industries. Let's take GE for example, bringing good things to light by not only making lightbulbs and investing in electricity production around the nation, but also building weapons for the defense department. They, of course, own NBC (as well as a number of porn companies). And it should come as no surprise that they dictate content, colluding with News Corp subsidiary Fox News to shut down debate found overly revealing of both companies' back room dealings. But it's not just that! There's also the government sponsored monopolies of internet and cable providers keeping us out of the top 20 for broadband internet penetration, AND the top 20 for both wired and wireless connection speeds, despite the fact that we pay more for our services than anywhere on earth. These being the same companies conspiring to restrict what we can and cannot do on the internet, and creating new opportunities to fleece their captive audience. </div>Uriah Zebadiahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17673763450199552220noreply@blogger.com26