Local Tea Party Activist starts his own news source

From its humble beginnings, the Tea Party has been suspected of being the brainchild of the elistists at the Fox New Network, and at the very least, MSNBC uncovered the constant promotion of the Tea Party by the FOX News Network in the movement’s earliest stages.

But the Tea Party has come a long way from its elitist beginnings. The party is currently known as a party of the people, rage against the machine, or simply anger in general at issues like excessive taxation and health care.

And it’s apparent that the Tea Party, strange as it seems, has landed right here in Branson, Missouri, a tourist town. In fact, here in Branson, there are several Tea Party groups that are heavily involved in Missouri politics. The Tea Party HQ is located on 248 downtown. The Branson Tea party has its own website and is run and funded by a pominent lawyer.

The Tea Party has begun endorsing—or not endorsing—state candidates like Roy Blunt, the poster child of the Republican Party, Mr. Big Tabacco, and Springfield, Missouri local. Such organization and unanimity is proof that the Tea Party is becoming a sort of machine in its own respect.

Most interestingly of all is the new upstart web news source created by a local Branson Tea Party activist. The website, American Policy Examiner, claims to be “A Tea Party Activist’s guide to American political science”. And its no makeshift website, this extensive site includes sources for researching politics, comprehensive biographies of every American president, and daily national news in relation to the conservative agenda. The owner, “The APE” (American Policy Examiner), writes a conservative blog unlike any written by Tea Party activists prior. In fact, Dana Loesch, who makes a living speaking at Tea Party rallies, doesn’t even have a domain for her blog, but rather, she writes on Blogger under a subdomain, something that can be set up in roughly five minutes. And even the infamous lone black Tea Party activist writes on such a blog.

Does the APE have what it takes to harness the power of Tea Party anger? Can the Tea Party come together, organize, and find a common political ground? And is the APE the answer to such a question, or will the Tea Party go as it came, in a sensational notion forgotten in the shadow of the bigger picture.

Shorty Smalls floating restaurant

According the the Missouri Department of Labor Standards, Shorty Small’s is not required to pay the minimum wage simply because their gross revenue does not exceed $500,000 per year.

Don’t believe me?

Here is an audio clip of Butch Garrett explaining to my voice mail that Shorty Small’s is not required to pay the minimum wage.

Butch Garrett

It’s difficult to fall short of the minimum wage as a server, because in most cases servers who fall short simply aren’t doing their jobs efficiently. But there are some exceptions.

I’ve served tables at various restaurants including Olive Garden and Chateau on the Lake. In other words, with several years of experience, I know how get tipped and I know how to provide guests with excellent service. But a server is only as good as the restaurant he or she works in. When patrons walk into a dump like the Shorty Small’s on the Branson Landing, the server’s tip percentage drops as a result of poor atmospherics (it’s interior design resembles a pawnshop or flea market). At the Chateau, the tip percentages are increased due to exceptional atmospherics (the perception of cleanliness and class).

Shorty Small’s is required to pay the standard tipped employee wage of $3.62 per hour. Traditionally, the server would get to keep their tips. However, to save money, Shorty Small’s requires their employees to share their tips with bartenders (even when no alcohol is sold) and hosts and hostesses. Such is called “tip sharing” and is common in restaurants. However, Shorty Small’s has taken it to the extreme. They use the tip share to pay the hosts and hostesses and bartenders the base wage. So in reality, the company is only spending half of what a law obiding restaurant would on labor. And such practices are surprisingly legal in Missouri.

Tip shares were designed to enhance the wages of bussers, who are paid a stardard hourly wage and contribute to customer service. However, Shorty Small’s has no bussers. The servers are required to bus the tables themselves, so Shorty Small’s once again saves money. They can afford to hire three servers for what one busser would have costed them. Such practices cuts the servers’ wage again, because now there are three times as many servers on the floor and more work to do.

Just in case there might be a legal problem with this system, Shorty Small’s requires servers who claim less than the minimum wage [when $3.62 + (tips – 2% of gross sales for tipshare) does not equal $7.25 per hour] to sign a paper stating that they did not claim all of their tips (that the server lied and really made more money). Thus, Shorty Small’s stays out of legal trouble. If the server refuses to sign, it’s grounds for termination.

If for some reason a server does not make minimum wage, he or she can contact the Missouri Department of Labor Standards and fill out a form and mail it to their office. The MDLS will look into the case, as they did in mine, and see if the complaint warrants legal action. However, as you can see in my case, a company must make more than $500,000 per year to be in violation of Missouri law.

