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A Community New Year Resolution:
Buy Locally!
By MICHAEL SCHENKLER
Follow me on Twitter @QueensTribune
I’m not big on New Year resolutions. That’s probably because I don’t care to deal with the discipline required to meet artificially set personal goals.
However, that doesn’t prevent me from making a resolution for the entire community – for all of us.
The community — the entire business community – is entering a third calendar year of what Henry Stern refers to below as the Great Recession. The concern here in Queens is not Wall Street, but Main Street. The terrible economic conditions are affecting business on all our Main Streets and sooner or later it impacts each and every one of us – if it hasn’t already.
When the recession impacts your Main Street, and people get laid off, stores close, less business is done, there is less cash in the community. Less cash to go out to eat, less cash to spend at the stores that are open, less cash to support the community – it is a continuing cycle which depletes the economic vitality of a community.
As we look around Queens, we are happy at how effective our communities have been in weathering the economic storm. But recovery has not been as quick as we had hoped.
So, how my friends, you ask, does this relate to a New Year resolution for us all?
I think it’s simple.
While we are all concerned with the world economy and are hopeful that the Obama administration is taking the necessary steps to deal with the situation here at home, we can help on Main St.
It doesn’t matter what you consider your community, you should support it. If your local shopping strip is on Northern Boulevard or the small shopping center on Merrick Boulevard is community to you; support it! If its Bell Boulevard Union Tpke, Austin, Steinway, Roosevelt or Metropolitan, you know what feels like home; support it!
Some may view their community as all of Queens; some as the entire city; those in the eastern part of the borough may include parts of Nassau when they think community.
Well my friends, shop there; dine there; spend your money there. Support your community.
Months ago, Peter Sloggatt, Associate Publisher of our Huntington-based Long Islander Newspapers, designed the logo which appears on this page: It Starts Here: Buy Locally. With Huntington Chamber of Commerce President Bob Bontempi and Northport Trustee Tom Kehoe, they spread the concept to the various business groups of the town. Now, you can walk through Huntington or Northport Village and see the logo on posters in stores along their Main Streets.
The logo has since been adopted by the Nassau County Chamber of Commerce. But Buy Locally is merely a poster – a concept. How do we make it work?
When you buy on the internet, chances are some fulfillment house far across the country processes the order. When you call to inquire or complain, a phone room in India or maybe the Philippines handles the work. The jobs created when we buy online, are created far from our community.
Our newspaper buys many of its office supplies from Staples. If we order by phone or online, the kid that stocks the shelves and the worker who runs the tape and packs the order is in Pennsylvania. If we go to the store in Bayside, two or three or more employees have work to do from our order.
When jobs stay in the community, so does the money. So those workers have cash in their pockets to eat out or spend on our Main Street.
Some promote “staycation” -- a vacation near to home.
Perhaps dining out can mean trying that exciting Queens restaurant instead of going to the City or eating down the block instead of traveling far from home.
Just do your part to keep the money close to home. Do as much as you can. It can make a difference.
No, one individual who practices “buy locally” does not make the difference. But an entire community or borough or city can.
Whether our efforts keep or create 10 or 100 or more jobs here in Queens, we can make a difference. For every dollar spent locally, we are contributing to keeping a job locally. And with that job, comes another paycheck contributing to the local effort.
Can you imagine if one million of the people in Queens joined the movement and kept the money in our borough?
Can they give up internet shopping? Can they decrease the amount of money they spend far from home? Can we as a community Buy Locally?
While the country’s economic gurus work on a long-term solution, we can help our neighborhood weather the storm. We can work to keep the money in our community.
A simple community New Year resolution: Buy Locally!
MSchenkler@QueensTribune.com
Michael Schenkler can be reached via this contact form.
