I ride roller coasters so much in fact that when my publisher accepted the manuscript to my latest novel, they commented on how intense the action was, and wondered how I could write such a thing. I explained that much of the original manuscript had been sketched out on my hand while riding The Stunt Track at Kings Island, which I road again will thinking about the Hume story at Lakota East. There is something soothing in that catapult launch, and the run through the police cars that gets my blood boiling in a positive direction and organizes my thoughts. The faster the roller coasters, the more clear things become for me.And as for settings, strange creatures, gothic music, and smoke machines actually provide context for the metaphors they represent in the real world. My wife and I grabbed some steak fries from Rivertown and I pondered more of the perplexing quagmires percolating in my mind from the week. I think I like this time of year at Kings Island best simply because they don’t play all the pop music throughout the park. I prefer symphonic pieces most of the time as a musical choice, especially playful pieces themed around horror films.
A reporter called me, “Rich, not too many people like you do they?”
“No, and I like it that way,” I replied.
“You like it that way?”
“Yes, because if you are good and fair to people, yet they still don’t like you just because you are asking legitimate questions, it’s because they have something to hide. So the more people who hate me means we’re uncovering things they want to hide and their anger is the mask for which they use to hide it,” I said. “Did you call to tell me that?”
“I received a strange message from someone who didn’t leave their name or number. They were furious that I spoke to you about the school board story.”
I thought about the story that had broken earlier in the week, along with everything else mentioned. You can see the article that started the rift on the Lakota School Board at this ink:
“They said you weren’t qualified to speak about school board matters and that we shouldn’t talk to you.”
“Well, there’s your answer, it’s one of the school board members themselves. What do you think?”
“You’re the one who gave us the flyer,” the reporter said. “If you hadn’t done that there wouldn’t be a story.”
“So because I’m not a school board member I’m not qualified to look at a flyer from a school board president and see what she’s up to, trying to stack the board in her favor, and therefore the position of the union? So because you interviewed me, they are trying to put pressure on you to not speak to me in the future. Is that how you take it?”
“Sounds that way to me,” the reporter said.
“Well, do you regret talking to me?”
“Hell, no!” the reporter said. “You are a fun guy to talk to. I just thought it was funny is all.”
I laughed. “Well, if they are pissed off, it means I’m doing something right. And before I’m done, there will be a lot more pissed off people, you can count on that. Sounds like mafia tactics to me. What do you think?”
“That’s the first thing I thought of,” the reporter added before we went into another interview for a story being prepared for another article.
In Ohio the NEA (NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION) contributed $1 million to defeating Issue 2 and they are a radical organization. Look at their reading list, shown on their website. These are the books that the NEA wants the teachers you pay for to read. The NEA is the parent union to the OEA (Ohio Education Association) and specific to Lakota the OEA is the parent organization to the LEA (Lakota Education Association.) These books are listed as they appear on the NEA website.
Rules for Radicals
Saul Alinsky, Vintage Books, 1989
The classic book about organizing people, written by one of America’s foremost organizers.
Organize for Social Change
Midwest Academy Manual for Activists
Third Edition, Kim Bobo et al, Seven Locks Press, 2001
This is one of the best books about collective action and putting the screws to decision-makers. It’s about winning battles.
Building More Effective Unions
Paul Clark, Cornell University Press, 2000
Penn State Professor of Labor Studies Paul Clark applies the latest in behavioral sciences research to creating more effective unions. His insights are both astute and highly practical.
The Trajectory of Change: Activist Strategies for Social Change
Michael Albert, SouThend Press, 2002
Z Magazine’s Michael Albert has assembled a collection of thoughtful articles on ways to overcome various obstacles to social change.
Roots to Power: A Manual for Grassroots Organizing
Lee Staples, Praeger, 1984
This is a good nuts and bolts guide to organizing. It is especially good on recruiting, developing action plans, executing them, and dealing with counterattacks.
