Investing Locally - Sources of Capital

"Locavesting: The Revolution in Local Investing" by Amy Cortese


excerpts

When small enterprises create 3 out of every 4 jobs and generate half of GDP ...


At the same time, the traditional funding sources for small business - savings, friends and family, venture capital, and bank credit and loans (and credit cards and Equity Lines of Credit) - have become mighty scarce ... (p. IX)

But that, I saw, was about to change.

In Wisconsin ... the state's rural cooperatives were demonstrating that more harmonious and productive models are possible. (p. x)

Kiva (http://www.kiva.org/) and Kickstarter (ww.kickstarted.com) have shown how the small donations of many people can have a big impact on the lives of other.  Now this peer-to-peer crowdfunding model of aggregating many small sums promises to unlock new opportunities for investing in business whose needs are not being me by conventional sources. (p. x)

Social Media is also reviving the direct public offering, or DPO, a little-known method of selling shares directly to the public, without Wall Street underwriters. ...  Ben & Jerry's raised capital through a DPO. (x)  --disclosure : Ben & Jerry's now owned by the mufti-national Unilever-

Meanwhile, communities from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to Hawaiian islands are attempting to bring back local stock exchanges, like the ones that thrived in the United States from the 1830s until the mid-20th century, to provide liquidity and spur investment in regional economies. (x)

Rather than synthetic Collaterized Dept Obligations (CDOs) and computerized robo-trading....

Milk Thistle ... what is it about this milk that inspires grown people to gush breathlessly and line up at farmers markets to pay $7 for a half-gallon..?  ... not merely organic, it comes from grass-fed cows .. pesticide-free pastures ..  sold his milk in bulk to a bigger dairy operation... he was on the fast track to ruin ... then... (started) selling his milk directly to the public at New York City Farmers Markets, to immediate acclaim.  (p.xvi)..  When he needed to expand.. . successful in raising money from a customer-led group of investors. (xix)

Moebius Technologies manufactures high-tech medical equipment in Lansing Michigan... They contribute to the community's prosperity by employing local workers and spending profits locally, allowing that money to recirculate in the community - know by economists as the multiplier effect. (p.5-6) .. and their tax contributions pay for local services.

A study by Harvard professor Edward L. Glaeser highlight the link between firm size and employment. Analyzing census data from 1977 to 2007, Glaeser found that the U.S. counties with the smallest firms experienced job growth of 150 percent. As average firm size increased, job growth decreased almost in lockstep.  Large corporations create a lot of jobs, to be sure, but they eliminate more - at least domestically - making them net job destroyers.

 @
  |/

Buying Locally grown (Farmer's markets), Eating at Local restaurants, Investing Locally ...  look for Locally Owned Businesses:

Restaurants
Farmer's markets
Supermarkets
Community Banks and Credit Unions
Dance Studio, Pilates, gyms, Karate

Beauty Salon
Books store
Liquor stores
Travel Agencies
Laundry
Roofer
Electrician
Plumber
Bowling alleys
Piano teachers
Freight Forwarders
Printers
Day Care Centers
Accountants
Advertising

Largest outlays of monthly income: (local in bold):
Housing, Health Insurance, Food, Property Taxes, Housing Insurance, Car, Car Insurance, Cable,....

Housing - Local Builder(?) Local construction worker (Yes) Local Bank(?)

Local Markets and Restaurants, finding local Health Insurance and investing in Local Banks will make the biggest impact...




<>

Prospering within Negative Power Structures

There is no enviornment in which humans cannot prosper and find fulfilment.   The key is finding the cultural skills that work best to achieving these goals

http://www.c-spanvideo.org/davidkennedy03

David Kennedy, director of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control, recounts the development and execution of his plan to curb inner-city violence in Boston in the 1990s. Mr. Kennedy's proposal, dubbed the "Boston Miracle," brought together all the key actors in a neighborhood from the police and community members to gang members and drug dealers to openly discuss their issues in a way akin to an intervention. Boston's youth murders were cut by two thirds after installation of the program and it was replicated in over seventy cities, including Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Baltimore. David Kennedy responded to questions from members of the audience at Harvard Book Store in Cambridge, Massachusetts.




hydrogen helium solar  flares
 
 
give love
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

HISTORY OF THE U.S. CORPORATION - Reclaim Democracy

��

RECLAIM DEMOCRACY.ORG:


In 1776 we declared our independence not only from British rule, but also from the corporations of England that controlled trade and extracted wealth from the U.S. (and other) colonies.

After fighting a revolution for freedom from colonialism, our country's founders retained a healthy fear of the similar threats posed by corporate power and wisely limited corporations exclusively to a business role. These state laws, many of which remain on the books today, imposed conditions such as these:

�� A charter was granted for a limited time.

�� Corporations were explicitly chartered for
the purpose of serving the public interest--
profit for shareholders was the means to that
end.

�� Corporations could engage only in
activities necessary to fulfill their chartered
purpose.

�� Corporations could be terminated if they
exceeded their authority or if they caused
public harm.

�� Owners and managers were responsible
for criminal acts they committed on the job.

�� Corporations could not make any political
contributions, nor spend money to influence
legislation.

�� A corporation could not purchase or own
stock in other corporations, nor own any property
other than that necessary to fulfill its chartered
purpose.

Read more... http://reclaimdemocracy.org/pdf/primers/hidden_corporate_history.pdf


INDIVIDUAL ACTION:

Do business with your neighbors--patronize
independent community-based businesses. The
ultimate source of corporate power is our wallets
--help cut off the fuel supply! Set specific goals to
shift more of your spending to community-based
businesses. Local Banks, Credit Unions, Restaurants...

