1,200 ‘Occupy Wall St.’ Products For Sale On eBay – To Help You Fight Capitalism

How ironic!

If you look around enough, you can find them on Cafe Press too!

Hey, it was bound to happen.

When something like “Occupy Wall Street” (or any event) gets this much publicity in the international media … entrepreneurs are going to sell things in hopes of making money!

Even if they might be communists at heart!

As one wag said, “do these count as jobs created or saved under Obama?”

If you’re making your money selling on Ebay, Etsy.com, or Amazon… the demise of the USPS could leave you looking for work. Or at least raise your shipping costs immensely which then could leave you looking for work. Network marketing companies and their representatives could suffer too (or we could go back to the days of people carrying inventory!)

But don’t worry, you would’t be alone. Even HUGE companies like Federal Express earn money in part because of the Postal Service! Netflix could take a licking too… (but after they’ve antagonized their own customers anyway, it might serve them right!)

After you see the Big Companies that have been hit, you might be convinced that crony capitalism will kick in to save the USPS no matter what it costs the rest of us…

Here’s an interesting photo gallery of businesses that will be hurt if the USPS goes under.

USPS Fallout: 7 Businesses that May Hit the Skids at The Fiscal Times…

Here’s the heart of the article that I want to comment on:

Employees can save about $6,500 a year by teleworking from home just one day per week. Workers are also more productive when they telework, often clocking in longer hours in exchange for avoiding that grueling commute. In fact, a telecommuting schedule that also includes flex-time can add up to a 55 hour-work week that doesn’t leave workers feeling overwhelmed.

I can see this being TRUE under the following circumstances…

1. You have a motivated employee who won’t watch Netflix and eat bon bons at home.
2. The employee has a grueling commute and would rather spend the equivalent time working as fighting traffic and breathing the air pollution
3. That after the commute there are parking fees and other hassles
4. That the employee recognizes an immediate savings by not having to pay parking, eat out, fight other drivers, etc.

So this would be true of many URBAN telecommuters.

In my personal experience recently of having kids home all day in the summer….MY SCHEDULE IS TOTALLY UPSIDE DOWN!

Working at home is COSTING me as a result!

In the “Capitalism” my parents knew, employees were considered “stakeholders”… now in today’s “Shareholder Capitalism” where only corporate executives and shareholders matter, employees are liabilities to be eliminated. As long as the CEO’s make their millions and the stock price goes up, to heck with the Middle Class.

The best form of revenge is to be your own stakeholder by having your own business.

The question is – what’s going to work for you?

If you have a service you can provide – “handyman”, yard clean up, hauling off junk (while recycling the valuable stuff), etc. Craiglist’s free ads are a great way to promote yourself. Get a Google Voice number so they don’t wake you up in the middle of the night!

Some small businesses have been built almost entirely from Craigslist advertising… they aren’t multi million dollar enterprises, but you only need to be able to give yourself breathing room.

Can you wash cars? Youth groups raise money all the time doing that. From what I can tell they never show their non profit credentials…could you do that to make some extra money one Saturday? Could you give a genuine proportion to a charity if you’re not a non profit to have a charitable angle?

What about carpet cleaning? Can you do a good job at that? If you can rent a carpet cleaner at a local store, you don’t have to invest anything until someone responds to your free advertisement.  Just know in advance the cost of rental, the cost per square foot for cleaning supplies, etc. and you’ll know how to quote the job.

I was just talking to a man who got laid off and is trying to climb back up out of  a financial hole.  Like many he developed a strategy of turning lemons into lemonade.

He started driving a school bus – 2 hours work in the AM, 2 hours in the PM and some of these positions even have health benefits. He uses the time in the middle of the day and after his “run” to operate his business ventures.

There are many things you can do to start making extra money… the first step is to decide that you will not let yourself be the wage slave of Big Government or Big Business.

Will you?

Related Link: How to Start Different Home Based Businesses (At Amazon )

Note: The above link is an affiliate link.

Here’s another reason though… because they have to create their own jobs just to make ends meet.

Call it Involuntary Entrepreneurship

I had a friend who once said “‘ Consultant’ is what you put on your resume when you don’t have a job!”

Evidently the stats are proving him right as this quote shows…

But the latest government data indicates that most people traveling the start-up road are doing so out of necessity – not because they have a great idea or have been moved by the entrepreneurial spirit. The economic landscape is littered with consultants, freelancers and one-person contractors earning less on their own than they made as full-time employees before the 2008 financial collapse. The number of part-time self-employed rose from 33 percent to 41 percent of all self-employed workers between 2007 and 2009, with virtually all of that increase from people reporting they were working part-time because they couldn’t find enough work, according to Steven Hipple, a labor economist at the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

It prompts me to ask a question…. what would you do to earn money if your job ended tomorrow?

If, however, your business involves active contact with customers and colleagues over the Skype platform, you could have lost real money…

• Lost product sales
• Lost billable hours
• Unhappy customers
• Incomplete projects

Skype is cool because it’s so darn cheap. If you’re running a business on a shoestring, it’s great.

