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The Small Enterprise Growth Fund Re-named The Maine Venture Fund


TWEET THIS ! http://goo.gl/f0GPqy


Quietly, the Small Enterprise Growth Fund has changed its name to The Maine Venture Fund, leaving the world to wonder why. Freshening up their image? Having numerology concerns? Or perhaps for a legal reason that one can only fictionalize upon- but there it is - The Small Enterprise Growth Fund is now being called the Maine Venture Fund- just another episode in the ongoing linguistic re-configuration of reality.

Website (for more information): http://www.segfmaine.com/index.phpOverview: The SEGF is a professionally-managed venture capital fund that invests exclusively in Maine companies who demonstrate a potential for high growth and public benefit. The Fund has been actively investing in Maine companies since 1997, after its creation by an act of the Maine Legislature in 1995 to provide Maine companies and entrepreneurs access to patient sources of venture capital. The fund has received $13 million in capital contributions from the State of Maine and operates as a revolving, ‘evergreen’ fund. Copyright 2013 CDVCA. All rights reserved.

There are currently two websites for The Maine Venture Fund. The one that uses the SEGf web address which tells us that The SEGF is changing it's name to The Maine Venture Fund  and the other http://www.maineventurefund.com/,which doesn't make mention of The Small Enterprise Growth Fund. There the only clue to any connection between the SEGF and the MFA is found on the About US page in the sentence: "The Fund has been actively investing in Maine companies since 1997, after its creation by an act of the Maine Legislature in 1995":


The Maine Venture Fund is a professionally managed venture capital fund that invests exclusively in Maine companies that demonstrate a potential for high growth and public benefit. The Fund has been actively investing in Maine companies since 1997, after its creation by an act of the Maine Legislature in 1995.  The fund has received $13 million in capital contributions from the State of Maine and operates as a revolving, “evergreen” fund



CDVA, the page above. where I found the SEGF listed stands for Community Development Venture Capital Alliance

Kerwin Tesdell is president of the Community Development Venture Capital Alliance, the association of venture capital funds that provide equity financing for businesses that create good jobs for low income people and wealth and entrepreneurial capacity in low-income communities in the United States and around the world. He is also an adjunct professor at New York University, teaching Double Bottom Line Finance at the Stern School of Business and Community Development Law at the School of Law.

The SEGF ( now called the Maine Venture Fund ) is listed on the CDVA website but as long as I have been aware of the Small Enterprise Growth Fund  (now called the Maine Venture Fund )  has always been for "high growth investors" and decidedly not creating jobs for low income people- which would be middle class jobs and not jobs exclusively occupying the sector of the economy offering jobs that pay above the Median Household Income- which is part of the definition of  the Maine Corporation's "the targeted sector".

So- I have just now become cognizant of the CDVA and I already know that there is a discrepancy between what they say and what they do.

I suspect that CDVA & MVA would point to the second part of the phrase "wealth and entrepreneurial capacity in low-income communities" meaning locating companies with high end jobs in low-income communities and spinning it as trickle down economics. However the corporation of Maine has resisted requests to deliver an accounting of their economic policies which would give substance, one way or the other to such claims. I submit that trickle down economics requires a middle sector in order to work, otherwise it is nothing more than gentrification- moving the wealthier people in and driving the poorer people out. When you have a two tier economy ,the whole economy caters toward the top, driving up prices on everything and driving the bottom half of the economy elsewhere.

(In 2013 the maine legislature passed a statute to affirm the friendship between Maine & China, ironically starting with these words:

WHEREAS,  the United States and the Republic of China, known as Taiwan, share a most important relationship supported by our common values of freedom, democracy, rule of law and commitment to a free market economy; a http://www.mainelegislature.org/legis/bills/bills_126th/billtexts/HP094301.asp
In April 2014, A Bloomberg headline reads:

China’s Income Inequality Surpasses U.S., Posing Risk for Xi
 The income gap between the rich and poor in China has surpassed that of the U.S. and is among the widest in the world, a report showed, adding to the challenges for President Xi Jinping as growth slows.
2011 has increased the risk of social instability in the world’s most populous nation and biggest developing economy. Xi is engineering a slowdown in expansion to below 8 percent and leading a campaign against corruption as he grapples with rising unrest, credit risks, and pollution choking the country’s biggest cities.

This is the working of a free market economy?

My own crowdfunding project which I have permanently listed above, is the real thing in terms of being capable of providing jobs for low-income communities,and perhaps that is why it is so difficult to find where my support base is in this world, which has, in the linguistic reconfiguration of reality been phasing out the very concept of a middle class- there now being only two parts to the economy with separate governing systems for each- socialism for the bottom and private capitalism for the top with the corporate state as the mediator redistributing public wealth to both halfs through general and corporate welfare programs with the Small Enterprise Growth Fund  (now called the Maine Venture Fund)  being a beneficiary of the latter.

I was raised on Southport Island,where I attended school for the first time. I was always an outsider, not understanding the reasons as a child lacking any other perspective. My parents were then the out-siders and my mother was from England. The Boothbay Peninsula is a summer destination and home to seasonal locals with long roots and year long locals with equally long roots and the transitional and new arrivals communities. Our family business had feet in both worlds and that remains true today. Attending school with the local community is an experience deeply embedded into my own psyche. That community is deeply Maine, but in my opinion, completely overlooked by the corporation of Maine and it's economic development policies, about which by now, you must know, I am highly critical.

