This is a question which has been coming up more and more lately. Back in March I made quite a few posts on that author site I hang out on stating the business model could not survive. I have even had a previous blog entry about it last year some time I think.

Here is a prediction for you though:

Inside of three years there will either be no large publishing houses, or their financial condition will be worse than Borders was two years ago.

The future printed market is not wide scale distribution through traditional, but “available exclusively at xxx” like Craftsman used to be available only at SEARS.

I did some research and found that when book buyers at Target choose a title for their on-line book club (I didn’t even know they had a book club of any kind) it is generally a minimum 100,000 copies sold, but usually closer to 250,000 copies. We are, of course, currently talking about books available to the general book buying community. Currently they are using some broker/distributor which I have never heard of, but I cannot believe that company is getting into the middle of book buying transactions for free. If Target wants to really wade into the $10 hard cover market it is going to have to start making deals directly with Indie authors and small publishers. The other Big Box stores are all moving into the book market and many have joined the $10 hard cover battle.

While it is quite true that nobody could possibly hate Amazon.com more than I do, here is an interesting article.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704912004575253132121412028.html?KEYWORDS=vanity+press+goes+digital

Please note the portion which says Amazon will be printing this book. It didn’t say Simon & Shuster (sp?), Random House, or any other large publisher. Amazon is going to print the book and compete directly with publishers who are selling books via their site. Quite frankly, this is the new model…well close to it.

1. Books will be initially released in PDF or eBook form via authors directly (hopefully with heaps and gobs of professional editing first, because right now a lot of raw sewage gets released by CreateSpace and the other enabling firms which don’t mandate any professional editing.)

2. A paid reader for one of the big box chains will read and like one of the titles.

3. After checking with the author and verifying no other deals are on the table they will kick the title up to the buyer.

4. The buyer will skim or just take at face value the paid reader’s recommendation, then make an offer to the author of “available exclusively at XXX”. No investment will be required by the author, they will simply pay them roughly $2.00/copy and contract out the printing themselves. Deal good for one year with right of extension.

5. Author will tell friends and jump with joy when they see a small add in the weekly sales flyer for their local store.

6. Some 30-90 days later, checks will start arriving and author will be quite happy.

The new model won’t have 20 layers of middle people all taking a cut. There won’t be pulped print runs (unless there is a major printing error) as we’ve all seen these stores run “end of season clearance” sales, which is what they will do with the few titles they buy and don’t put on the book club list.

New authors will end up with something they never get from a major publishing house. Marketing! These big box stores know how to work their customer base and they won’t select a title which doesn’t feed directly into their market. The companies buying movie options will have something they don’t often get…real numbers and direct feedback from Joe and Jane consumer who paid for and read the book. (Most of those big box book clubs have on-line forums for people to comment on the books.) In short, we won’t have to live through another “Sahara” movie or court drama.

http://www.omm.com/newsroom/News.aspx?news=767

Major grocery and supermarket chains have also started wading into the book business, and even the $10 hard cover battle.

http://new.publishersweekly.com/pw/print/20090427/17159-books-stay-part-of-the-grocery-store-mix-.html

Meijer has taken books in their store from a small rack on a back wall to a section of the store which stocks roughly 100,000 units according to some sources.

Think about it. What is pretty much the only thing fueling the growth of POD right now? Scams telling Indie authors they can make big money paying an exorbitant per unit printing cost if they “publish” with this service, only printing books as needed…after they pay for NNN copies up front. While there are legitimate business reasons to move long tail titles into POD, printing first run books which are not low volume textbooks or graphics intense is simply inexcusable. Toner puts out a much lower quality product at a much higher cost than ink. You need to have a print run of around 1,000 copies to get the benefits of ink, but for a big box store that is going to print 100,000 – 250,000 copies initially (or only 5,000 copies if the title is to be a regular shelf title) this is not a problem. (Actually, some of the direct to plate printers can only print about 50,000 copies with a single set of plates, so the bigger runs would be scheduled as separate runs of 50,000 each.)

