I realized today that I needed to get a designer to create a landing page. I use oDesk, a service that attracts design firms and freelances from around the world. I posted the job and within 15 minutes I had more than a dozen responses. Needless to say, the bulk of these responses came from countries other than the U.S. But there was a U.S.-based firm that responded. His rate was at least twice as expensive as the offshore rates. But the job isn’t that large and, even though it will cost me more, I am going to engage his firm. Why? Because while I am sitting here writing this post on a Japanese-made laptop and understand the realities of the global economy, it’s high time I did at least one thing to support a true U.S. company that doesn’t make its money importing cheap goods from overseas. Now for all I know this firm will sub-contract with an offshore designer and pocket the difference between what he charges me and what he pays another resource. I can’t control that. All I can do I decide that I am going to use a U.S. company and hope some of what I pay that firm ends up in the pockets of other local businesses.

There was talk recently that OccupyLA was planning to picket the port of Long Beach to protest the fact that cheap goods from China, Vietnam, etc. take away U.S. jobs. Well they do but picketing the port won’t do anything except piss off and inconvenience lot of working people right here at home. A better but more difficult task that requires much more organization and patience than this movement appears to have would be to write letters to every elected representative and tell them go after corporate tax loopholes and benefits that encourage U.S. firms and retailers to continue doing nothing but feed our insatiable desire for cheap electronics by importing things. Yes, the “1%” should pay their fair share but the real fatties here are the corporations. Oh I know – some dim bulb might respond that I’m going to kill jobs because Best Buy will have to charge $10 more for some television that will be obsolete in 3 months. I doubt that will happen and something has to give somewhere along the line in order for us to reclaim our spot as the most exceptional nation.

It was nice that we had Small Business Saturday after Black Friday. Near as I can tell, no one was trampled, shot, pepper sprayed or otherwise injured in the mad rush to save a few bucks on a stupid “shoot ‘em up” video game.  So let’s all start small. Shop local whenever you can. Avoid the Big Box retailers if at all possible. Go to a Farmer’s Market. Buy a sandwich from a local deli rather than a national chain. Find the local stationer and buy a ream of copy paper from that store. Hire a small U.S. firm to handle a small technology project. You might even find yourself feeling better about life when you go to sleep that night.

Except that Google somehow has decided to turn into the IRS when it comes to enforcing its AdWords standards which are fairly ambigious and basically created with the idea that – at any point in time – Google can and will shut you down. This happened to me. I was told my site was a candidate for click fraud. I didn’t see anything in my Analytics reports that showed huge spikes and, honestly, the amount of money I was generating through AdSense was negligible at best because my site wasn’t getting gobs of traffic. But one day I got a note saying your account had been suspended. I tried to appeal – which is a process that involves sending an email to a nameless, faceless person who functions and judge, jury and executioner. Nope, they said. My account showed all of the characteristics of click fraud and so the $50 that I had earned was taken from me and given back to the advertisers.

This is not to knock Google generally. They are the most spectacular company at what they do, which is deliver relevant search results. I spend a lot of money on AdWords so it is nice to sometimes see that my account is credited on that end for click fraud. Google owns search and that’s that. Google is search. PERIOD.

But after this experience, I would not recommend AdSense to a publisher. There are lots of other networks out there that can provide revenue. Google sometimes needs to remember that it started out as a research paper and stop treating everyone on the web like a powerless serf.