I didn't pay significant attention to what the state was doing prior to the Baldacci administration. I was  a-political. I didn't vote for Baldacci but I was ready to take an open mind to his policies and when he came up with "the creative economy", I thought that it would include businesses such as our family business- designing , producing, marketing, wholesaling and retailing ceramics, but I soon learned that it did not. Perhaps if the creative economy occurred simultaneously to our own most successful time, they would have embraced us - but I cannot say that for sure.

As I have learned through years of focused independent investigation of the statutes put into place by the corporation of Maine, that corporation has eyes only for businesses that are operating in the top half of the economy. The corporation of Maine takes on the role of the unions in mandating pay levels, health insurance programs, and pension plans to recipients of dollars extracted from the public's pockets and handed over to private corporations meeting the Maine corporation's specifications.

In my naivety, when I first became engaged in what is going on at the state level during the beginning of the Baldacci administration, I thought that the state would take an assessment of the existing socio economic environment and look for where the state can benefit the growth of what is already existent in addition to attracting new businesses. I was not wrong in thinking this is what a state would do, I simply did not understand at that point that Maine is no longer a state but has been transformed into a corporation which works to the benefit of its own special interests exclusively, a purpose distinct from that of a state which serves the common welfare:


CONSTITUTION OF THE STATE OF MAINE
2013 ARRANGEMENT
(Arranged by the Chief Justice of the Maine Supreme Judicial Court
and approved by the Maine State Legislature, Resolve 2013, chapter 75,
pursuant to the Constitution of Maine, Article X, Section 6
 PREAMBLE.
Objects of government.  We the people of Maine, in order to establish justice, insure tranquility, provide for our mutual defense, promote our common welfare, and secure to ourselves and our posterity the blessings of liberty, acknowledging with grateful hearts the goodness of the Sovereign Ruler of the Universe in affording us an opportunity, so favorable to the design; and, imploring God's aid and direction in its accomplishment, do agree to form ourselves into a free and independent State, by the style and title of the State of Maine and do ordain and establish the following Constitution for the government of the same. (emphasis mine

The words which I have emphasized " the goodness of the Sovereign Ruler of the Universe in affording us an opportunity, so favorable to the design; and, imploring God's aid and direction in its accomplishment, carries a specific meaning, a meaning which is distinct from imploring the help of government created by man. It is Nature or God that affords us opportunity- not a government centrally managed economy .

I have often pointed out in this blog the multitude of statutory violations of Article IV Part Third , Sections 13 & 14 of the Maine State Constitution, which if heeded would prohibit the formation of a corporate state, which is likewise reinforced and emphasized by the words of the preamble to the Maine State Constitution. To the degree that the Maine Constitution is not being heeded and as a result of that, to the degree that the legislature has embedded a huge corporate network, state capitalism, and systems of wealth redistribution, it is accurate to say that Maine is no longer a state- it is a corporation, serving not the common welfare but the benefit of its own special interests identified as the "targeted sector".

The subsidiary corporations in the Maine State Inc Network, such as what is now to be referred to as the MVF (The Maine Venture Fund) always deem in their rhetoric and statutory charters that they are there to serve "the public benefit" a term that I have yet to find properly defined in Maine statutes as has been done in the New Hampshire Statute that establishes the granting of public benefit certificates to private corporations. I have already written on that subject HERE.

I have often quoted the following deeming statement found in the statutes that chartered the FAME and DECD corporations:


Any benefits accruing to private individuals or associations, as a result of the activities of the authority, are deemed by the Legislature to be incidental to the public purposes to be achieved by the implementation of this chapter.

I submit that it is fundamentally Marxist to make deeming statements about human character. Where as The United States Constitution was crafted from a process found in The Federalist Papers in which the entire range of human character was taken into account and a system of checks and balances was tailor made to fit that range, Marx proposed that the external system would transform human character when he said "the state would wither away"-apparently after it had effectively molded human character to its specifications. I have been in debates with die hard Marxist who claim that Marxism has never been tried because the state has never withered away, which is an odd way of saying that Marxism has never been tried because it has never succeeded!

That said, as The SEGF has just changed its cloak to the MVF, and as promotions for the next Juice Conference are being distributed  and I am still trying to find a way to capitalize a mold making project for our very large line of classic designs which have retained marketability for decades- via my crowdfunding project- PRE-LAUNCH drive- this seems like the right moment to continue telling the story of how I came to be involved in researching Maine's economic development statutes and in telling that story I will demonstrate that the state's statutory deeming of the saintly character of their investment partners is far far away from the truth. READ FIRST INSTALLMENT OF STORY HERE

So stay tuned and please consider signing up for my PRE-LAUNCH campaign. I will be offering rewards at all price points and it is also allowed to contribute any amount simply as a donation to the cause. Consider that I have been researching and writing this blog, bringing information to the public which is not found any where else -except by direct research as I do- and that there is no one paying my salary to do so. I have to stop this bad habit of working for free and that is why I am merging this blog into my campaign efforts to capitalize The Great American Ceramic Artists Designers Craftsmen Network. The way I have always seen it- Everything is Everything and so all processes are interconnected. 


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