Rich Hoffman
https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com
Check out this article from Yahoo News about Pickerington Schools up in Columbus.
Source article from Yahoo News:
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Administrators at the Pickerington Local School District in Ohio are gearing up for an August levy vote to avert the need to make $7 million in budget cuts. Superintendent Karen Mantia estimates 30 more educator jobs will be cut during the 2012-13 school year if the levy does not pass. While some school administrators and staff are blaming the planned state funding cuts for the district’s financial woes, there is a lot more to consider than the lack of availability of taxpayer funds.
According to the fiscal information on the school website the projected $5 million state funding cuts for this school year would only scale the district back to 2008 funding amounts. The districts experienced at least $5 million per year in increased taxpayer funds since 2000. The school garnered $15 million in state assistance in 2000 and $45 in 2010.
Unsustainable spending is an issue for not just the Pickerington Local School District, but public schools and agencies throughout Ohio. A business as usual approach to funding schools and entitlement programs is simply not feasible without drastically increasing taxes. The fiscally responsible measures detailed in Ohio’s Jobs Budget and Senate Bill 5 are not meant to punish schools or attack public employees, but to ensure districts and agencies can remain solvent without adding to the burden of taxpayers.
Voters residing in the Pickerington Local School District said “no” to a levy increase last year. Residents currently pay $1,303 in property taxes on homes valued at $100,000 and a 1 percent income tax to support the school district.
Even if the 2011 levy gains approval the $500 per student extracurricular fee per sport will still stand. The proposed levy would generate nearly $6 million and add $168 to the average property tax bill. Salaries and benefits comprise the largest portion of the budget. Administrator salaries range from $75,000 to $144,000 per year.
Beginning in 2007 the district initiated a plan to reduce operational expenses by $7 million. During the same time period the district opened three new school buildings. The taxpayer-funded federal stimulus plan added funds to the district’s coffers last fiscal year when the Strickland administration funding formula reduced state assistance by $2 million for the district. Cost saving measures enacted by the district include nearly $3 million for non-replacement of resigning or retiring employees, more than $1 million in transportation cuts and in excess of $300,000 by eliminating positions.
Unlike the Columbus City School District, Pickerington Local does not have audit findings, ongoing fraud investigations or low test scores. Parents within the school community are concerned about access to extracurricular activities with the $500 price tag per club or athletic team. Although school officials are skirting the subject, there is fear that district enrollment will drop as parents exercise the open enrollment option to transport their children to nearby schools so they can continue to enjoy sports and academic clubs.
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Sounds good doesn’t it? Well, I thought that was what schools were doing all along.
Read more about Global Integration Models here:
http://www.pickerington.k12.oh.us/school_NewsArticle.aspx?artID=1781&schoolID=16
It’s really a progressive program designed to teach our kids to move into a globalized government, which I’m against as a tax payer. Here’s what it’s really about:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/20729275/Poverty-Reduction-Policies-and-Global-Integration
Rich Hoffman
https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com
What got the Bulldog into trouble at 700 WLW were videos like this one.
For those who don’t know who the Bulldog is here he is with Tracy Jones while on the air.
I have had the misfortune of terminating a lot of employees and it’s never fun. But you can often tell as an employer, even if you like the employee that must be terminated, that the day will come when you will have to do the deed. It’s hard to look a person in the face when you are their source of income, and tell them they are no longer needed by you. It is a rejection very similar to breaking up with someone that is in love with you. It is very hard to do.
Here is the Bulldog in his famous cage fight. People that crave constant attention can be good personalities for something like radio, but at the same time be destructive to the employees around them because to them anyone that isn’t over-the-top flamboyant is boring, or otherwise, a dork.
Out of all the terminations I’ve been involved in, and it’s so many that I can’t count them on the hands, and toes of four people, there is a small percentage that become violent, because those employees build the illusion in their minds that they are the greatest employee to ever grace your presence. There are traits that you, as the employer can readily see while they are in your employment that indicates trouble ahead. The sooner you can deal with that trouble, the better. The longer it goes on, the worse it will be later.
Here Eric Deters does his stand-up comedy act at the Funnybone Comedy Club down at Newport on the Levee. There is a line between being ambitious, and arrogant that is difficult for a person of many talents to navigate. Eric has been struggling with that thin line and it was obvious to everyone but him.
The employee in question took this reluctance by me to mean that he was invaluable. In his mind, he convinced himself that he is doing me a favor and his tasks were irreplaceable. I knew I had a problem with this employee based on how he interacted with other employees, and when I noticed he was taking liberties with the rules because he had developed a sense of entitlement that I would have to act soon. I didn’t address those problems as I would other employees because in my mind I was waiting for him to make that terrible error which would allow me to cleanly terminate his employment. This provides a clean separation that stands legal scrutiny and is necessary in this day and age with all the legal maneuvering that goes on. You hope as the employer that the employee will see that you haven’t taken an interest in the actions of their obligations because it is a kind of warning sign to them that they are on the cusp. But in some of these people, their egos take that kind hearted warning as an act of endorsement and they fail to see the truth because they build up in their minds an image of themselves that is of much higher value than reality reflects.
