Critical advice for business: In order to survive, your productivity needs to accelerate

Why the world economy may face a permanent slump
AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE
James Pethokoukis is a columnist and blogger at the American Enterprise Institute. Previously, he was the Washington columnist for Reuters

Business must play a critical role: aggressively upgrading capital and technology, taking risks by investing in R&D and unproven technologies or processes, and mitigating the labor pool’s erosion by providing a more flexible work environment for women and older workers, as well as training and mentorship for young people. In an environment of potentially weaker global economic growth, and definitely evolving growth dynamics, executives need to anticipate where the market opportunities will be and the competitors they will meet in those markets. Above all, companies need to be competitive in a world where productivity will increasingly be the arbiter of success or failure.

READ MORE

Go forth and be successful

From FORBES:

5 Things Super Successful People Do Before 8 AM

6 Things You Should Quit Doing To Be More Successful

California Seeks Retroactive Taxes From Business Owners

NEWSMAX

“How would you feel if you made a decision, which was made four years ago, you absolutely knew was legally correct and four years later a governing body came in and said, ‘no, it's not correct, now you owe us a bunch more money. And we’re going to charge you interest on money you didn't even know you owed,’” San Francisco entrepreneur Brian Overstreet told Fox.

Check out some of these store closing numbers for 2013

Excerpt:

Retail Apocalypse: Why Are Major Retail Chains All Over America Collapsing?

When you step back and take a look at the bigger picture, the rapid decline of some of our largest retail chains really is stunning.

It is happening already in some areas, but soon half empty malls and boarded up storefronts will litter the landscapes of cities all over America.

Just check out some of these store closing numbers for 2013.  These numbers are from a recent Yahoo Finance article...

Best Buy
Forecast store closings: 200 to 250
Sears Holding Corp.
Forecast store closings: Kmart 175 to 225, Sears 100 to 125
J.C. Penney
Forecast store closings: 300 to 350
Office Depot
Forecast store closings: 125 to 150
Barnes & Noble
Forecast store closings: 190 to 240, per company comments
Gamestop
Forecast store closings: 500 to 600
OfficeMax
Forecast store closings: 150 to 175
RadioShack
Forecast store closings: 450 to 550

But the truth is that those store closings are not the entire story.  When you dig deeper you find a lot more retailers that are in trouble.
READ MORE

Bad news for business owners

Reality is beginning to sink in.

Did you know...

"If you’ve got a business -- you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen" -- Obama (7/14/12)

Everything is updated as of today

I started this blog about six years ago last February and have been collecting links under the following categories for years. As of today, they are all updated and working. There's a lot of great resources here, so please make use of them. (Note: "Join the Second American Revolution" was originally called "Join the Resistance" and I started collecting these activist links within a day or two after the 2008 presidential election).

All the links are under the following categories somewhere on the right panel and reaching all the way to the bottom:

• JOIN THE SECOND AMERICAN REVOLUTION
  
  
• NEWS & POLITICS
  
  
• MILITARY
  
  
• TERRORISM & INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
  
  
• IMMIGRATION
  
  
• CLIMATE CHANGE
  
  
• GOVERNMENT & POLICY
  
  
• TEA PARTY
  
  
• ECONOMICS
  
  
• HEALTH & MEDICINE
  
  
• BUSINESS
  
  
• RELIGION
  
  
• SCIENCE
  
  
• ORGANIZATIONS
  
  
• OPTING OUT
  
  
• BREAKING TECH NEWS DAILY

Why is Google so mean to business owners?

...other than that Lefties generally penalize businesses on principle (unless they are big corps with lots of money to extort):

Excerpted from
Why You May Need To Hide Your Google Places Address ASAP

...it's my considered opinion that Google just makes the whole thing too hard for busy local business owners. I've compared Google before to a circus ringmaster, requiring local business owners to jump through a series of flaming hoops if they want to participate - and, in fact, even if they don't want to participate. Remember that Google started their local business index by creating listings of businesses without any permission from the business owners, themselves. Suddenly, the average local business owner began to become aware that there was a giant, visible advertisement of his company on the web that he hadn't authorized and that was very likely to contain incorrect data about his business. The hoop jumping began.

Over the years, business owners have had to stretch and squish themselves into a variety of odd postures to adhere to Google's ever-changing guidelines, partly out of a wish to be visible, but also out of fear that if they don't get it right, their businesses will surely suffer. While the benefits of visibility in Google's local results are tremendous, you don't have to dig deep to encounter strong, negative sentiment about their manner of interacting with the local business community.

READ MORE

Executives ranked California as the worst place to do business for the eighth year in a row…

California narrowly edged out New York in what the survey called “the ninth circle of business hell,” sharing the bottom five spots with Illinois, Massachusetts and Michigan.

READ MORE

California is like that old Henny Youngman joke:

Patient:

"Doctor, it hurts when I go like this."

Doctor:

"So don't go like that."

But the Democrats always "go like that", year after year after year after year here (where I live).

I was born in California and it used to be paradise.

You just wonder what goes through people's minds when they consciously take paradise and turn it into hell.

