The Greek Debt Crisis Explained in Four Minutes

You can fix the sovereign debt/government revenue problem in two ways:
1) Austerity (doesn't work)
2) Deficit Spending and increased TAX REVENUES.

NBC News - Basic Income

New Fast Food Chain Pays $15 Per Hour

New Fast Food Chain Pays $15 Per Hour

Any corporation can freely choose to be a Cooperative, an Employee Owned Business, a Non-Profit, or even just a "Fair-Profit" company. But when people incorporate or limited liability protections they always seem to choose 'FOR-PROFIT' status, and thus maximizing profits, limiting liability, and retaining control become the priorities.

America's 50 WORST CHARAITIES

Never give money to anybody until you vet them!

http://www.tampabay.com/americas-worst-charities/

$970.6 MILLION 
PAID TO SOLICITORS

Worst 50's record

A more typical split *

• $970.6 million cash paid to solicitors
• $380.3 million cash to the charities
• $49.1 million to direct cash aid

* Watchdog groups say no more than 35 percent of donations should go to fundraising costs. There is no standard for how much should be be spent on direct cash aid.

RESOURCES FOR CHECKING NONPROFITS

• A list of solicitors used by the worst 50
• A list of the worst 50, with addresses
• State charity officials, with contacts for all 50 states
• Florida's gift givers' guide for consumers
• ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer
• Guidestar's research website
• GiveWell does in-depth research into a small number of worthy charities
• Charity Navigator's charity evaluation website
• CharityWatch's charity rating service
• The Better Business Bureau's Wise Giving website

Chris Hedges on Capitalism’s ‘Sacrifice Zones’ | Moyers & Company | BillMoyers.com

Chris Hedges on Capitalism’s ‘Sacrifice Zones’ | Moyers & Company | BillMoyers.com

What if hydrogen and nickel make copper?

Fusion?

Mello-Roos taxes explained

Mello Roos is a voluntary property tax that helps make up for the lack of property tax revenu in California due to 1978's Proposition-13. If you buy a house today, at current home prices, you will pay high taxes on that home. If your neighbor bought her home in 1976, then she only pays taxes based upon the value of her home in that year.

Now you can use INewsSource,org's application to find out if you are paying Mello Roos taxes, and how you compare to those neighbors and corporations. ( http://maps.inewsource.org/mello-roos/ )

This series of reports from KPBS in San Diego begins to demystify the system, but fails to mention key issues about how corporations and family-trusts avoid paying their fair share of property taxes, by creating shell-corporations that own real-estate property, but avoid taxes.

California doesn't have a Budget Deficit it has a REVENUE TAX LOOPHOLE!

Since 1978, California Corporations have avoided paying property taxes by using a giant tax-loophole provided in Prop. 13. 

Many people know that Proposition 13, protects homeowners from large increases in their property taxes due to California's huge average annual increase in property values, and since property owners vote, they like this protection. What most don't realize is that this same property tax exemption is available to corporations, and corporations never die. 

This is how it works, when a developer builds a new property, like a shopping mall or an office building, they create a 'SHELL CORPORATION" that owns that property. Now here is the crucial part, in CALIFORNIA Property Taxes are ONLY REASSESSED WHEN THE PROPERTY IS SOLD. The corporate ownership can change via sale of stock, but the corporation continues to own the property forever. The property never legally changes hands, and thus it is never reassessed. 

In this way anyone can incorporate their real-property and avoid property taxes as your property values increase. Unfortunately for most of us, this plan only makes economic sense if your property is worth over about $1-million dollars. 

Now most people like Prop. 13, as they believe it saves them money, but that is a myth. The average homeowner moves every 5-7 years, so when they sell and move both they and the buyer are reassessed and they must pay taxes at the current property value. However, Corporations can change hands every day, yet their property will never be re-assessed, and corporations live forever. 

Now Property-Taxes in other states are re-assessed every year (or every few years), and they pay for basic public infrastructure: Schools, Hospitals, Libraries, Emergency Services. This may be why, in California, such public infrastructure is currently being underfunded and eviscerated. 

Property tax revenue dropped by half when Prop. 13 was first instituted, and today the estimated annual revenue loss to the State of California is approximately $40-billion/year. Strangely, this is about the same as California's current budget deficit. 

