Wall Street Tells Us What to Buy Just jotting down some thoughts here. I can only look at things from my own perspective so here it is. Wall Street has taken over the corner mom and pop markets. Local business does not exist anymore and it's all Wall Street corporations that provide our goods and services. You'll see these malls and shopping district have popped up throughout the country and they're all the same. You can go into a Target in Wisconsin or California and it's the same building with the same inventory in pretty much the same places. I can't begin to list all the troubles with this but I'll give you one example. Our local office supply store, where I grew up, was owned by one of the cheer leaders parents. It was a local business that seemed to make a good living for her family. They hired local people and even bought some local goods. One of the products I could buy in their store was 14LB paper. I would cut it up and make note books by binding it together with glue and a 60LB paper cover. 14LB paper is thin and is like Bible paper. The paper they sold was also durable, solid, so you could write on one side and it didn't show through and obstruct the other side. They had a variety of different types of paper. Like a lot of people I started buying at Office Dept and Staples. It soon became apparent that I couldn't get 14LB paper and the counter clerks at Staples told me they couldn't order it. I noticed all the paper they had was 20LB and it made lousy bound notebooks. I wanted to buy some more 14LB paper so I went back to the office supply store owned by the cheer leaders parents, but it wasn't there anymore. It had shut down and gone out of business; put out of business by Staples and Office Depot. Phone calls and letters to Weyerhaeuser, James River, Strathmore paper company and other big paper manufacturers couldn't give me a source for 14LB paper except in 12000 pound rolls. For all intents and purposes it no longer existed in the American market place. No one was packaging it for the consumer market. My grandmother used to keep a stack of paper by the telephone and it was 14LB paper. I somehow got the impression that her generation preferred it because it was more compact. Now at the end of the twentieth century you can't find it on store shelves anywhere. Is that progress or control over our lives by the fortune 500 companies that rule the economy. I think it's an oversight. Their statistics showed that consumers wanted paper for their computer printers in the eighties and nineties so that's what they stocked. They didn't take the time to think about other uses for paper and cut inventory costs by no longer ordering the 14LB paper - nation wide. Since their markets were so enstaunched (entrenched), they long since gave up thinking about what the public wants so they didn't bother to change their paper inventory. I mean give me a break. Do people use computer printers anymore? But the big box office supply stores still only carry 20LB paper - at least until their next Harvard Business graduate genius decides to be a mover in the company and order something different. Here's another one for you. It's the 21st century, well into it, 2015 and I notice you can't buy guitar strings anyplace, around here anyway. Target used to stock them but they no longer stock guitars or related paraphernalia like guitar strings. Some Wall Marts do, I notice online, but not where I live. It takes me weeks to get around to ordering guitar strings online when I used to just pop into my local music store and buy them, which unfortunately went out of business. Then for a while I was able to get them at Target, which that was out of the way and now none of the stores I frequent, within a thirty mile radius, stock guitar strings. One more if I may. People gladly give control of their lives to the fortune 500 companies for initial comfort, ease of use and hype. They've taken away your banking. If you were a small business, it used to be, you made a deposit once in a while to process monies received for your goods or service. You could rest assured that if you sent a check of money order to a company online they could process the payment. Now they can't. By signing up for an online payment service the merchant is giving up rights to their bank account. They can only deposit funds that have been processed by the service that offers them the web space and merchant account. I'm amazed at the number of people who think they're setting up their own money machine by setting up an online business and then relinquishing control of their payment processing the merchant service, usually sold to them under the guise of security. The power of wall street is like magic. They've taken control over peoples lives, telling them what they can do or buy or sell and the people don't even know it. We as individuals are worth no more to a billion or trillion dollar company than a microbial bacteria is to us. kb kbushnel.sdf-us.org/contact.html Yea! So why do I put my contact here anyway. No one has ever contacted me about any of these ideas, comments or quotes. What the heck. You've all sold out to Mammon anyway so why do we even try. You're all a bunch of self indulgent, self involved, experts and I'm sure I couldn't tell you anything anyway or even start up a conversation where you don't already know all the answers. Hello!