15 Successful People Who Started Their Careers At McDonald's

Business Insider

1. Jeff Bezos
   
   
2. Sharon Stone
   
   
3. Macy Gray
   
   
4. Jay Leno
   
   
5. Seal
   
   
6. Andy Card, Chief of Staff under George W. Bush
   
   
7. Carl Lewis
   
   
8. Pink
   
   
9. Joe Kernan, former governor of Indiana
   
   
10. Star Jones
    
    
11. Keenan Wayans
    
    
12. Shania Twain
    
    
13. DL Hughley

BONUS: T-Pain very nearly worked there... For more humble beginnings, check out: The Humble First Jobs Of 15 Hotshots

Ayn Rand: Prophet

This is only the beginning:

Atlas Is Sorta Shrugging

How has the Obama administration contributed to this failure to achieve a robust and sustainable recovery?

Wall Street Journal:

1. The administration's most obvious failure was its misguided fiscal policies: the cash-for-clunkers subsidy for car buyers, the tax credit for first-time home buyers, and the $830 billion "stimulus" package...
   
   
2. A second cause of the continued economic weakness is the president's emphasis on increasing tax rates...
   
   
3. A third problem stems from the administration's lack of an explicit plan to deal with future budget deficits and with the exploding national debt. This creates uncertainty about future tax increases and interest rates that impedes spending by households and investment by businesses...
   
   
4. Finally, there is the administration's incoherent position on the international value of the dollar...

Read more at the The Economy Is Worse Than You Think

A sad moment for our country

It is hard to imagine how a president could give a more mean-spirited and less substantial speech on a grave national crisis than Obama delivered today. Obama appears to be a man who understands little or nothing about business or the economy. For him, partisan politics is everything. We saw that today. It was a sad moment for our country.

Obama Channels Ted Kennedy

For American families: There is a good chance you will lose your current insurance in 2014, and you will be forced to buy government-designed health insurance. Your new plan may not cover the doctor you like and it will certainly be more expensive.

THE DETROIT NEWS

U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers

Put yourself in the shoes of a small business owner.

You own a restaurant with 33 full-time employees and several dozen part-time workers. You offer health benefits to some because you feel that it's the right thing to do. However, under Obamacare, you will be required to provide expensive, government-designed health insurance beginning in 2014.

After crunching the numbers, you find that the mandate will increase your health costs by 200 percent, forcing you to lay off workers, increase food prices and not open a new restaurant.

This is an example of a real Michigan employer who testified before Congress that Obamacare's mandates will cripple his business.

Countless other employers are running the same math, and reaching the same conclusions: How can employers afford offering health benefits under the new law?

Catastrophe looming thanks to Obamacare

Own Your Own Internet Membership Website

If you'd like to have your own membership website and make recurring income with it, this is a new course that will walk you through and get you around the pitfalls to the finish line:

Click Here

Good luck!

PS: Ian del Carmen's been around for a long time and is well established in this business.

A new breed of online worker is paid by the task

Bloomberg Businessweek:

Lee, 36, has earned more than $6,000 for about 100 hours of work, or $60 an hour on average...

Meet the Microworkers

How to change your life

Yes, we are all still are interested in "change" even after Obama's has basically turned it into a very dirty word (i.e. code for making him King of America).

But few are happy with how 2010 turned out, right? Or maybe even how your life has turned out up until now?

So here are some highly recommended books for those of us still working at changing our lives for the better in 2011:

Power of Full Engagement:

This was just recently recommended by British internet marketing guru now living in Spain, Andre Chaperon.

QUESTION: What's the #1 priority in business today?

My guess is that you're prob'ly way off base.

It's not what I expected when I heard the answer.

ANSWER: Reducing, minimizing and eliminating
distraction and interruption.

Think about that for a second...

Reducing, minimizing and ELIMINATING distraction
and interruption.

Wow!

I was first exposed to this stuff from Eben Pagan
in 2007 at his GetAltitude seminar.

Eben learned it from Tony Schwartz who was a
guest speaker at the $10,000 per person seminar.

Work The System:

British professional mentor extraordinaire Alex Goodall -- who gives the best and most detailed webinars on every aspect of running an online business -- recommended this book last year to his mentees.

Strategic Acceleration:

This was recommended last year by another internet marketing guru, Tommy Liantonio (who would probably object to that description and say he's just a very successful businessman). Tommy, who I think actually lives in New Jersey (not that there's anything wrong with that), gets so excited by the ideas he's discussing that he just can't help letting a few "F" words slip out now and again :-)

50 Success Classics:

The Best Business Books Ever:

The Obama Administration is the most anti-business administration in the last 70 years—if not ever—in the United States of America.

RedState: What the Obama Administration is about to unleash on American business...

...imagine if you will, the federal government (at the behest of union bosses) terrorizing American businesses with the same ‘death by a thousand cuts’ strategies that unions use during corporate campaigns. However, instead of unions engaging in all of the tactics at the union’s expense, your tax dollars will be helping to fund the union’s corporate campaign...

No wonder businesses don’t want to hire in the United States. With as anti-business as the Obama Administration is, what sane business leader is going to invest in jobs so they can be targeted and shamed by its own government.

Investors around the world say President Barack Obama is bad for the bottom line

Investor Poll: Obama Bad for Business Despite Profit Surge

Since the Supreme Court's January decision in Citizens United v. FEC, Democrats in Congress have been trying to pass legislation to repeal the First Amendment for business, though not for unions.

WSJ: Shutting Up Business: Democrats unleash the IRS and Justice on donors to their political opponents