For more information about how to correct this problem and close the loophole, goto:

http://www.closetheloophole.com

PROP13 Close the Loophole

 http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-december-5-2011/california-s-direct-democracy-troubles

Daily Show: California's Direct Democracy Troubles

John Oliver heads west to report on California's direct democracy-induced financial Armageddon.

The problem with Intellectual Property

This American Life has done a series of shows about how our patent system has become the black hole of resources.  Most people don't realize just how bad things truly are, as unaccountable shell corporations try to patent everything from your DNA to general processes for communication.

Listen to the reports, and then go to your local law library, and find out more about intellectual property. You may have good ideas, but you will never be allowed to benefit from them, unless you are a Patent Lawyer.

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/496/when-patents-attackpart-two

What is an Accredited Investor?

Accredited Investors

Under the Securities Act of 1933, a company that offers or sells its securities must register the securities with the SEC or find an exemption from the registration requirements. The Act provides companies with a number of exemptions. For some of the exemptions, such as rules 505 and506 of Regulation D, a company may sell its securities to what are known as "accredited investors."

The federal securities laws define the term accredited investor in Rule 501 of Regulation D as:

1. a bank, insurance company, registered investment company, business development company, or small business investment company;
2. an employee benefit plan, within the meaning of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, if a bank, insurance company, or registered investment adviser makes the investment decisions, or if the plan has total assets in excess of $5 million;
3. a charitable organization, corporation, or partnership with assets exceeding $5 million;
4. a director, executive officer, or general partner of the company selling the securities;
5. a business in which all the equity owners are accredited investors;
6. a natural person who has individual net worth, or joint net worth with the person’s spouse, that exceeds $1 million at the time of the purchase, excluding the value of the primary residence of such person;
7. a natural person with income exceeding $200,000 in each of the two most recent years or joint income with a spouse exceeding $300,000 for those years and a reasonable expectation of the same income level in the current year; or
8. a trust with assets in excess of $5 million, not formed to acquire the securities offered, whose purchases a sophisticated person makes.

For more information about the SEC’s registration requirements and common exemptions, read our brochure, Q&A: Small Business & the SEC.

http://www.sec.gov/answers/accred.htm

Union Co-Ops

From It's Our Economy ...

“Too often we have seen Wall Street hollow out companies by draining their cash and assets and hollow out communities by shedding jobs and shuttering plants,” said United Steelworkers (USW) President Leo Gerard in 2009. “We need a new business model that invests in workers and invests in communities.”

As manufacturing in the United States continues in free fall, the USW is working to bring the Mondragon cooperative model to the Rust Belt. It aims to use employee-run businesses to create new, middle-class jobs to replace union work that has gone overseas.

A March 2012 report from the USW, Mondragon, and the Ohio Employee Ownership Center (OEOC), lays out a template for how “union co-ops” can function. “A union co-op is a unionized worker-owned cooperative in which worker-owners all own an equal share of the business and have an equal vote in overseeing the business,” the report states.

Drawing from Mondragon’s principles of shared prosperity for workers and democratic governance, It also has plans for a solar installers’ cooperative and a greenhouse that grows high-end salad greens and herbs for the Cleveland Clinic, as well as universities and restaurants.  

OEOC Director Bill McIntyre worked with the Cleveland Foundation on crafting the organizational framework for the Evergreen Cooperatives. At a March 2012 press event at United Steelworkers headquarters, he observed that employee-owners more often kept their jobs during the recent economic meltdown. “Employee-owned companies,” he said, “have more stable, loyal, and experienced work forces, which translates into real cost savings, productivity, and quality advantages.”
But union co-ops don’t address some difficult issues. For instance, they do not directly address the forces of global competition that have been undermining the U.S. manufacturing base. In particular, by adopting NAFTA-model “free trade” agreements, the United States has encouraged corporations to seek out competitive advantage in places with the lowest wages and fewest environmental regulations. At best, co-ops such as the Evergreen co-ops in Cleveland work around this problem by limiting themselves to making goods or providing services that cannot be offshored, like growing heirloom salad greens for local consumption.

“Now there’s a renewed interest in manufacturing as labor wages rise in developing countries,” he says. Moreover, he believes the recent economic crisis has also expanded public receptivity: “Even in the outer regions of the Midwest, where I spend a lot of time, people know that they’ve been victimized,” Peck says.

