Letters From The Poor Man's Camp

Cornbread For Breakfast

2008-11-19T16:54:00.002-05:00

Since being retired, I have had a little more time to investigate life. I am as busy with my Poor Man's Camp projects as I have ever been, but somehow, I seem to do more not having to punch the time clock.

One of the things I have decided to investigate is cornbread. Cornmeal is an historic staple. My 2nd great grandfather and his comrades in the Civil War often had cornbread or cornmeal mush around the clock. My husband's Native American ancestors raised it, ground it with stones and made wonderful food with it year round.

I tend to cook it with cheese, salsa or peppers. You can make it into cakes, griddle it and pour maple syrup on top. You can stretch a dinner of meat or sausage with it, cook it in a casserole on top of meat or vegetables, eat it with milk for breakfast. You can do a million different things with cornmeal and cornbread--it is simple and it satisfies.

So how did we get from cornbread to modern business? Easy. I ran across this article while looking at different recipes:

What Jiffy Cornbread Tells You About Life
It is a short walk from cornbread to bumping your head on one of life's glaring lessons. Why do you have Jiffy Cornbread Mix in your pantry? The answer may surprise you.
View more »

The author eloquently describes how Jiffy Cornbread is a model for us all, in the same way that the simplicity of cornbread is nourishment for us all. Little advertising, no hype and the company completely controls the process from grinding the corn to making the boxes in which the finished mixes are taken to market. For 78 years, the same mixes and recipes appear regularly in our cupboards and nobody ever sees a hyped million dollar TV commercial. No movie stars eat it in front of the cameras, no one wears a t-shirt with Jiffy cornbread mix on it and Oprah hasn't discussed it. Nevertheless, Jiffy Cornbread is a recipe for success and the author tells us why.

As the author describes it, Jiffy is the ultimate Poor Man's Camp. We can still make it this way, folks, even in this age of hype, credit, overblown services and outsourcing in the name of saving a nickel. They did it--so can we .

Bring Back Those Crummy Jobs ...!

2008-11-15T20:44:00.011-05:00

This video was recently posted on "The Onion News Service", a never ending source of sardonic hilarity:

Obama Promises To Stop America's Shitty Jobs From Going Overseas

Like many satires, this one carries a grain of truth at the heart of it....And that is:

We think we are too good to do the "shitty" jobs.

How did we ever get there? How did we go from the country of the "can do attitude" to the "sorry, I am too good to do it" attitude?

We have just elected a president and first lady who are exemplars of the "I'm too good to do it attitude". Mr Obama went to the finest private school in Hawaii and then to Harvard. Mrs. Obama also went to Harvard. Both of them have been heard to sneer about our country and its people . Mr Obama, in an attempt to woo the San Francisco elite, said "bitter people clinging to God and their guns " ; Mrs. Obama said "I have never been proud of my country until now." Both play the race card when asked why they can't be proud of being a common man-even though Mr. Obama is half Scots Irish and Mrs. Obama is also the descendant of slaveowners as well as slaves.

Well, I am not too good... I have a PhD and I dumpster dived at taverns for cans to make my way through school. I went to the field with the Army National Guard, delivered newspapers and sold china in a department store to do it. I went to one of the finest graduate schools in my field--and sorry folks, Harvard is NOT the best school in my field and I am not impressed with a Harvard education. I turned one down.

The problem here is a populace who sees the political process as no more than a "Dancing With The Candidates" show. We vote for those who are pretty, or we vote for a token candidate based upon some spurious notion of guilt from 150 years ago. If we vote for a minority based on his race, that is OK , "cool" and "making history"--if we vote for a majority based on his race, well, that is racist. Go figure.

What about hard work? What about devotion in the face of torture, even to the point of breaking? That used to be the American way. There used to be value in putting our hands in the soil, digging and facing adversity through our own effort. Even if we broke sometimes, well, at least we had the courage to take the chance.

Be that as it may, we need to move away from the "bread and circuses" model of governance and business. We need to dismiss the notion that any of us are too good to roll up our sleeves and get down to the job.

To comment on the video, I would like to offer this:

"Yes, I would like for the right for my son to have a shitty job. My first ancestor in America, Christopher Reynolds, had a shitty job. He came over as the indentured secretary to the governor of Jamestown in 1611. He was a slave, had no toilets, bugs and mosquitoes, lived with stinky men, rampaging Indians, and almost no women--how shitty a job is that ?

His descendants farmed the land, worked the mines, marched through a gauntlet of machine guns to resist union and management control...And I as his descendant, flipped burgers, collected unpaid bills, served in two militaries, dived in dumpsters, delivered newspapers, worked with dangerously ill people and prison inmates...