Taking Action: Working Together for Positive Change in Your Community
Elizabeth Amer, Self Counsel Press, 1992
Written by a Toronto community activist, this book is easy to read, full of examples, and sprinkled with how-to-advice.
Organizing: A Guide for Grassroots Leaders
Si Kahn, McGraw Hill, 1981, Revised 1991
This book is well organized. You can find relevant material for your situation without reading the whole book.
Ethical Ambition: Living a Life of Meaning and Worth
Derrick Bell, Bloomsbury, 2002
A gem of a book that delves into the question of “Why become an activist?” It is both thought-provoking and energizing.
Soul of a Citizen: Living with Conviction in a Cynical Time
Paul Rogat Loeb, St. Martins Press, 1999
Provides solace for the activist‘s soul and juice for the activist’s battery
What’s happening is through radical union activity and small little rewards like higher wage compensation and benefits, grants and other perks, the radical unions are nudging their teachers to embrace radical ideas camouflaged behind carefully planted smiles and a public image. School boards are constructed to maintain that façade to the public, as the direction of the school boards is then controlled by the OSBA, the Ohio School Board Association who also reads the same types of books. School board members who don’t play nicely are pushed off the board, because the aim of a school board is to achieve public consensus. The game is a very subtle one, and for people who are more interested in watching Dancing with the Stars or picking up a magazine which features Jennifer Aniston’s newest love interest, they probably will think what I’m saying is a bunch of crazy talk. In fact, many school board members and even some superintendents might think so because their thinking is so specialized and focused on a specific task that they fail to see static patterns outside of their own experience. (TO UNDERSTAND STATIC PATTERNS AND WHAT THEY MEAN TO YOU CLICK THE LINK FOR REFERENCE.)
As I looked at all the costumes around Kings Island on the Haunt night I saw that it is the masks that the unions show us. The education institutions themselves are all wearing them and they want you to buy into the product they are selling, care and education for your children with service and smile. But what the larger organizations of union control want are teachers to pay them dues so they can use that money to inflict social change. READ THIS ARTICLE TO UNDERSTAND WHAT THEY ARE AFTER.
All we are paying for with more costs are the inflated contracts of teachers who have priced themselves out of their own market. But that market value is artificially propped up because of collective-bargaining derived from the union influence. I didn’t get the time to explain it on the radio but the best way to explain this concept is with professional baseball. The New York Yankees have the highest payroll in baseball. So with that in mind, they should win a World Series every year if money bought wins. But the Tampa Bay Devil Rays have one of the smallest payrolls in baseball, yet they have regular playoff appearances, and could be argued statistically to be as good as the Yankees.The reason is the Rays tend to dump their high dollar employees in favor of fresh talent right out of the Triple A League. The Yankees tend to buy up other teams best players, which inflates their payroll on the belief that in doing so, they are buying a championship team, which doesn’t work. It doesn’t work in sports and it doesn’t work in business. It also doesn’t work in education. Being lean and mean works, employing people who have passion works.
Now we know why the Pro Levy campaign called themselves “Move Forward”……..because they are moving forward toward the bank while the rest of us count our pennies.
For the answer to everything click the link below!
The West Chester Police did a good thing and that’s act quickly on an internal investigation of one of their own. The nine-year veteran 37-year-old David Busemeyer was investigated and indicted by a grand jury of three felony charges, obstruction of official business, obstruction of justice and attempted tampering with evidence. Busemeyer is of course innocent until proven guilty, but this entire internal investigation is a reminder that public servants are not perfect. And I don’t expect them to be. What I expect is for West Chester to do exactly as it did, and that is bring about justice even when it involves their own.