The shadiest of its practices is that Shorty Small’s does not disclose to their guests where the guests’ tips are actually going. They intensionally lead guests to believe the tips they leave on the table are going to the servers, when in fact, they are going right into the hands of Shorty Small’s, the corporation, to pay the base wages of their hourly employees. And the very fact that Shorty Small’s can participate in such practices and not make $500,000 per year is a testiment to their poor business practices.

Read more:

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090718235705AA6gROa

Brennan Law Center, Missouri

Southeast Misssourian, “Minimum wage increases 40 cents”

Sunrise

(From Myrtle Beach, SC)

For the last ten years of my life, I cannot account for the innumerous applications that I’ve filled out that asked me for my racial makeup. EOE, Equal Opportunity Employer, at the bottom of the page always made me wonder if I was being given a fair chance as a white male. After all, white males are the one race and gender that has not been discriminated against over the life of the United States, thus I’m put at a disadvantage—particularly since whites are still the majority in the US.

However, my recent hiatus in Myrtle Beach has offered a new perspective—one of opportunity for my self and people like me. I’m a college graduate after all—one that has diligently searched for professional employment for more than a year without so much as an interview. The economy, I tell myself, and the news reinforces. But I realize it’s a bundle of factors—one being my chosen major, English, which may not be specific enough. It may be easier if my degree said technical something—a nice label to ensure I fit somewhere.

I’ve come to Myrtle Beach to escape the ultra conservative mid-west, which prides itself in its above average schools and white majority. And now I’ve realized that’s precisely why I can’t find a job at a corporation—I’m too much like everyone else in Missouri, and national corporations want to be represented in a way that reflects the national diversity—not the local one. Therefore, theoretically, if a guy like me walks into a branch office in a neighborhood that’s largely made up of minorities, I will be considered quite thoroughly for a job.

Employers seem to frown upon those unwilling to leave their cradles—the comfort of their own people, their own culture; they aren’t willing to take risks.

And I think I can give people advice in regard to finding employment—and that is to integrate not segregate. And that’s not to say it’s absolutely necessary, but right now the job market is tough. Graduates have to be willing to be malleable and innovative.

Here in Myrtle Beach the workforce is made up of a variety of nationalities—the college students from Russia, legal and illegal Mexicans and other Central Americans, and Black Americans. The lack of American white male workers gives opportunity to such; I’ve experienced this first hand. People are surprised to see that I’m both white and American when I ask for applications—the managers are excited to hand one to me.

I can tell when I talk to the locals in Myrtle Beach that they are well educated—more so than in other minority areas I’ve been to. I’ve looked at the Myrtle Beach District Schools’ website—their high school curriculum is outstanding. The classes they offer students are diverse, typically found on college campuses. Such shows how diversity can benefit society.
Graduates who are willing to move to areas where they are the minority will land jobs, and possibly improve society in areas where the education system fails its students.

It’s important for graduates to follow the opportunity, and opportunity exists where improvement is needed.

Written by Nick Reding, a traveling journalist, Methland portrays the plight of Olwein, Iowa, a once bustling small town with a meatpacking pant, Iowa Ham, that once paid its workers eighteen dollars an hour. However, after being sold to a large food corporation, Gillette, pay was cut to $6.20, resulting in workers working longer hours to earn a living wage. This new culture, according to Reding, paved the way for the meth epidemic—workers quickly realized that meth provided the stimulation needed to make a long workday tolerable.

Many of the workers after getting addicted to meth at Gillette realized in the mid nineties that making and selling meth was far more profitable than working long hours. It was then that meth spread incessantly.

In light of the slave labor wages, the town began to shrink and the meatpacking plant resorted to hiring illegal immigrants from Mexico. In addition to the illegals working the low paying jobs, Mexicans would come up from Mexico and sell enough meth for them to go back to Mexico and retire within a year. The Mexican drug trafficers are clever and are able to easily evade the police. In one instance of the book, the trafficers call the DEA and taunt them: the DEA was able catch the trafficking in process by using intelligence. However, the intelligence they receive is often planted as a decoy so a much larger transport can be made incognito. It appears that the federal police are inadequate in stopping drugs from crossing the borders.

I talked with a Branson visitor from Ottumwa, Iowa, a similar town to Oelwein. Although he hadn’t read the book, he was familiar with Tom Arnold’s sister, Lori Arnold, who was a major player in Mexican drug trafficking. The visitor’s wife was a teacher, and she stated that more and more resources are going to bilingual services because of the high illegal immigrant population in the area. The visitor also stated that there are signs on the borders directing the illegal immigrants to the towns where they can find work.

Methland is important to Branson because of its excess restaurant and hotel jobs. Because businesses are not required to run background checks on employees; anybody with a fake ID can get a job in Branson. Background checks are not expensive either—but it seems that many businesses in the Branson area do not want to know if an employee is illegal. Thus, when ICE asks them why they hired an illegal immigrant, the business cannot be held accountable, claiming ignorance and referencing the fake ID.

