Whew! I didn't realize that folks would make
Ruminator Books the poster child for what the city should or shouldn't do in
terms of extending loans to private businesses. As I said in my first post,
folks should be skeptical of any deal that the city makes involving public
funds. But it amazes me that Ruminator, a business that's been around for 34
years and been a landmark on Grand Avenue for so many years would be held to
such a high standard of demonstrated need when multi-million dollar projects
have been getting approved by the city for the past twenty years, often with
dubious or no benefits except for the financial gains of the well-heeled
developers and landowners. And why, given the city's contribution to helping put
a competitor (Bound to be Read) on Grand Avenue--tell me that's an appropriate
us of city money!--shouldn't Ruminator get some assistance to "level the playing
field" (as George Bush loves to say)? Why so much angst because the city is
putting together a loan package that indeed might be risky, but also might save
a going concern that many folks in the community value? The debt load on the
city is something like a billion dollars for all the projects and loans that the
city has committed to everything from Gopher State Ethanol to Xcel
Center to US Banks, and yet we're going to draw the line with Ruminator?
Given the choice, I'd much rather see the city loan
$100,000 to ten or twenty or 100 businesses like Ruminator that have made
mistakes, are locally owned, and will continue to give back to the community if
they survive. (Do the math--that would still only come to somewhere between
$1-10 million, about 1/10 to 1 percent of what's been handed out in so many
other deals). Had that been what Norm Coleman did during his eight years, the
whole city would be much better off, we wouldn't still be losing jobs at
companies that have no ties to our community, and there would be lots more
bonding authority to assist other small dollar deals now.
I don't want to bore everyone with the details, but
if you're really interested in Ruminator's financial situation, pick up a copy
of the stock prospectus at the store. Nobody's going to get rich if the various
financing mechanisms come together to keep the store afloat and pay back
Macalester College, the main creditor of the store. Good businessman or
not, David Unowsky has poured all his financial resources into his business
right now, and I suspect he is drawing little or no salary at the present
time. At best, the business survives and maybe some day David can afford to
retire. Mary Baker's right; the city probably
wouldn't loan $100,000 to every similarly situated business, but how many
similarly situated businesses are there? At a time when free speech is being
severely threatened and limited by the government and that so-called "liberal"
media, it seems that a bookstore like Ruminator, a place where lots of
alternative ideas get promoted, is a rather unique and important
entity. Mitch Berg correctly points out that
if this were a "right wing" bookstore, there wouldn't be much clamor to keep the
place alive. But you know what? The right wing, or whatever you want to call the
powers that be with all the monopoly control, have already gained billions in
subsidies by rewriting the laws, engaging in unprecedented mergers,
consolidating enormous wealth, etc. As Paul Wellstone would say, they don't need
our help. Ruminator is a place for the little guys (and gals) in the world, one
of the last such places, relatively speaking, in the country. That bookstores
might be going the way of the dodo, as Charlie Swope points out, may be true,
but it's not necessarily the result of only market forces at play. How
about if we have Bound to be Read pay its share of the subsidy that got the
building at Grand and Victoria built to Ruminator, and then we'll call it a
draw? And while we're at it, let's calculate the state subsidies that went
towards creating the Mall of America, that monster that regularly funnels
millions of dollars to out-of-state corporations and slowly wipes out main
street stores across the metro area, and put a chunk of that toward businesses
like Ruminator as well.
It's fine to talk about capitalism and healthy
competition being good for the economy and all that, but I've yet to see any
dominant business get that way without somehow gaining government subsidies or
engaging in some type of predatory pricing scheme. So as far as I'm
concerned, we can fund a hundred Ruminators in St. Paul and we wouldn't come
close to leveling the playing field so severely tilted toward corporate
America.
Tom
Goldstein
Mac-Groveland
| 