Amazon has already fired the first volley. They have announced that THEY, not one of the publishers supplying them with books, will be the printer for that woman’s book. This won’t be an isolated case with them. It is one of the reasons they make it so free and easy for Indie authors to get books onto the Kindle. They want the Kindle to be the screen for those titles they choose to print. Now other retailers will have to buy books FROM Amazon if they want the title. If it sold 36,000 eBooks, it will most likely sell enough print copies to warrant shelf space. Some current industry numbers put eBooks at 5% of unit sales for a title: 0.05x = 36,000 x = 36,000 / 0.05 x = 720,000 if the industry analysts are correct.

Yes, there will be some die hard book buyers who will say nothing compares to the experience of reading a book with a $12 Latte before buying it from a book store. They are a minority. Everybody has to eat and go to the bathroom. This means everybody shops at either a supermarket or a big box store with a grocery section every week. If you don’t consider yourself a book buyer, how often do you actually go into a book store? Only during the Christmas shopping season? I thought so.

As a travelling consultant you would think that I would encounter this situation more often than I do. Well, one would think that if they didn’t know I usually try to take contracts long enough in length that I can move directly into a Corporate Housing unit rather than a hotel. My current contract was a phone call of desperation out of the blue. It seems that I specialize in these contracts anymore…off-shore resource brought in was a supposed OpenVMS expert…they sat at the client site sucking air for a length of time without ever actually doing anything and without bothering to buy a copy of my OpenVMS application development book in a desperate attempt to learn the platform…now project is desperately behind and off-shore consulting company is about to be thrown out on their collective asses unless they bring someone in to get the project back on track…I’m sure you guys have heard this all before. No off-shore project ever actually succeeds, they simply have success redefined to be whatever got delivered and all documentation about what was requested shredded.

The unseen downside I’m talking about today though, is the hotel industry. There have been too many commercials on television for the cheap hotel and travel sites. It worked out well when they were a secret know buy a connected few thousand business travelers. It was even OK when they were known by mom & dad planning to take that trip to spend some time with the grand kids. It’s certainly not OK now. Last night was a shining example of that.

Hotels are hard hit. Really be hotels are the hardest hit of all. They are also the hotels capable of offering the cheapest room rates via those travel sites…but…none of those travel sites make a bidder read and sign a “Code of Conduct” before allowing them to book their hotel stay. None of those hotel sites ask for driver’s license or perform a background check prior to renting someone with a “valid” credit card a room. None of that matters when they are surfing the 2 star and under bracket, but now things are tight enough you can get 3.5 stars and up for around $45/night. I know I booked this 3.5 star hotel for 21 nights at $45/night. When the hotel is selling rooms at this rate to business travellers they are getting customers who implicitly understand the code of conduct for hotels in the higher star brackets. They also tend to spend a bit more on the over priced drinks at the hotel bar and opt to purchase the $12 breakfast buffet which doesn’t come with the room. We are odd creatures we business travelers. When we spend over $50 for a room we want some kind of breakfast thrown in, but under $50 we will go ahead and buy breakfast.

What is happening now is that a lot of the “ Motel 6” crowd is finding its way into the 3 star and up hotels. I don’t begrudge anyone who knows how to behave in such a hotel getting a great room at a cheap price. The Motel 6/Red Roof Inn/frat party crowd on the other hand, I begrudge whole heartedly. You see, they are the ones that tend to check in shit-faced drunk at 8:30pm then put one guy on the luggage cart with two pushing down the hallway screaming their heads off. Not only does it piss off the other guests (some of whom didn’t book via those hotel sites and paid near full price for their rooms) it overworks the understaffed front desk which must now send someone up to the room in question to educate the people about proper hotel etiquette and the fact that if they don’t quiet down the police will have to be brought in to haul their asses out of the building.

Like logic ever works with someone that drunk and rowdy.

Hotels need to offer two different rates to these discount sites. One rate for customers which have already provided the driver’s license of EVERY OCCUPANT and all have come back with a clean background check, and the near list price rates for those people who have a few drunk and disorderly or other arrests in their background. It’s not that those people cannot be entertaining to be around, and generally good people otherwise, it’s just that there is a higher percentage chance they end up having cart races down the hall while other guests are asleep.