And I am proud of that. I am an American and I am never too good for any kind of work".

That was the way that made our country strong, and the lack of it, sadly, may be running us into the ground now.

WWJD--What Would Jefferson Do?

2008-11-10T21:30:00.010-05:00

The older I get, the more I turn to Thomas Jefferson.

He seems to have been at least as prescient as Nostradamus, though he was not trying to be. How's this for a statement of what is happening in the economy?:

"I sincerely believe that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies, and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale. "

We have both right now, and there is certainly danger. The foolish choices of the banking establishments have propelled us into a terrible crisis, just as he foretold.

And, interestingly, the first mission of a standing army on US soil was implemented in OCT 2008. For the first time since it was implemented after Reconstruction , the Posse Comitatus act of 1878 has been violated with the formal designation of a ongoing mission of a standing army on US soil to, among other things, quell civil unrest.

In the past, the Army could always be called in when there was a disaster or civil unrest that could not be handled by the state, as specified by Posse Comitatus. No problem with that; the appropriate checks and balances were in place. But now, the Congress has no say and the governors have no say in when the Army battalion will be called in.

These are "interesting times" as described by the famous Chinese curse. Will a brother be ordered to go onto the property of his brother and stand against him?

About standing armies and liberty, Jefferson commented

"The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.'

Today, I may have lost someone who I thought was a friend of 13 years, all because I didn't agree with his choice of candidate in the last election. This candidate had, by the way, been the one who'd been consistently advocated by the news media for the last year. Social negative pressure came from all around, namecalling and threatening any of us who didn't "get with the plan" and support this candidate.

Jefferson warned us about the media when he said:

"Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper."

"I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month, and I feel myself infinitely the happier for it. "

"The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers."

No one should ever follow the media slavishly. In today's world, it appears that the important task of appointing our leaders has deteriorated into voting for an episode of "Dancing With The Candidates". Vote by phone for the pretty one, folks.

And Jefferson may have been warning about my loss when he said

" I have never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend. "

I don't , but his silence suggests that maybe my friend does.

But what am I to do? After all , Jefferson also says :

"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent. "

and

"Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves are its only safe depositories."

It is very sad to think that I must make a choice between my friendship and my principles, or my business and my principles. However misguided or disenfranchised, I am still first of all, the "safe depository" of my government and my country.

It is not easy, but I must put my country before myself, or sadly, my friends .

America's Companies --DBA "Jabba The Hutt"

2008-11-07T18:34:00.005-05:00

For eight years, I have been a good customer of an unnamed payment processor for personal internet auction sales and money transfers. Their percentages for the service were high, but who's to gripe about it? Those of us who could not or would not pay a high dollar merchant services account did well enough with this. They evidently worked their way to fame and fortune off those of us with our own auction site Poor Man's Camps and they were eventually bought out by an unnamed auction site.

But, along with the rest of American business, it seems, this company has now embraced a new business brand.

Enter the Poor Man's Payment Processor, now DBA as Jabba the Hutt.

[Remember the trader from Star Wars? Jabba was big, slow, lazy and greedy. He rarely told anyone the truth. He explained himself to no one. He robbed people. He thought he had people chained to his leg where they could not--or would not get away.]

The unnamed folks are the payment processor--come on, I'm not getting my money till they get theirs. This is a no lose situation for them . Not only am I NOT borrowing money from them--they actually have the use of my money until they turn it over.

So what is the sudden deal of demanding a credit score before making a decision to process further sales? I asked them for a point of sale account to make a few lousy transactions at flea markets, (that again will profit them at their inflated percentages without risk) and suddenly I am treated worse than a Hare Krishna pandhandler at the airport.

"No point of sale processing because of your credit score" they said, "But oh yeah, you can now pay us $30 a month for what you get for free already, website processing".

I ask why, and get the all purpose "the government made us do it". "Well, why didn't any of your competitors require that I meet some sort of nebulous credit score requirement before they offered me the service". Dead silence. Then I got "cutoff" on the phone and my emails are never answered. I get an occasional email, but it is always from a "no answer" return mail at the company.

So I finally had to shake my head, come up out of the slime and say

"When did I get chained to their leg, dressed in a harem outfit?"

And guess what, I'm not. I signed on immediately with one of their reputable competitors at an attractive rate and with courteous service. There is such a thing.

Meanwhile, this company seems to be just another example of the reason why the financial backbone of America is breaking.