The trouble with “collective begging” which is the union term that Cunningham has adopted to refer to the “collective bargaining” reform bill of Issue 2 is that “collective bargaining” is not practical, is expensive, and allows employees who can’t achieve large wage levels under their own merit to make excellent wages under that system. Using West Chester purely as an example since it’s my community it’s not a big deal if David Busemeyer makes $70,032.20 if there was some sort of evaluation procedure that delivered him that type of wage. Maybe he does a lot of high risk work, or maybe he can speak in several languages and act as a translator for illegal immigration busts. But under collective bargaining, EVERYONE makes that kind of money. All a public employee has to do is show up for work, do what they are told within the union rules, and keep their nose clean, somewhat, and they will receive an automatic increase based on their collective bargaining contract.And instead of one employee making great money, you have hundreds making that kind of money and every bit of it must come from the tax payer.
I hired Willie about 15 years ago to be my spokesman for a line of T-shirts I was producing to help get out a message I had which stated, “TAKE AN AX TO OUR TAX.” We were making the shirts at cost during the 1996 election season to bring high taxes to people’s attention. Rob Portman actually bought one from me, and I took one down to city hall and gave it to Roxanne Quals, the mayor of Cincinnati at the time. Willie was hired to do our commercial which we ran on 700 WLW.
I was set to go on with Bill Cunningham during his 9 PM show on a summer Friday night. As I was headed to the station Cunningham had on a segment where he had strippers on doing a live strip show while Cunningham did play-by-play commentary. My wife told me, “This is the guy you’ve hired to be your spokesman?”
I said, “No, he’s a conservative. Willie is just doing this for ratings.”
My wife said, “And you’re going to go on behind this?”
I shrugged my shoulders.
“Doesn’t this compromise your message?” My wife said. “You hate Howard Stern because he has no ethics. You hate Jerry Springer because he’ll do anything for money. How is this guy any different? And you’re going to go on his show and let him pretend he’s a conservative. You’re going to acknowledge his existence? You’re going to even give him the time of day?”
In the video above, Cunningham has fantasies that his words actually carry weight, and there is a certain percentage of the population out there who would listen to advice from Jerry Springer, Howard Stern, or Bill Cunningham. Those types of personalities try to be everything to everybody, and actually believe in nothing. But then again, most lawyers are that way. They’ll believe whatever you tell them to, so long as the money is green.
At Lakota while this broadcast was roaming across the Eastern United States, mailmen were putting the letter you see below into the mail boxes of “select” supporters of Joan Powell, the school board president. Have a look at that letter for yourself. The first thing that should send an alarm up your spine is that Joan chose to put pictures of her grandchildren on the letter, that always means there is something hidden underneath the surface of the message.
VOTE NO on the LAKOTA SCHOOL LEVY. Vote for any candidates except for Jamie Green and Julie Shaffer. And VOTE YES on Issue 2 so this school board can actually manage its costs in the future and not keep asking us to pass school levies while people like Joan toss that money into a bottomless pit called the Teachers Union.
There was a lot of dispute about the removal of Senator Bill Seitz from a key committee during the final days of the vote on Senate Bill 5 which would become Issue 2. See an interview from Seitz with Channel 9 who is from the Cincinnati area.
I’ve known a lot of attorneys, and one of the common tactics they use when they have a weak case is to drag their feet and extend out a case. And Seitz obviously blindly loyal to labor interests even though he sells himself as a conservative was not able to see Senate Bill 5 for what it was, a good healthy culture change for public sector employment. Seitz, the labor attorney, listed as one of the best in America, as you can see at the link below, looks to have sabotaged and watered down the impact of Issue 2 from the very beginning by loading it down with unnecessary politics, which went against the kind of reform Kasich and many in the house and senate were looking for.
And this explains the behavior of Bill Cunningham on 700 WLW as well. In the brotherhood of attorneys, it is the mask of conservatism that they use for their act, but in reality when the make-up is taken off to who the individual truly is, the union of attorney brotherhood speaks of the true actions and now that Issue 2 for the first time in my adult life attempts REAL reform, it scares the people who have built their lives around the chaos of litigation.