There are times when I could save myself a lot of heart ache if I followed my instincts or took my own advice. Recently, I’ve been back in Dublin, OH doing some work for a new client out that way. The start date was kind of rushed so I didn’t get everything packed I wanted to or configured the way it would be needed. I even had to use my own notebook at the client site, a thing which doesn’t happen often in this day and age. Of course, this is one of the last few remaining sites in the world still using Windows on the desktop, so my unused Vista Home Premium partition has been pressed into service.

I guess you could say this frustration started a few years ago. After having nothing but miserable experiences with the Winbook I purchased at Micro Center. I was told by many that the motherboard in it was by Toshiba, yet, a year or so later when they had supposedly high end Toshiba A215 notebooks on sale for next to no money, I ignored my own advice and bought one. It’s a classic Toshiba product, a boat anchor the day it was made. Advertized as having a “faxmodem”, just like the Winbook, it has only a modem. The thing was also strangled with only 2Gig of RAM. Ubuntu could work fine, but multiple terminal sessions open along with a couple browser windows and Vista was wheezing like death warmed over.

I tolerated this condition for a couple of weeks, but could take it no longer. Despite knowing I would be better off to buy the memory at Micro Center and installing it myself, I called the local Worst Buy to chat with the Geek Squad since they were close to the hotel where I was staying. They wanted $39 labor to put the thing in. I knew I was being Googled by that fee, but I persisted. I asked them to quote the memory price (knowing full well a 2Gig module for this notebook goes for around $50) and the person on the phone said they had them for around $55.

After arriving at the store, I was told I had to go pick out the memory from the store floor. Naturally the only memory module they had was listing for over $70. The sales rep swore I couldn’t possibly have been quoted a price of around $50. I took the thing back over to the Geek Squad desk and told him about the price shaft. After confering with the person in the back, the one I actually spoke with, he told me I was quoted an “Internet Only” price, but if they could find a matching price they could price match it for me. I stood there for a while longer letting the price of not having brought a toolkit sink in. This $50 upgrade was now over $120 and climbing. Finally, I picked up my notebook and walked out of the store.

Life sucked at work the following day without having done the memory upgrade. When it was over I surfed to the Micro Center Web site and sure enough, they had the EXACT SAME BRAND memory module for $55. Apparently the Geek Squad computers don’t bother checking the stores which will actually be lower in price. Guess what? They also had a screw driver set on sale for $4.99 as I walked in the door.

Once I arrived back at the hotel room, it took longer to cut the memory module out of its plastic container than it did to do the actual installation.

Actual cost of Upgrade? $60 + tax.

Not getting Googled by Geek Squad? Priceless

It’s a beautiful day outside, and after spending some time playing with the puppy and thinking of things gone by, I got to thinking about the car I miss most. There have been a few cars that I loved over the years. Some I kept well beyond 100,000 miles long before that was considered normal or acceptable. One car which I really miss is my 1990 Eagle Premier Ltd. Since most of you probably don’t even remember that car, let me provide you a few links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eagle_Premier

http://www.allpar.com/model/premier.html

It was the end of AMC and the beginning of the Iococca golden years at Cryco. It also happened to be when I finally had 120,000+ miles on my AMC Concord station wagon and had to look around for a new ride. (I actually didn’t trade the Concord, but sold it later, with > 130,000 miles on it, to some high school aged brothers who put a transmission in it and handed it down betwixt the three of them.) It wasn’t just the first time I had a job paying enough to let me buy a brand new car either, although many will try to that.

The Premier had lines like nothing else on the road at the time. It was one of the first production cars in an “average joe” price range to feature interior climate control. Some of you might not remember that phrase, but, when set on automatic, you chose a temperature and it chose everything else. For its day, the V6 had balls to spare. While there are faster 4 door sedans on the road now, the Premier held its own matching wheels against BMW and Mercedes models it/I encountered…of course…that was back when radar detectors actually worked and the patrol officers had a little more leeway in judgement…<sigh>

Probably the coolest thing, which I haven’t seen duplicated on any car ever again, was the “wings” on the steering column putting the most used controls within reach of your fingertips so your hands never had to leave the wheel. It lead to a beautiful and clean looking dash. I remember the bizarre turn signal which was a paddle that didn’t stick. You moved it like a regular turn signal, but it followed your finger back. The turn signal stayed on and used the same “chime” as the rest of the car’s features, so it was a bit difficult for the untrained owner to tell if the turn signal was on or someone hand managed to open a door without making any noise.