The easy answer might be that Branson should require businesses to run background checks on new hires. However, this will only push the illegal labor trade underground further. But perhaps that is a good thing. Whatever the case may be, businesses and managers should be held accountable. If a business uses illegal immigrants, it should not be doing business in Branson. They need to be held accountable.

As for Methland, I suggest everyone who lives in a small town to read this book, because if small town American continues to turn a blind eye to this problem, the problem of corporate greed, America will fall apart.

And corporate greed is the route problem here. That is more apparent now than ever in light of the massive oil spill in the gulf, which is a direct result of the government’s lack of regulation on corporations. Such lax regulations are the result of special interest groups, which bombard the government daily to keep regulations minimal. And so far it has been working. Corporations in American are not held accountable for their actions, and it is these corporations that are cutting corners by hiring illegal aliens and claiming ignorance when they are caught. For citizens in America, ignorance is not a plead in court, but rather an admission of guilt. Corporations should be subjected to jail time in the same manner as citizens—if a manager fails to run a background check, that manager should go to jail, not the illegal immigrant.

http://ksmu.org/content/view/6644/66/

Wal-Mart , over the years, has accrued a reputation of using excessive plastic bags—sometimes only placing on or two small items in each unnecessarily.

In more recent years, Wal-Mart has provided reusable bags, offered at a price to customers concerned with the environment.

But now, the Wal-Mart in Branson Hills has begun recycling plastic bags altogether, providing a giant box by the entry way where patrons can easily drop off their wads of plastic Wal-Mart bags for recycling.

To some, particularly those who live in north east coast states, recycling plastic is nothing new. In fact, states like Maine, and Massachusetts have been recycling various plastics for decades.

However, Missouri has never been one of those states that emphasized the recycling of plastics; perhaps because of the lack of nearby sea, the inland landfills able to neatly tuck away plastics without worry of runoff.

And because Wal-Mart is such a dominant corporation in Missouri and other southern, inland states, recycling plastic bags has the potential to make an environmental difference in the area—particularly since southern government institutions are so disinterested in sustainability.

Such recycling is beneficial to Wal-Mart’s bottom line as well—they now have access to free plastic to make bags, given the recycling process is less costly than buying raw plastic.

It’s about time that Wal-Mart has taken responsibility for its waste. Now, McDonalds, what are you going to do about your trash?

Tea Party supporters disappointed by handling of flag at recent demonstration

This weekend Branson hosted Tea Party protesters, a planned peaceful demonstration on the popular Hwy 76 Boulevard.

Tea Partiers protested everything from Health Care Reform to taxation without representation.

Passersby honked in agreement with the protesters. However, one Branson visitor, a Tea Party supporter, was disgusted by the disrespectful manner in which the American flag was handled.

“I stopped when I saw the flag on the ground,” the anonymous visitor said. “I told them to get that flag off the ground. A lady responded by telling me the Tea Partier didn’t know what he was doing.”

Two Tea Partiers made a point to keep the potentially offensive signage from being seen by passersby on Hwy 76. George Grisser and Fred Ellison, according the conservative free newspaper the Branson Independent, did their best to contain the right wing extremists by blocking their signs, which proved to be a tall order. The extremists, who refused to give their names, where everywhere, trying to get noticed.

It’s not clear why the Tea Party brought its road protest to Branson, but it may be to counter the formation of the Coffee Party, a local progressive church group. The Coffee Party protests peacefully in nearby Springfield, Missouri, formed by college students in a local nondenominational church.

Nationally, the Coffee Party began on Facebook in January of 2010, and it has surpassed both the DNC and the Tea Party in fans.

Information on the Coffee Party

The following is an amateur video report of academics being kicked out of the Branson Tea Party rally.

we are change branson

We Are Change Branson

Since the charter schools had been developed, the St. Louis school district has lost 10,000 students to the charter schools, leaving the district strapped for cash. The charters are independently run, non-district public schools, and the loss of student costs the St. Louis district $100 million per year in funding.

After a folly of letters were sent to the state department of education, the discrepancy between the charters schools and the public school districts went under review by the state. However, the state set the complaints to a low priority.

It was not until a charter school opened suit against the state that the state made it a priority. In the suit, the charter school asked the judge to force the state to make a decision about the back-monies. In November of 2009, Cole County Circuit Judge Patricia Joyce sided with the charter schools, but she did not tell the state how to make a decision; she merely insisted that the state come to a decision.

Free Writing and Editing Help

We will be offering writing services to students who otherwise would not have the professional help required to win scholarship money and grants. The fact is that such contests are biased toward kids with educated parents, as parents often help their kids write papers, giving judges the impression that the student has an inherent ability.

