I finished and printed out the first draft of my book, Silver Lore, the last Caitlin Ferguson mystery,  and it is now in the hands of the readers and editors. I am excited to wrap it up and move on to the next project. I will finish up the final Canyon Rangers, Rudy Gordon, novella in a few months, so hopefully all will be online before Christmas!

So right now, I have more time for blogging and my brain is bursting! I was thinking about the state of the world a lot today and this 80-year-business of slowly destroying industry and housing for the middle class in North America. When large corporations take over industry, and housing, people suffer, period.

When manufacturing was booming, the middle class was starting to get ahead of the curve. When the big corporate raiders took over (in the 1980s it was called Hostile Takeovers), they not only gutted the employees, laying off millions of people, they also invested their pension funds and lost a lot of the workers’ money in the stock market. They sent the work overseas, and huge losses were felt by the cities that created infrastructure and investment into these businesses. People had to move to find work, so these cities shrunk as a result of closing facilities and factories and sending the work overseas. This has happened over and over again, and today people are hurting. I am told that the Gen Zs who will be graduating in the next few years will walk into a stagnation job market and we will lose a lot of our talent to overseas firms, like Australia, the UK, etc., because there is nothing for them here, or at least jobs where they can afford to have food, housing, and all of the amenities that are necessary to live here.

And don’t get me started on housing! These corporations and pacts buy up houses and apartment complexes, evict and even arrest people to clear the buildings out so they can raise housing prices, are despicable. The new owners would rather keep them empty, because they get huge tax cuts, instead of fixing them up and selling them, therefore decreasing the available and affordable housing to people who need them. The community suffers as a whole, and owners who live out of state really don’t care. That is a sad state of affairs all because of greed. The Greed is Good! mentality is back and we let it happen.

So my questions to all of those who support you know who and his ilk are:
-Why are we letting them gut businesses for sheer purpose of the billionaires making more money at the expense of the workers and the cities who gave so much to bring industry in?
-Why are we letting them ignore the stakeholders at the expense of their shareholders making more money than they will ever need, increasing prices, and decreasing wages, and thus making the middle class become the low income class?
-Why is that right?

We lose our brightest minds to other places because they can’t find work. (Remind you of the Great Depression?) Today these practices are even more evil and it seems that We the People have accepted this as just business as usual. Good working people of all walks of life suffer, and have no resources to turn to because of Federal funding cuts. We are a divided people and that is just too unbelievable to me in this day.

“When the only purpose of business is to make as much money as possible in the shortest time, regardless of how it’s done, the common good is sacrificed. There can be no social balance. In pursuit of high profits, CEOs have ignored, circumvented, or worked to change laws intended to protect workers, communities, the environment, and consumers. They have abandoned the principle of equal economic opportunity [emphasis mine].”
[Reich, Robert B. Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America (p. 195). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.]
READ HIS BOOK!

So I am reaching out to those who have small businesses and are feeling the pressure to sell out to reconsider. Please think about it before you take the big bucks from some corporate conglomerate. I understand that you want to make more money, but think about all those good workers who you employ. Think about the neighborhood that you live in and what you bring to it. I am sure what those corporations can offer you is more money than what you would see in profits of your business, but for the common good, think about that sale and the people that will suffer as a result. Think about the common good of your community if it is thriving in part because of your business. Just… think about it!

I love you all and hope you are continuing the good fight to keep democracy alive and well in these times of hurting humankind!