As I recall, even with the way I drove it, that car averaged in the low 20’s MPG wise. Pretty much about the same as my current Buick Rendezvous. Funny, but we have had 20 years of “improvements” from Detroit and a V6 with a 4 speed automatic still gets about 24 MPG on the highway in real life and 17-19 around town.

I have to admit. If I was shopping for a car and Cryco announced they were re-introducing the Eagle Premier Ltd. I would order one before production even got started. Of all the cars I’ve owned, it’s the one I miss the most.

It has really gone too far. I don’t follow sports at all, but I heard the bullshit reasons for expelling one U.S. Team member prior to the closing ceremonies, now we read this:

The International Olympic Committee will investigate the actions of Canadian women’s hockey players who celebrated their gold medal victory Thursday night by swigging beer and smoking cigars on the ice in Vancouver.

A number of players, including 18-year-old superstar Marie-Philip Poulin, were drinking alcohol on the ice following the team’s 2-0 defeat of the United States. (The legal drinking age in British Columbia is 19.) Players lingered for more than 70 minutes after the awards ceremony reveling in the arena, which was empty except for media and arena staff.

For crying out loud! They’re Canadian! They drink and smoke, thus enjoying life, much like we used to here in the U.S.A. until we allowed religious zealots that are one hijacked plane away from being the next Bin Laden into our governmental process. Now, everything which makes life worth living is taxed out of existence and banned in most places you would want to do it. Our jobs are being shipped over seas and viciously poor quality product is coming back in return, along with payoffs into the pockets of the terrorists which have been put into government by those same religious zealots who claim abortion is killing yet blow up abortion clinics with patients and workers inside.

Let me go on record as telling this terrorist organizations the following: You may have fucked America beyond recognition by taxing and or removing alcohol, tobacco, and all real pleasure known by man, BUT LEAVE CANADA ALONE. All one has to do is take one glance at this debacle known as health care reform to know that one more religious zealot added to the mix would make us the next Iran, not something any country would want to be, except the “moral minority” bound and determined to force their religious practices upon the world…just like Bin Laden.

I guess I could also title this post “Are There Any Ethics Left in Technical Recruiting”, but everybody already knows the answer is “No!” In order to make anything blog worthy about that statement, one must be able to demonstrate just how non-existent ethics really are. This goes way beyond the typical practice of flying illegal aliens over, paying them on a 1099, and stacking them 8 deep in a room at Homestead Studio Suites. I’ve had a lot of smaller examples over the past few weeks, but one recent example really stands out and should serve as a good example for the industry.

Like many other bottom feeding consulting firms, this firm uses a precious stone/metal as its name. A more accurate name for the firm would be clinker, but that is an entirely different blog post. Like many other bottom feeding consulting firms, this one boats of its memberships in organizations which are supposed to improve IT and consulting in general. They claim to belong to ASA (American Staffing Association) which has a published code of ethics, and TechServe Alliance (formerly NACCB) which also has a Statement of Business Principles which also wraps up a code of ethics. The thing of it is that nobody actually audits to see if the firm meets any of the requirements or violates the code of ethics. A consultant or a client must crawl across broken glass filing complaints with the organizations with little hope of intervention.

Simply put, once the logo is on the company Web site, it’s business as usual for most of the members. Here’s a shiny example.

Here are your responsibilities as a technical recruiter:

1. To read up enough on the industry skill sets to know that the REQ in your hand requesting a Windows CICS developer is just wrong in so many ways. When a requirement comes in with an acronym you’ve never heard of it is your responsibility to research a definition before including it in your posting.