More...

Venture Capital - The new entrepreneurs

>Something Ventured is a documentary about silicon valley. It spans the last half of the 20th Century, from the beginning of Fairchild Semiconductor, the first computer startup, through Apple to Google. Offering vital insight in to the way venture capital works and how to sell yourself and your corporation to rase the necessary capital to capture the world's imagination. 

“Steve Jobs is a national treasure. He is so visionary, and so bright...uh, I had to fire him though.” - Arthur Rock, Visionary Venture Capitalist

“You know it wasn’t my goal to start an industry, my goal was to, um, make sure the science got translated into an endeavor that would be useful to people.” - Herbert Boyer, Founder of Genentech

“You gotta get money from strong people because weak people don’t invest in tough times. But that’s when most of the big winners are created.” - Jimmy Treybig, Founder of Tandem Computers

“I’m not interested in entrepreneurs who will do it our way. I’m not interested in entrepreneurs who think there’s a dress code. I’m interested in entrepreneurs who have a vision of doing something consequential—preferably that becomes BIG.” - Don Valentine, Founder of Sequoia Capital and early investor in Apple, Cisco and Atari

SOMETHING VENTURED tells the story of the creation of an industry that went on to become the single greatest engine of innovation and economic growth in the 20th century. It is told by the visionary risk-takers who dared to make it happen…Tom Perkins, Don Valentine, Arthur Rock, Dick Kramlich and others. The film also includes some of our finest entrepreneurs sharing how they worked with these venture capitalists to grow world-class companies like Intel, Apple, Cisco, Atari, Genentech, Tandem and others.

Beginning in the late 1950′s, this small group of high rollers fostered a one-of-a-kind business culture that encouraged extraordinary risk and made possible unprecedented rewards. They laid the groundwork for America’s start-up economy, providing not just the working capital but the guidance to allow seedling companies to reach their full potential. Our lives would be dramatically different without the contributions that these venture capitalists made to the creation of PCs, the Internet and life-saving drugs.

SOMETHING VENTURED was conceived by Paul Holland, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist. Paul, a general partner with Foundation Capital, is co-executive producer of the film along with Molly Davis of Rainmaker Communications. The film was directed by Emmy-Award-winning filmmakers Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine.

What Happened After Steve was Fired from Apple?

The Venture Capitalists:
Arthur Rock	Early investor in Fairchild Semiconductor, Intel, Apple and Teledyne
Tom Perkins	Founder of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, early investor in companies linke Genentech and Tandem
Don Valentine	Founder of Sequoia Capital; early investor in companies like Apple, Cisco, Oracle, Electronic Arts and LSI Logic
Dick Kramlich	Founder of New Enterprise Associates, investor in companies like PowerPoint, Juniper Networks, Macromedia and Dallas Semiconductor
Reid Dennis	Founder of Institutional Venture Partners
Bill Draper	Founder of Sutter Hill Ventures; Founder of Draper Richards
Pitch Johnson	Co-founder of Draper and Johnson Investment; Founder of Asset Management Company
Bill Bowes	Founder of US Venture Partners
Bill Edwards	Founder of Bryan and Edwards
Jim Gaither	One of the early developers of the venture financing structure still in use today

The Entrepreneurs:
Gordon Moore	Founder of Intel; one of Fairchild Semiconductor’s “Traitorous Eight”
Jimmy Treybig	Founder of Tandem
Nolan Bushnell	Founder of Atari
Dr. Herbert Boyer	Co-founder of Genentech
Mike Markkula	Early CEO of Apple
Sandy Lerner	Co-founder of Cisco
John Morgridge	Early CEO of Cisco
Robert Campbell SOMETHING VENTURED is available as a consumer DVD here. It can also be purchased at Amazon.com, iTune,s and Barnes & Noble.com. Educational DVDs are available here. To host a private screening, contact Ben Crossley-Mara of Zeitgeist Films atben@zeitgeistfilms.com or 212-274-1989.	Founder of PowerPoint "Something Ventured" is on Facebook, and you can follow @venturemovie on Twitter (#somethingventured, #venturemovie). Molly Davis Co-executive Producer SOMETHING VENTURED molly@rainmakercommunications.com 925-296-610