Like Jabba, they're big. Too big to make the nimble movements needed to dodge the lightning bolts of our current economic storm.
They're lazy and complacent. "What, us do something for your business? What ARE you thinking?" And the use of a credit score is downright lazy. Did anyone wake up and notice that today's credit score isn't reflective what the person does? Like, how much time does it take to review the record of a customer's years long dealings with you? The credit score is arbitrarily raised and lowered when companies are starting to fail through their own practices and wish to shovel the blame onto the consumer. The best predictor of a client's behavior is their behavior with YOU.
They are slow. Now, it doesn't have to be that way, but bigger and more successful is slower these days. I do business with a webhost right now that answers any questions with a few hours by email and immediately by phone. Moreover they answer me with a native American English speaker here in the US. Now that is responsive to the client, getting knowledgeable people right on the problem and taking care of it. Not waiting three days to send somebody an email with the FAQ page referenced (like I, a PhD, was too retarded to have already read the FAQ page?) Oh, yeah, and an email that forbids any reply.
They don't tell the truth and they explain themselves to no one. Ask the "why" question and see how fast you get shunned or bullied.
They rob people . Hike the rates arbitrarily, charge for non-existant "extras".

I've decided I am tired of doing business with Jabba the Hutt. You can't appease a monster, it will only make him grow. My worth as a human and a businesswoman is not measured by three arbitrary numbers that reflect the environment more than me.

I am not chained to anyone's leg, and I refuse to wear a harem outfit.

Watch me leave, Jabba. Watch me leave.

The New First American

2008-11-05T23:42:00.003-05:00

Yep, the election was last night. Of course, the Poor Man's Camp has something to say about it. It is an uncertain time for all of us in small business. We watch, we wait and we hope that a government has not been empowered to take away the rights and the duties of the small businessman.

We Poor Men remember what Mr. Obama said to "Joe the Plumber", one of us. Open a business, gross 250K (not a lot for a business with employees and overhead) and we will tax you and "spread your wealth around". Mr. Obama purports to be a learned man--does he not remember the words of Thomas Jefferson ?--

“The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.”

Small business DOES spread the wealth around, by creating jobs.

We Poor Men also remember what Mr. Obama said in order to pander to the votes of liberal San Franciscans

"they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations"

Well, yes, Mr. Obama, we are bitter. But we are bitter at people who despise us, who mock us and what we believe. Lacking human beings to cling to, humans of honor, we cling to our guns and our God.

That said, I am willing to give you the benefit of the doubt , Mr. Obama. We all pander to someone for something--if you pander for votes, well we can understand what you are doing, even if we don't like or respect it.

But now that you have the votes from the people you pandered to--Will you be yourself now? Will you be a full human being who serves all the people of the US?

In the beginning, the hope of us all was that you would rise to be the embodiment of us all--blood of the Scots Irishman and African in one flesh, the servant of neither and of all.

However, your cause has been hijacked by those who state that you are the "messiah" of the black American (Thank you , Louis Farrakhan). Is that who you are , Mr, Obama , Oprah's servant, Farrakhan's messiah?

Is there nothing left of you to serve all the American people, not just a minority special interest group?

This is what we look for, this is what we wait and watch for. That you will rise up beyond being the token lackey of certain ethnic groups and political correctness liberals. That you will call upon the warrior within you and rise beyond the people who hijacked your campaign in their service. That you will say, "I am for all the people, not just the blacks, not just the armchair academics. "

Will you do that, Mr. Obama ?

CAN you do that?

The Poor Men need you down here at the camp.

There is work to do.

You Can't Buy American in America

2008-11-04T12:35:00.003-05:00

The idea seemed logical and simple. Sell patriotic t-shirts made in America by Americans.

Easier said than done. All of the major national "print on demand" vendors don't carry products made in America . Would General Nathanial Greene really feel honored if his face appeared on a t-shirt made in a sweatshop in Honduras? By a child laboring at a loom in Bangladesh? I don't think so--it would seem to be against his principles.

The vendors are cagey, of course . "We have fair labor contracts", they say. Like those are worth the paper they were written on.

Many years ago, I had the experience of attempting to run a business in a third-world country that I shall not name. It was a simple submarine sandwich shop catering to a nearby American military population. Three or four kinds of sandwiches, bread baked for us by a local vendor , vegetables and meats obtained at a local market and bottled soda. How tough is that?

Well, it was very tough if we weren't standing there every minute monitoring the staff. As it was, we would show up unannounced to discover all sorts of scams designed to skim a nickel here, a nickel there off the profits. Cheaper soda bought with petty cash "under the table" with the profits pocketed by the manager. Underaged street children being intimidated into cleaning tasks that we'd hired an adult for...Hookers shilling for free sandwiches...It was a surprise a minute. Like trying to keep up with my dogs who keep digging their way back under a fence.