2. When you publish a phone number with your job/contract opening, it is your responsibility to respond either by email or phone to everyone who leaves a message within 2-3 business days. If you don’t want phone calls your ad must clearly state people are not to call and must not show a phone number.

3. When you present a candidate to a client it is your responsibility to keep the candidate up to date. If the position “ goes on hold” it is your responsibility to inform the candidate the same day. Yes, email is fine. At no time is it ever acceptable to hurl a resume over the wall and ignore the candidate.

4. It is never ethical, moral, and in most cases not even legal to tell a candidate to rewrite their resume to match the job posting with all of the buz words from the requirement highlighted.

5. It is your responsibility to talk with the candidate before presenting them, not only to agree to billing rate, but payment terms and contract duration. It is never acceptable to simply present a resume which came in via email at some point without contacting the person. You will need an email from them stating they have given you the right to present.

There used to be technical recruiting associations which actually enforced these rules…well…the email thing is a rather new addition…replacing fax…but these were basically the rules. They are actually squirreled away in a lot of the ethics codes out there, but you usually have to find a supporting document when interpreting things like:

DO NOT misrepresent a consultant’s pay rate, contract terms, assignment duration, or other subjects pertinent to the business relationship.

DO actively avoid misrepresenting a consultant’s skills or experience.

DO NOT defame clients, consultants or competitors.

To treat all applicants and employees with dignity and respect, and to provide equal employment opportunities, based on bona fide job qualifications, without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, sex, age, disability, or any basis prohibited by applicable law.

To maintain high standards of integrity in all advertising, and to assign the best qualified employees to fill clients’ needs.

So, over the course of eight business days I left a message each day with Variable_J. I never received an email or a return voice mail. Adding insult to injury the greeting on Variable_J’s phone sounds like he recorded it after smoking his fourth joint of the morning. It leaves a caller with the impression he is off satisfying the munchies and may not return for days.

After eight days, I had pretty much had enough of this. I called the main number and asked for Variable_J’s boss. I was told that was Variable_K and transferred to his phone. I left a message stating that I had been trying to contact Variable_J for eight business days without response. I also informed him that the greeting on the voice mail sounded like he was stoned, and that the combination was highly unprofessional.

Some time later my cell phone rang with a RESTRICTED number. Naturally I didn’t answer. Telemarketers call like that now I’ve been told. A few minutes after that failed Variable_K called back from a regular number. He told me it was not cool to call the boss of a recruiter even if the recruiter wasn’t doing their job. He said never to bother him again and hung up.

You know, there was a time when the New York Attorney General would take the time to file wire fraud charges against such a place. Then again, that same AG tended to book a date with a hooker right after such a filing, so I guess justice must be somewhat limited in the world. Isn’t it really wire fraud to post membership logo’s on your corporate Web site, then adhere to none of the ethics codes those logos imply?

http://www.americanstaffing.net/members/code_of_ethics.cfm

http://www.techservealliance.org/about-techserve/techserve-business-principles.cfm

If you’ve worked in IT for any length of time you have encountered every type of bottom feeding technical recruiter. Some firms in the Chicago area have standing instructions with their receptionist to route all job related phone calls directly to a voice mail box and to empty that mail box any time it is full. I have heard of greeting messages from some, supposed heads of technical recruiting, that they would not be returning any voice mail left regarding a job opening.

It’s pretty obvious that ASA, TechServerAlliance, and all the rest of these agencies don’t bother policing their membership otherwise “clinker” wouldn’t be able to have their logos on its Web site.

I remember quite some time ago when there was an ad campaign which simply said “vote the crooks out of office”. Any money it raised went into running more ads. There were even T-shirts sold to fund the campaign. The campaign didn’t care what political party the candidate was in. Rather, it had a simply philosophy, every incumbent was obviously a career criminal which needed to be moved further away from the tax payer’s wallet.