But as the stakes in business become higher for you, the more you need a work around (or alternative) that won’t as likely be ovewhelmed.  Apparently “Undisclosed problems in different Skype versions brought down the peer-to-peer interconnecting system” according to this article:

Skype Outage Blamed on Supernodes

Whatever the reason – the more you depend on Skype to make money, the more you need a ready alternative in case of emergency.

The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto Kevin Carson (Amazon link)

Systemic reasons people find starting a business hard or impossible… and why self-employment in the use has dropped by half in just the last 30 years since the “Reagan Revolution”. From the Preface:

The higher the fixed costs of an enterprise, the larger the income stream required to service them. That’s as true for the household microenterprise, and for the “enterprise” of the household itself, as for more conventional businesses. Regulations that impose artificial capitalization and other overhead costs, the purchase of unnecessarily expensive equipment of a sort that requires large batch production to amortize, the use of stand‐alone buildings, etc., increase the size of the minimum revenue stream required to stay in business, and effectively rule out part‐time or intermittent self‐employment. When such restrictions impose artificially high fixed costs on the means of basic subsistence (housing and feeding oneself, etc.), their effect is to make cheap and comfortable subsistence impossible, and to mandate ongoing external sources of income just to survive.

… innovation in the technologies of small‐scale production and of daily living reduce the worker’ need for a continuing income stream. It enables the microenterprise to function intermittently and to enter the market incrementally, with no overhead to be serviced when business is slow. The result is enterprises that are lean and agile, and can survive long periods of slow business, at virtually no cost; likewise, such increased efficiencies, by minimizing the ongoing income stream required for comfortable subsistence, have the same liberating effect on ordinary people that access to land on the common did for their ancestors three hundred years ago.

The more I thought about it, the more central the concept of overhead became to my analysis of the two competing economies. Along with setup time, fixed costs and overhead are central to the difference between agility and its lack. Hence the subtitle of this book: “A Low Overhead Manifesto.”

Two economies are fighting to the death: one of them a highly‐capitalized, high‐overhead, and bureaucratically ossified conventional economy, the subsidized and protected product of one and a half century’ collusion between big government and big business; the other a low capital, low‐overhead, agile and resilient alternative economy, outperforming the state capitalist economy despite being hobbled and driven underground.

Read it all here… (Amazon link)

Or maybe there’s a new tactic now… getting the Feds to just seize the website.

Reminder: If you register domain names with trademarked terms something nasty like this could happen!

Homeland Security seizes domain names…

The investigative arm of the Homeland Security Department appears to be shutting down websites that facilitate copyright infringement.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has seized dozens of domain names over the past few days, according to TorrentFreak.

ICE appears to be targeting sites that help Internet users download copyrighted music, as well as sites that sell bootleg goods, such as fake designer handbags.

The sites are replaced with a note from the government: “This domain named has been seized by ICE, Homeland Security Investigations.”

For instance, borntrade.com, 51607.com, and amoyhy.com have each been seized.

Here’s what their handiwork looks like:

Why?

Barry Lynn , senior fellow at the New America Foundation and the author of “Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction”, notes that this has happened for a variety of reasons… but not the ones usually offered. We “hear” that it’s because of “free markets”  or the vagaries of “capitalism”. Mr. Lynn suggests that such is not the case.

In fact the change started in 1981 with drastic changes in the antitrust laws.  Antitrust laws that since 1935 had protected the “American Dream” of small business ownership opened the door for huge corporate monopolies to expand in a way that swallowed up the ability of individual entrepreneurs to compete. This reflected a wholesale overturning of Supreme Court legal traditions that had protected the ability of family run businesses to avoid the predation of Big Money.

In 1949 Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas wrote:

“When independents are swallowed up by the trusts and entrepreneurs become employees of absentee owners,” that means there “is a serious loss in citizenship. Local leadership is diluted. He who was a leader in the village becomes dependent on outsiders for his action and policy.”

Democratic and Republican administrations in succession enforced this policy against the “Wal Marts” of their day.  Lynn notes that “They accepted outright monopoly, for instance, in the case of many utilities, as long as the public had a say in their management, and they accepted heavy industry in the hands of a few large companies, as long as they were forced to compete. But in retail and farming, the populists opted to protect the market system that allowed individual owners to deliver their products and services to their neighbors free from predation by distant powers. The result was a restoration of the republic of small proprietors established by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in the early 19th century.”

Lynn goes on to discuss just how seriously these monopolies have made inroads into self-employment.

The point is that it is, indeed, true that there are forces beyond your and my control that work against our entrepreneurial ambitions.

Finding a way to create a job won’t be easy, but the rewards as we do it will benefit all of us!

Toward a Truly Free Market: A Distributist Perspective on the Role of Government, Taxes, Health Care, Deficits, and More (Culture of Enterprise)

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