To help level the playing field, I will offer editing services to any student whose parents did not go to college. I’ve realized over the years that opportunities flock to kids who come from wealthy, educated backgrounds.

Who is this Free Writing and Editing Service For?

This service is for anyone who is interested in obtaining scholarship or grant money by way of writing essays. In fact, any kid from an underprivileged background who would like help writing for any goal, I will be willing to help. Such a kid may be a high school dropout looking to obtain a GED, a high school student looking to win grant money, kids from bad neighborhoods, and so on and so forth.

Because such kids do not have access to “professional parents,” I believe that offering such services is necessary to level the grant and scholarship playing field, which is overly biased toward privileged students.

How to Get Started

If you are a person who believes you meet the profile that I’ve mentioned above, please fill out the form below. In the comments box, please let me know what you are working on and why you believe you come from an underprivileged background.

The subtitle of the article, “The human cost of a two-dollar T-shirt,” caught my interest because I had recently bought a slew of two-dollar t-shirts that I had planned to create original designs for and sell on this website. However, I abandoned the concept in favor of outsourcing to a t-shirt design specialist that could produce higher quality t-shirts with my designs on them.

These t-shirts can be found here.

Anyway, I am not surprised that t-shirts are produced in such a way. This was a big issue in the ‘90s with Nike, and to this day, I rarely buy Nike products for that reason. According to Silverstein’s article, however, Nike has since taken measures to improve the working conditions in third-world sweatshops. In all honesty–if you didn’t already know–the damage has already been done, as the co-founder of Nike, Phil Knight, is one of the 50 richest men in the world today.

The other key piece of information that Silverstein’s article unveiled was his estimates of the sheer profits made annually off each employee. Exploiting cheap labor, paying bare-minimum prices for the products produced, and selling those sweatshop products to Americans with ridiculous markups makes major profits for clothing retailers.

Silverstein estimates in his article that each sweatshop employee produces $195,000 in sales per year. Each factory employee’s gross pay is around $750 per year, and his estimate assumes that the retailers will sell each product for roughly $25 per piece.

People who regularly shop in Branson realize that clothes are generally priced less at Aeropostale than Wal-Mart. One reason is Aeropostal’s retail outlet in the Tanger Mall which sells excess inventory from the previous year. Often times you can find t-shirts on sale in Aeropostale for under $10. Such sales keep Aeropostale’s profit margin on sweatshop t-shirts sold in Branson at a reasonable level.

However, Wal-Mart is a different story. Because of Wal-Mart’s “everyday low prices,” one should not expect to find t-shirts below $10. Unlike Aeropostale, Wal-Mart has consistent prices, and often times their supposed “sales” are nothing more than sales promotions. Wal-Mart marks their t-shirts down from the “retail” value of $18-25, but their prices never go below the competitive t-shirt prices of non-sweatshop or American-made t-shirt products. Realistically, Wal-Mart’s prices are not competitive with Aeropostale’s in many cases, so consumers should understand that Wal-Mart is making massive profits from selling such clothing.

Beside that fact that Wal-Mart is pulling the wool over the eyes of its customers, it should also be considered who Wal-Mart’s core clothing customer base is.

Wal-Mart began in Bentonville, Arkansas and quickly expanded all over the world within a few decades. People like Gretchen Wilson, the popular country music singer, have endorsed Wal-Mart as being a cheap place to buy clothing.

In Wilson’s “Redneck Woman,” she states:

Victoria’s Secret,
Well their stuff’s real nice,
Oh but I can buy the same damn thing,
On a Wal-Mart shelf half price.

It seems that people in and around the Bible Belt have long believed Wal-Mart to be a place of low prices in terms of clothing. Such a case is a half-truth at best. Many Christians within the Bible Belt inadvertently endorse clothing sweatshops and the perpetual impoverishment of third-world countries like Cambodia, whose children are often sold into prostitution to put food on the table of their families, by purchasing average-priced clothing from Wal-Mart.

Silverstein’s article also takes note of the abundance of Christian charity groups and underage prostitutes in Cambodia, but his article does not directly suggest that Wal-Mart is responsible for Cambodia’s impoverishment.

My suggestion to those not-so-wealthy Bible Belt citizens, who might believe that they have nothing to give to charity, is that you make a difference by not buying your clothing from Wal-Mart, Target, or JC Penney (all mentioned in Silverstein’s article), and start buying your clothing from outlet stores such as Aeropostale, that do not consistently overcharge for sweatshop goods. Realistically, making an effort to keep your money out of the hands of companies that exploit Cambodians may be the best thing you can do for the poor this season.