Funny how things come back into style. I’m seeing a lot of the same campaign. Some say crook and others say criminal, but they have the same sentiment. We’ve all been royally screwed by both Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court. No, I’m not talking about Clarence Thomas, who said “no job is worth this” during his confirmation hearings, then took the robe and voted in favor of his former client, Monsanto, during a genetics trial which screwed farmers world-wide, not just in America, and every American tax payer that eats. I’m talking about the recent decision by the Supreme Court which said the limits on corporate campaign dollars were unconstitutional. Any entity can now spend as much as they want promoting the candidate of their choice, so now, big corporations are simply going to put forth one of their own employees and spend shareholder’s money promoting the employee, who is expected to help enact legislation no ethical person would enact.

Today, we are all watching as the checkbooks are open and the sky is the limit when it comes to trampling down health care reform. I would believe the healthcare companies have actually spent more in lobbying efforts than they spent in executive bonuses and stock options over the past 4 years.

Let’s be real here. We have the Post Office. We also have UPS and FedEx. The Post Office couldn’t turn a profit on a bet given its charter, and I’m OK with that. Six days per week a mail carrier delivers mail to every address in the country. Anyone that currently is inside of our borders can write a letter, place it in an envelop, and mail said letter to any address in the continental U.S. for under a buck. Not only is the cost low, but the letter will arrive within 3-5 business days…even on Saturday…for no extra charge. We always joke about the Post Office delivering the Christmas mail in June, but for the most part, it’s a money losing business which does a good job. UPS and FedEx have found ways to both compete with and utilize the Post Office. Those who have money and don’t like the Post Office have other options. Those who don’t have much in the way of money, still have service. Even if you never mail a letter, the Post Office will continue to deliver mail to your address.

I’m a Republican, though it hurts to say that out loud after two terms of snot-nosed-George. I want a public option. We already have Gubmint Motors putting out shitty cars and other manufacturers putting out better ones. Yes, you “could” get by with a Gubmint Motors vehicle, but after the screwing they gave the tax payer, nobody who pays taxes would even consider adding insult to injury by purchasing a new Gubmint Motors vehicle. Admittedly, in the future, I’m sure Congress and/or the White House will authorize pissing even more tax dollars down that abyss and funding programs to get low income people new Gubmint Motors vehicles to help clean up the environment. Of course, since many states have a mandatory insurance law, that program will simply be there to help fill the prisons faster.

I didn’t want Gubmint Motors. I was vehemently against giving any faction of those lying-thieving-inept-bastards one red cent from the federal treasury. We ended up with Gubmint Motors. While they will cook the books in Aurthur Andersen accounting style to “show” a profit, they can never pay back enough to the treasury to cover the royal *(&)_(*&ing we got by them ducking out on their pension and healthcare liabilities. Until they cover all of that along with every cent we’ve had to pay every former GM employee in unemployment and health insurance benefits, they haven’t turned a profit. I want to see a law enacted which garnishes the wages of GM’s upper management and Board of Directors taking 70% of their wages and 100% of all bonus and stock options from them until they pay back every last red cent of that debt.

On the flip side, I want a public option. I want a government run health plan which provides all of the basic coverage needed by both individuals and families and I want every citizen to have the option of signing up without any exclusions. Rather than basing the premiums on the current industry trend, I want the premiums to be based upon a person’s ability to pay. At some point your income will be low enough your coverage is free. Those people making more than $180K/yr (based upon adjusted gross on their 1040) would find the premiums quite high compared to regular commercial plans. The Gubmint Insurance option would never make money, but it would force a nationwide ethical threshold for insurance.

Right now we have absolutely nothing establishing a bottom. Each state licenses the health insurance providers it allows to operate within its borders. Naturally, there have been an awful lot of bribes and some states only have one or two “licensed” providers. This really hit home recently.

A friend from NY asked me what I did for health insurance. I said I went to this eHealthInsurance.com Web site, answered some questions, and took a real 80/20 policy which costs less than $500 every two months. I told him there were dozens of providers selling insurance there. We are in the same age bracket and industry. In NY there were about three different companies providing insurance and the “cheap” policy was pricing out at $1700/month if you wanted anything other than a “surgery only” policy. Just for grins he changed his zipcode to mine and wa-la! There were about a dozen competing insurance companies and he found premiums of under $500.