We had to close because we lost so much to fraud and theft on the part of the employees and the customers. Were these evil people? No, not particularly. They simply didn't come from a culture who valued hard work and honesty. We just couldn't stand over them every minute of every day.

Aside from being unable to monitor and enforce compliance with fair labor standards overseas comes the more murky issue of intimidation and human enslavement. We all know that psychological abuse and bullying in the workplace is bad over here . Trust me, it is much worse in cultures where there is no national value regarding free speech and the right to challenge a hostile workplace. Employees work for pennies, have their jobs threatened, are sexually victimized and physically assaulted. There is no mechanism for complaint or remedy. If they complain, they are out on the street. How will their children eat? The employees put up with it silently.

Now , our current outsourcing companies would certainly disagree with me, but this sure sounds a lot like modern day slavery. Working in bad conditions, disrespected, brutalized , bought and sold through arbitrary threats and dismissals. I thought we figured out that slavery was bad 150 years ago--why do we condone it by outsourcing to save a few pennies?

"Well, the people are free to work at what we will pay them. They choose to work for us." Really? Wasn't that a good argument for slavery back in the day? "Auntie Mable wouldn't know what to do if she wasn't here with us. She wants to be here".

These arguments aside, I would like to propose that we look aside from a few pennies we would save. I would like to propose that we resolve to buy American--and from North Carolina if possible--for one reason only:

The American worker.

The American worker is you, your family, your neighbor. The American worker has our values, our sense of what is right and what is wrong.

Of all the many things to be admired about the American worker , the thing I like the most is that, in any situation, there will be at least one person who will stand up for what is right.

There is always one "squeaky wheel" who will dig his/her heels in and say "Don't bully me. Fire me if you want. This isn't right, and I won't stand for it".

So as you consider your purchases in these hard economic times, consider that one good American shirt might be better than three cheap foreign ones. You don't have to buy MY shirts, but please consider buying American.

Not out of some sort of misguided protectionism, but to support the people who are willing to say :

Don't Tread on Me !

Getting Our Hands Dirty

2008-11-03T23:22:00.000-05:00

My ancestors have done a lot of interesting things. Mostly they farmed, they fought in every war since the French and Indian War, and they used tobacco. Not trendy by today's standards, but very American and rather cool, in my opinion. I raise dogs, served in the Navy and the Army and use tobacco just to see my peers get all twisted up about it. Trendy is not interesting to me but bucking the trends is great fun.

My father's ancestors came down to Missouri from Illinois after the Civil War . They farmed, ran a saloon, and sat on the coroner's inquest jury after the Younger-Pinkerton Gunbattle outside Roscoe MO. Because they happened to be living atop the most extensive lead and zinc fields in the world at that time, they became miners.

One of the most interesting things about mining in the Tri-State area (Missouri, Oklahoma, Kansas) was their resistance to unions. They stubbornly insisted on doing it all themselves, resisting big business and big unions alike. The essence of the "poor man's camp" was that you learned everything you needed to do the work all the way through the process and you did it.

One of my great great grandfathers, James Bodine, was one of the many who operated his own "poor man's camp" in Jasper County MO . Grandfather Bodine (himself or with one partner) leased the land, prospected, dug out the ore himself , smelted it and loaded it on a mule to send it off to market.

In Grandfather Bodine's case, his partner had to pull out of one venture due to having financial trouble and being unable to feed his family. Grandfather Bodine then proceeded to strike it rich a few months later --and the first thing he did was to go to his partner and give him what would have been his share of the profits if he'd stayed.

Now THAT was a man...Where are the Grandfather Bodines now ? Where are the people of vision, hard work, fairness to their neighbors? Whatever happened to American small business, the cornerstone of our culture?

I started this blog in the hopes of finding others who are rethinking the American business model as I am . Why do we think we need easy credit, venture capital, major startup funding? Why make our ability to conduct business dependent on the whim of the corporations?

Here in my rural NC county, we have people selling home grown produce, making wine from their own vineyards, advertising services with a little sign in their yards. We are finding that if we go to our neighbors first for what we need, we can all make it.

I sell fine dogs that I breed and train, and t-shirts and gifts honoring our fathers in the Revolutionary War. I crawl to no one for money, preferring to risk my own pension, not that of other people . It seems to me that if we are willing to work hard, be patient and be creative, we ought to be able to build our businesses the old fashioned way.

So this is a record of my own "poor man's camp", my own experiment in raising a business independently. I welcome the input of others who wish to do the same.