If your wife asks you, “Honey, does this dress make me look fat?” Then you, the husband answer as you can see the skin dimples pushing through the fine surface of the dress as it hugs her hips, “No, no, you look beautiful.” The husband has committed a sin. You told her she was beautiful when you know in your mind that the correct answer was, “Hell, no, you’re fat. You have let yourself go over the last ten years and I’m embarrassed to be seen in public with you.” The husband answers the way he does out of a duty to his wife that goes beyond truth. He is forced to put on blinders to the truth in order to share a life with this woman, who has gained 40 extra pounds, wants the ability to eat, and eat and eat, but still expects her husband to lust after her for sex.The man, to avoid fighting with his over-weight wife will tell her anything to shut her up and get her off his back, so he tells her, “No, the dress looks great………..dear.”
Parents who have kids in those delicate years of childhood, who are in their school years, are an insecure lot. They of course want what’s best for their children, and desire every opportunity for them. So they tend to trust the opinions of others over their own knowledge because after all, being a good parent takes experience, and how do you get experience but by raising kids. So during that process, parents tend to believe they can throw money at a “professional” to give them the added security that those professionals will be there to pick-up whatever they miss as parents.
The parents both working jobs and paying a lot of money for a house they bought just so they could send their child to Lakota is no different from the husband who is just trying to keep the peace with his wife. “Yes, you look good to me. How much do you need to do your job better?”
The obese professionals caring for our children then take that money given by the enabler and buy more junk food so they can become even more obese. And when the food runs out, they will come back and say, “I need more! I am a ‘big boned’ entity and I need to maintain this large body. I’m hungry. We need a new levy.” The enabler, the typical tax advocate will then say as the woman in the video said, “We need to pass this levy so we can have good schools, so we can maintain our excellence.” But the eyes don’t lie. The public can witness the dishonesty which resides there seemingly hidden. They can see what the enabler is really thinking. “Wouldn’t it be better if the school system wasn’t so obese? Wouldn’t the school be better if it was much thinner?” The enabler is just as guilty as the husband who tells his wife, “Yes honey, you look good. You’re not fat at all.” The husband knows that if he doesn’t tell his wife something to that effect then sex will come with difficulty, and it will be a pain-in-the ass to pass his wife in the bathroom or in the hallways of his home. And thus the levy advocates are in the same boat. They must pass these inflated professionals in the halls of the school their children attend and communicate with others in social events, so they put on the blinders so that they can endure the experience with some resemblance of sanity.
I would look at the woman with her body attempting to bust out of her dress and ask, “Do you really want to know?”
The woman expecting praise as she fans her hands down her thighs to straighten out her dress doing her best to look sexy, “Of course, darling.”
I would then say, “My dear, your ass is fat and you are a pain to all the eyes of this room for you should have worn a potato sack rather than do that dress injustice by asking it to hide your blob-like body. There isn’t any amount of perfume, make-up, or cosmetic accessories that can hide the fact that you have visited the potato chip bag about 100 times too many!”
I didn’t know how bad it was till the Issue 2 debate that I mentioned where a member of the Middletown City Council pleaded to Senator Coley that jobs needed to be brought to Ohio, as if Coley could somehow reach into a magic bag and produce them from thin air. This man truly believed that such a statement was possible, and as I heard him speak I felt profound pity for the man. He seemed like a nice guy, certainly well-intentioned, but he did not understand where all the jobs in his city had gone.
I don’t blame Boeing at all for not wanting to put up with a radical work force, and I find it appalling that the government is stepping in where it has no business, but the same thing happens in our communities each time a teachers union decides to strike, a federal mediator comes in to negotiate, and what happens is our elected officials quickly get out-witted by the outside pressure and the unions win with public money we must then supply as tax payers. The situation is that ridiculous. And yes the spoiled class is that out-of-touch.
Thank the “Spoiled Class” for those empty buildings, and the job that was once there, but has fled our shores in search for freedom and the right to thrive and grow.