Will Gibmint Insurance help me? Yes, but not as much as it will help him and everybody else in that boat. People in those markets will flock to Gubmint Insurance simply until the premiums in their area drop to an acceptable level. I expect there would be a shuffling of premium pricing in IL. Whenever book sales are high and I’m working a lot of overtime consulting, my current insurance would be best. When there is another slow down and the income stream drops to around $20K, Gubmint Insurance based on ability to pay would be best.

It’s up to us to fix this. The midterm elections are coming up. Not only must we vote the criminals out of office by making certain no incumbent returns, but we must replace said incumbent with any third party candidate vying for the seat. We went through this back in the days of Ross Perot. Before the dude went weird and dropped out of the election, America was set to elect its first third party candidate. No matter how awful of a president he turned out to be, he would have been better than what we ended up with. One thing happened though. During the debates and the interviews, the two main party candidates fell all over themselves to point out just how much like Ross they were.

I’m not normally very political, but this is pissing me off. It’s obvious the bill of sale has been completed by the healthcare industry for every public official in Washington at this time. It’s time we flood Washington with people from all of those “other” parties who’ve never held public office, never had a taste of lobbyist dollars, and never forced an earmark into a bill just to get some lobbyist project funded.

Vote the crooks out of office and send in the third party candidates. It is the only way to effect change at this point.

Those of us who see the destruction and devastation all around us find it difficult to condone what others pursue as “a good business practice.” We have heard for years about stock market players (in particular mutual fund and hedge fund managers) pursuing short term gains to juice their overall portfolio. We have watched corporations which were once the model for the world sell their future down the drain in order to make a fast buck this quarter (think GM and its pension plan.) Hell, we the tax payer, have had to bail most of them out this year, yet their executives still demand multi-million dollar compensation packages.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that it has finally hit agriculture in an end-of-the-industry way. I’ve watched it happening for the past couple of decades. I’m not talking about the huge corporate farms poisoning the world in order to make a fast buck. Eventually the excess population would be weeded off and the remaining people would simply quit buying stuff from supermarket chains. Perhaps China would claim jurisdiction over the corporate executives who poisoned so many. After all, in China they have public executions for people that poison consumable products.

What is happening now is a perfect storm which will leave the land unable to grow enough food and no trick of technology will help it. I’m not some alarmist tree hugger. I’m simply someone whose made a living over the past 20+ years being a problem solving analyst. I can find nothing which will solve this problem. But I can find historical evidence to back up my statements though.

The information is a bit hard to find on-line without buying DVDs, but the History Channel has run at least one show covering the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and how the continual irrigation to grow things in a desert lead to “salted earth.” You can even find textbooks covering the subject of irrigation failure. http://mygeologypage.ucdavis.edu/cowen/~GEL115/115CH17oldirrigation.html

Irrigation, however, is only a tiny portion of the problem. In fact, irrigation was the first warning sign we were headed down the path of short term gains destruction. Today, all the stops have been removed and we are running flat out towards world wide starvation, all for the sake of a fast buck.

As always, MBAs are at the root of this problem. After having trashed every industry they have touched, they moved into agriculture. First it was just the equipment manufacturers, then it was the packing plants, and then into livestock production. Since they couldn’t control enough that way, they bribed the politicians with lobbyist dollars to change the tax laws. Just about the only way to pass on a family farm to your heirs became the LLC-trust tool. If you didn’t use it, the government would take 75% of the estimated value of all assets in death taxes. The LLC-trust tool eventually puts all family farms under the control of a corporation, and guess who runs the corporations? Nice huh?

Most of you will have no idea this is going on. Most of you simply see the advertising on the product packaging showing a hard working family farmer, his picturesque little plot of land with a big red barn, and perhaps a small family. Wide open spaces, happy livestock, and a person who is one with the land. Subconsciously you buy into this because you want to believe it. The simple fact is, nothing could be further from the truth. Every year Willie Nelson and a bunch of others put on an event called Farm-Aid, but every year, fewer and fewer understand what is behind it. The simple truth is, they are trying to save the last few remaining family farms which actually live up to that picturesque marketing image. Most of them have “gone corporate” in some fashion. Sometimes they simply are forced into a contract to raise livestock in an un-healthy manner (watch the documentary Food, Inc. for some memorable images of this.) Other times the LLC-trusts they are forced to do business with force them into a raping of the land.