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Albany’s Disappointing Year:
Fiscal Problems, Senate Squabble
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| Henry Stern
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By HENRY STERN
We are writing on a cloudy afternoon. Snow fell this morning. I have looked over the 111 articles we wrote in 2009 and are impressed by how many different situations have arisen in state and local government; most of them reflecting some kind of misconduct or shortsightedness.
If one writes too frequently of shortcomings, one can get the reputation of a Cassandra, Eeyore, Chicken Little, or boy who cried ‘Wolf.’ But what if the bearer of bad (or mediocre) tidings is accurate, like the soothsayer in Julius Caesar?
It is true that we have cried ‘wolf,’ but in the case of the city and state of New York, there is a big, bad wolf at the door: insolvency. The state’s fiscal problems are greater than the city’s because the governor and the legislature have been particularly improvident and continue to spend more money than the state collects in taxes. Receipts have been substantially reduced by the Great Recession, which is what we should call the consequences of the last two years.
The events, taking place since the fall of 2007, have created a difficult climate for local governments, which, unlike the Federal Reserve, have no access to printing presses and no significant relationship with the People’s Republic of China. Cities and states are obligated to provide continuing services to the public: police, fire, education, health, sanitation and parks, among others. Some expenditures, such as assistance to the poor, increase in bad economic times because the city and state provide assistance to victims of the recession and their families. To make matters worse, it is difficult to raise additional money through tax increases when tax receipts are declining, and individuals and businesses are in financial distress.
The legislature’s reluctance to make necessary reductions in spending intensified the state’s fiscal problems during 2009. This recalcitrance to reduce school and health assistance to localities comes mostly because such cuts would impact members of the unions that make substantial year-round political contributions to legislators, and regularly endorse incumbents at the biennial elections. Remember: “There is no such thing as a free lunch.”
Apart from fiscal concerns, the year was most notably marked by the farce which occupied the State Senate for over a month. Defecting Democrats gave Republicans control of the chamber in a sneak attack, but neither side for some time could put together the 32 votes needed to transact business. When the defectors returned to their original base, they were treated as conquering heroes, and given fiscal, titular and patronage rewards which they had previously been denied. Their successful operation, creating chaos and then receiving rewards for ending it, is evocative of the Somali pirates in the Indian Ocean. The difference is that the pirates had no prior loyalty to the shipowners; they were not betraying anyone, simply enriching themselves. Pedro Espada and his confederates were elected as Democrats; their actions were deceitful as well as possibly criminal. The defectors demanded and received millions of dollars in jobs and member items, just to return to the status quo.
Unfortunately, their fellow Democrats acted as enablers. So eager were the wimps and wusses to gain their own committee chairmanships and member items, they surrendered meekly to the demands of the pirates. A few hypocrites among them issued sanctimonious statements denouncing the turncoats and proclaiming their own distress. The truth is that any one of them could have stopped the coup by simply voting ‘No,’ because each Democrat was the 32nd vote needed to take action. The pathetic events of midsummer will stain the reputations of all the participants, both active and passive.
The effect of these shenanigans was to increase public contempt for the legislature to what appears to be an all time high. There may have been only four aggressors, the Amigos, but the other 28 Democrats in the Senate were complicit in paying the ransom.
The mills of justice took their toll on senior legislators, Senator Bruno and Assemblyman Seminerio among them. The two had, separately, set themselves up as consultants, and collected substantial fees from companies seeking contracts with the State.
In general our stories report the baser side of human behavior, because that is what one is most likely to encounter in the corridors of power at the State Capitol. The most common sin among legislators is greed, or avarice.
To sum up Albany in 2009: A weak governor; an appointed lieutenant governor, state comptroller and junior United States senator, with others angling to take their jobs; a senate in anarchy; an efficient assembly with some ethically challenged members; a state attorney general waiting in the wings for the collapse of the regime, whose goal is to put it out of its misery by exerting a minimum of force necessary to do the job.
All the best to you, your family and your friends.
StarQuest@NYCivic.com
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Not4Publication.com by Dom Nunziato |
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