Read more... http://reclaimdemocracy.org/pdf/primers/what_you_can_do.pdf


<>

Estate Tax, Aristocracy, and Concentration of Power

The Very Soul Of A Republic
The Roots Of The Estate Tax
http://www.tompaine.com/Archive/scontent/7082.html  :

William H. Gates Sr. is the co-chairman of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle. Chuck Collins is the co-founder and program director of Boston-based United for a Fair Economy. -The following text is an excerpt from chapter two of Wealth And Our Commonwealth by William H. Gates and Chuck Collins, published by Beacon press. More information about the book is available on the Beacon Press Web site. 

The essence of the American experiment is our collective of rejection of European hereditary aristocracy and grotesque inequalities of wealth. When Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States in the mid-nineteenth century, he noted that equality of condition permeated the American spirit: "The American experiment presupposes a rejection of inherited privilege."

The nation's founders and populace viewed excessive concentrations of wealth as incompatible with the ideals of the new nation. Revolutionary era visitors to Europe, including Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Ben Franklin, were aghast at the wide disparities of wealth and poverty they observed. They surmised that these great European inequalities were the result of an aristocratic system of land transfers, hereditary political power, and monopoly

In two other articles, "Rights of Man" and "Agrarian justice," Paine extended his contempt of inherited political power to a critique of inherited economic power.

The distrust of concentrated wealth was so great that, in an extreme sentiment, Ben Franklin argued "that no man ought to own more property than needed for his livelihood; the rest, by right, belonged to the state."

In 1776, artisans from Philadelphia put forward a provision for inclusion in the original state constitution of Pennsylvania. They advocated for a limit on the concentration of wealth. "An enormous Proportion of Property vested in a few Individuals is dangerous to the Rights, and destructive of the Common Happiness of Mankind; and therefore any free State hath a Right by its Laws to discourage the Possession of such Property."

Indeed, central to American republicanism was the principle of a broad and fair distribution of wealth and property. Noah Webster, writing in favor of adopting the U.S. Constitution in 1787, expressed that "a general and tolerably equal distribution of landed property is the whole basis of national freedom" and wide spread distribution of property was "the very soul of a republic." Too much inequality was a threat to a self-governing society. Without an equitable land distribution, the founders believed, the republic would not survive.

John Adams also viewed broad land ownership as a key ingredient in maintaining a balance of political power. He was greatly influenced by seventeenth-century philosopher James Harrington, who argued that the widespread distribution of property dispersed power. Adams believed that when "economic power be came concentrated in a few hands, then political power flowed to those possessors and away from the citizens, ultimately resulting in an oligarchy or tyranny." In a 1776 letter to James Sullivan, Adams articulated his perspective that a balance in property owner ship was essential to liberty.

The balance of power in a society, accompanies the balance of property in land. The only possible way, then, of preserving the balance of power on the side of equal liberty and public virtue, is to make the acquisition of land easy to every member of society; to make a division of land into small quantities, so that the multitude may he possessed of landed estates. If the multitude is possessed of the balance of real estate, the multitude will take care of the liberty, virtue, and interest of the multitude, in all acts of government.

Jefferson wrote:

The descent of property of every kind therefore to all children, or to all the brothers and sisters, or other relations in equal degree, is a politic measure and a practicable one. Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise.

Noah Webster exuded confidence in the justness of the American system: "Here the equalizing genius of the laws distributes property to every citizen."

John Adams and Thomas Jefferson wrote confidently that America's land tenure system encouraged subdivision and a broader distribution of land ownership, preventing aristocratic concentrations of ownership.




<>

Thomas Jefferson on Corporations

THOMAS JEFFERSON
LETTER TO GEORGE LOGAN

j. mss.
Poplar Forest near Lynchburg, Nov. 12, 1816

—I received your favor of Oct. 16, at this place, where I pass much of my time, very distant from Monticello. I am quite astonished at the idea which seems to have got abroad; that I propose publishing something on the subject of religion, and this is said to have arisen from a letter of mine to my friend Charles Thompson, in which certainly there is no trace of such an idea. When we see religion split into so many thousand of sects, and I may say Christianity itself divided into it’s thousands also, who are disputing, anathematizing and where the laws permit burning and torturing one another for abstractions which no one of them understand, and which are indeed beyond the comprehension of the human mind, into which of the chambers of this Bedlam would a [torn] man wish to thrust himself. The sum of all religion as expressed by it’s best preacher, “fear god and love thy neighbor” contains no mystery, needs no explanation. But this wont do. It gives no scope to make dupes; priests could not live by it. Your idea of the moral obligations of governments are perfectly correct. The man who is dishonest as a statesman would be a dishonest man in any station. It is strangely absurd to suppose that a million of human beings collected together are not under the same moral laws which bind each of them separately. It is a great consolation to me that our government, as it cherishes most it’s duties to its own citizens, so is it the most exact in it’s moral conduct towards other nations. I do not believe that in the four administrations which have taken place, there has been a single instance of departure from good faith towards other nations. We may sometimes have mistaken our rights, or made an erroneous estimate of the actions of others, but no voluntary wrong can be imputed to us. In this respect England exhibits the most remarkable phaenomenon in the universe in the contrast between the profligacy of it’s government and the probity of it’s citizens. And accordingly it is now exhibiting an example of the truth of the maxim that virtue & interest are inseparable. It ends, as might have been expected, in the ruin of it’s people, but this ruin will fall heaviest, as it ought to fall on that hereditary aristocracy which has for generations been preparing the catastrophe. I hope we shall take warning from the example and crush in it’s birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country. Present me respectfully to Mrs. Logan and accept yourself my friendly and respectful salutations.

Read more...
http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=808&chapter=88352&layout=html&Itemid=27



I wonder If he was referring to 'crony capitalism' or 'banking schemes' ?


<>