When the trusts first started out, they weren’t a purely evil thing like they are today. The entire focus and charter of the trust was the care and husbandry of the land. Back then the trust would partner with a farm family on a 50/50 or similar basis. Buildings and equipment on premises were maintained, and soil tests were regularly done on the land to ensure it was improving every year.

Today, the MBAs have put the industry in a death spiral. The entire focus is squeezing every risk free dollar possible out of this goose until it quits laying golden eggs. Massively high cash rents are requested, and bottom feeders pony up. There is no soil testing nor soil care plan. The bottom feeders over plant and provide the soil with no additional inputs. The soil is strip mined in the truest sense of the word, only this kind of strip mining doesn’t leave a gaping hole in the ground. You “see” this strip mining in the average yield movement or relative to fields around them.

Of course now, it is illegal for a realtor or anybody else to request the five year average yield report from the ASCS office. Only the owner can be given that. Why? Because once land has been had by a strip mine farming operation it is worthless. Nobody living locally will purchase it. The realtor has to sucker in an “investor” from far away promising the new owner the same continued high dollar cash rent which will pay for the land in no time. Most banks in or near a farming community will no longer issue a loan to anyone who says they expect the farming operation to pay for itself via cash rent. They’ve gone down that road before. Five years into the loan the land is ruined and absolutely worthless. The bank is left holding the bag in most cases. A bunch of money spent with lobbyists got the law changed so the buyer now has to take the realtor’s word for the yields when the current owner refuses to cough up the ASCS documentation.

I’ve been watching this happen a lot lately. In an effort to try and squeeze out every last nickel from the golden goose of LLC-trust land, the farm managers have ceased doing any and all maintenance on the property. They got the cash rent jacked up extra high because the farm came with on-site grain and equipment storage. A functioning grain dryer was also pointed out. Well, the grain bins have gone past their life expectancy and the dryer ceased functioning two years ago, but the rent hasn’t come down. The new trend now is to tell the tenant that they have to provide their own storage and drying facilities. The original farm family would roll over in their graves hearing this, but today it is considered “good business practice” by the MBAs and Farm Management Teams.

Perhaps it is easier for me to see living out in the farm area part time. I’ve watched one farm which, while not the best in the world, used to average 120-160 bushel per acre corn and 35-42 bushel per acre for soybeans. The farmer who had it died. Things changed hands a few times until it ended up in some kind of trust renting to a strip mine farming operation. The first few years they had the farm the auger cart made many trips across the fields hauling grain away from the combine. It was not uncommon to see the cart weighting for one of 4-6 semis to return from an elevator. Two years in, the auger cart was making far fewer trips and you got to see trucks waiting for hours to get filled. Just over a year ago I watched as the combine, the auger cart, and the first truck all left the bean field at the same time. Ah, but a big farming operation like that can play the insurance game filing claim after claim. The insurance companies don’t mandate inspections and proof of good farming practices. They simply cash the premium checks and hope for the best. In the mean time, everybody’s premiums go up around the country.

Once upon a time, these operations were an isolated case. Now they are common. In fact, the MBAs that run much of the Ag industry magazine business are starting to hold them up as shining examples of “best farmers” due to the size of their operations and the equipment leasing business they give the large equipment manufacturers.

What is overlooked in all of this is the fact the land cannot be magically healed once an operation like this is done with it. The land will have to lie fallow for three to five years getting treatments of manure and lime. That won’t get it back to healthy, but it will get it back to where some legitimate farming practices can begin to tend it.

The strip mining practice isn’t just an American problem. Most of the large operations have grabbed as many dollars as they can in this country and raced down to Brazil ( and a few other places) buying up cheap land and stripping it bare. The Ag magazines are always running stories about large farming operations which exist on multiple continents. Think about that. A farming operation existing on multiple continents. Obviously not that picturesque family farm you see on the packages in the supermarket, so how come they are legally allowed to use those images?