Craig's Corner

I worked as a third party consultant for nearly two decades – providing a variety of organizations support on strategic, financial and operational goals. Part of my “pitch” was that I was “your CEO/CFO/COO/CIO/C… for hire without the costs or obligations of having an in-house C level executive.” For entrepreneurial and start-up ventures, I was able to provide a range of services, earn a living at a cost that helped the organization. I, therefore, am predisposed to supporting the concept of outsourcing. The outsourcing happening in law enforcement is something that is quite worrisome. Ordinarily, when an individual breaks a law, police investigate, district attorneys indict and the justice system goes through a long process of determining innocence or guilt and then punishment. It’s no longer ordinary times as 24 D.A.’s (nearly half the country) are trying to short-circuit this process. According to the Washington Post “State attorneys general are pressing Google to make it h

Like millions of other Americans I filed my tax return by the April 15 th deadline. According to the IRS , 85% of the population file on time, with 6% of small business owners and 9% of non-business owner individuals filing extensions . For anti-tax folks like myself the process is nearly as frustrating as the tax bill itself. Longtime readers may recall last year’s post A Taxing Situation  sharing my journey as a victim of  identity theft for tax purposes. The IRS had 770,000 people who were in the same situation as me. The delay in finalizing the return and issuing the refund (which is really an interest fee loan we give to the government) is already at six weeks. The 2011 delay was 14 months, the 2012 wait 8 months. Frustrating as it all is, and as much as I philosophically am anti-tax, it is the law and I may rant and blog, but I don’t violate. Not everybody has that same response. People have been resisting paying taxes as long as there have been taxes. In Biblical times t

In college I wrote a weekly column for my alma-matter’s Daily Newspaper. (Yes, there was newsprint back then...and yes, my opinion writing is now marked by decades!) I learned in pretty quick order that there's a cost to "free" speech. The University’s longtime Chancellor released, to great fanfare, a list of his 10 priorities and goals for the University. He and the Board trumpeted the breadth, innovation and vision of these ambitions. They came with pretty pictures and graphs. The local television and newspapers parroted the press release.   After carefully reviewing the list and all the various supplemental materials, I was left with a question. I used my column to opine on why the University didn’t have anything about academics in their list of goals. Suffice to say my column had a few weeks hiatus. Free Speech – whether it be actual talking, or writing or funding of those who write or talk is one of the most precious rights bestowed on Americans under the Constitu

The “heads or tails” game of flipping a coin is generally fair – there’s an equal probability of one side of the coin coming up versus the other. Only when the game is fixed – say with the double-headed-coin, does it become unfair. The idiom “two sides of the same coin” is applied to things that are essentially the same. In the case of American wages – a couple of recent news events from what seem like opposite ends of the economic spectrum are, in fact, more closely aligned than they are different. Silicon Valley CEO’s of tech giants like Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and others allegedly had agreements amongst themselves not to recruit, hire or lure engineers away from each other based on a class action lawsuit that is currently being tried, according to the New York Times .  “The case involves 64,000 programmers and seeks billions of dollars in damages.”  The companies previously settled with the Justice Department and agreed to stop the no-poaching practice. Individual engineer