Many of my current friends are about 30 to 40 years older than I am, because it is during this phase once the body has withered away, and sexual fulfillment is not the primary objective of the adult mind followed by a sense of sacrifice to a child. (I’d put the order of necessity for women the other way around, for men, it is as I listed it) It is these older minds who finally begin to see things as they are, unfortunately death is breathing down the necks of these fine people, so it’s often too little too late. They contributed their share of madness into the fabric of social existence confusing necessity with their biological urges and now in their later years they wish to fix what they helped to wreck through the ignorance of their youth. To my way of thinking, “youth” extends well into the late 50’s of some of these people. Some people don’t get “wise” until their 60’s or 70’s. But most do get there eventually because as the strength of their bodies leaves them, their minds increase to compensate.
She wasn’t the first to make such a proclamation. Over the years people would say to me, “You are just like Thoreau.” They seemed astonished when I’d reveal to them that I had never read him, at least until fairly recently, after the encouragement of my daughter. The reason I never gave Thoreau a chance early in my life was because I partially blamed him for the Hippie Movement. It was high school English that taught me that Civil Disobedience was the model of the Civil Rights Movement and it was enjoyed by Ghandi also. Well, I thought Ghandi was a pacifist who should have led India to a violent conquest of his enemies, and this whole starvation thing never made any sense to me. The idea of self-sacrifice for a greater caused always seemed immature. Just as the idea that Christ died on the cross to relieve me of my sins never made sense either. I spotted a long time ago in those Christian studies a series of looters who sought to place themselves between the people and their God as a kind of toll keeper, and they use Jesus, the pacifist as a gate to collect the toll. Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience wreaked all these elements and I refused to read it in high school for that reason, again in college, and in my adult life until my daughter told me my rebellion was misplaced.
Below is a message I received from a teacher who is attempting to play a little game that is now all too familiar. In the debate I had recently with the Pro Lakota Levy group, you could hear the same type of fear based placement of a core argument, resembling the message below.(CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO THAT DEBATE)
The example of Somalia is a preposterous one. It is obvious that the creators of that little (anti-libertarian) film does not understand the greater aspects of social relationships. The real trouble in Somalia is due exclusively to their tendency toward collectivism as can be seen in this short documentary.It was on the back of collectivism that socialism was brought to that country, then when that fell, as it always does it paved the way for the clan Civil War that is currently taking place. Somalia is the direct result of government meddling at many levels, not the other way around, as the video obviously produced by some New Age Leftists, only able to see a small part of the overall picture interpreted.
The threats by these collectivists are utterances that aren’t worth the wind which carries the sound wave of discontent. Anyone who believes as collectivists do can be replaced by a superior mind quickly and efficiently, because it is the superior mind who avoids such occupations in order to avoid the fools who are currently employed there.The superior mind doesn’t waste their time on the quandary of collectivism. The apocalypse predicted by those employed by government as that body of collectivism is reduced by the tax dollar are unfounded, completely, the world will still turn tomorrow, kids will still be taught by a teacher, there will still be police and firefighters and many others. The term phrased, “the squeaky wheel gets the grease,” has been true. But my solution to the squeaky wheel is not to just put more grease on it; it is to replace the wheel all together with one that doesn’t make any noise, and might even work better. It is in such thinking that permanent fixes reside.
So at one level my anger is at the audacious costs these public schools expect from the community to operate. But secondly, it’s what they expect people to take as they maintain an “education class” which instructs their “product,” the students themselves, to enter life already in chains, and as a lover of individual freedom, I find it appalling I am required through my taxes to contribute to such a poor “product.” What they are making is something I don’t want to deal with in the future because it is all the little events in the microcosm, the bullying, the subtle manipulations to secure funding, the political imbalance in philosophic collectivism, the radicalism of the public unions, the product public schools create that is terrible! They prepare the mind of mankind to fall for the utterances of half-baked presidents and live life in chains just as that artist portrayed.
Rich Hoffman