I could tell even from a distance that Eric was in one of those types of situations. In his email to me, he complained about management and how he had been overlooked for the 9-12 night spot and how he had been overlooked for the 3-6 spot with Tracy Jones. Eric was very upset that he was always ready on a dime to come in and cover for the hosts when they were off, so he felt that just by his work ethic he should have had a chance. In his anger he knocked the station for their ratings, their management decisions over the last year, a year when he had received many opportunities at the station he wouldn’t have gotten otherwise, and in general made a real butt of himself. He was shameful to say the least. Yet it was obvious to everyone that something was wrong with Eric Deters.
On June 1st, a few days after WLW surprisingly pulled Deters from the weekend spots, this video was put up. It tells the story of Eric Deters putting up the controversial video called “White Women and Pot” then realizing he went too far, called this guy and asked him to take the video down. Eric made several bad errors here, he crossed the line in the first place with the original video, but then he made it worse by calling up this guy and leaving a message on an answering machine that would end up being used against him. So as a radio personality on the powerful 700 WLW this was the kind of act that sealed the Bulldogs fate with management. It would have done it for me, even though I like Eric, this kind of behavior just pulls down the image of the radio station. I would have fired him too. There is that fine line of controversy, and putting into the hands of a predator, ammunition that can damage everything a radio station builds as a reputation, costs more than money, it costs credibility.
In this video, Eric made himself vulnerable by committing one error on top of another which snowballed into a tragedy. Ironically, in these tape recorded messages, Eric makes the case for himself why he can no longer work for 700 WLW, because it was just a matter of time before he stuck his foot in his mouth and he really did in this recorded message. WLW would not have been responsible if they hadn’t acted, even if they had to do so with a heavy heart.
I have listened to WLW for decades now. I have seen many radio personalities come and go. From what I can see, 700 WLW was doing their best to find a home for Eric out of pure loyalty. WLW as a business is first about the news, then about Reds baseball, and just behind those things is talk radio where hosts must fill the mind of the listener in that delicate art form of mind theater. Eric was a natural self-promoter, but lacked credibility, which a talk show host needs. Bill Cunningham for years walked that fine line carefully; his role is now a comedian. Nobody takes Cunningham very serious, and that’s the path he chose. He is the Jerry Springer of WLW. Doc Thompson has the difficult act of being the straight man for the station. Doc works hard to get to the facts, and he calls things as they are. In this next video, Doc gives a review of the Bulldog comedy routine while ironically doing an interview with an author who wrote a book about why celebrities crash and burn.
Speaking from experience, any time an employee that lacks natural talent but is rich in ambition confronts another employee of genuine talent, the first employee will seek to undermine the second with various forms of ass-kissing. That ass-kissing will win employment opportunities but it will not win respect. Shooting straight may not get the instant, easy ratings, but it will build the audience over time, and this is the path Doc Thompson has chosen. He spent most of his career in Cleveland but has also worked full-time in Lincoln, Las Vegas, and Albuquerque. He is a 5 time Marconi Award (the Academy Award of radio) winner for radio excellence. He’s at 700 WLW because he has to fill the role of Mike McConnell who played the straight man for a long time in Cincinnati. Doc is the real deal and a guy of genuine talent.
A man like Eric Deters made his bed and it is disgusting to attempt to bring down other radio personalities like Doc Thompson to cover the sins of his own doing. Doc’s criticism of Eric’s actions reflected my own opinion, that Eric was crossing the line in so many ways that he was embarrassing, not only to the station, but to himself. But the Bulldog was such a hard worker, and a guy that was always available for any shift of coverage which made it difficult for them to part ways with the Bulldog sooner. They did what they could to give Deters all the support they could afford to give. Behind the scenes they were probably doing what I was doing and that was scratching their heads wondering if Deters was even a stable enough individual to handle 50,000 Watts of responsibility.
In the end, Eric proved he couldn’t handle it. What every self promoter must understand is that you can sometimes cross the line, and when you realize it, you step back across it. What you don’t do is cross the line, then claim that there isn’t a line. And when you realize that you can’t convince people that the line isn’t there then try to back-track and erase the evidence. Bill Cunningham crossed that line often, but when he noticed it, he quickly corrected himself and would cover the flaw with humor. Because Deters was completely copying the extreme behavior of Bill Cunningham without the sense and humanity, the Bulldog wasn’t sure how to deal with the deeper and deeper grave he was digging for himself with his wild antics. The ultimate ending to living life over-the-top is you eventually go over.
Rich Hoffman
https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com
Toward the end of this broadcast I came on with Doc to give an update to the new contract concession made by the Lakota School System with the LEA. The LEA still needs to vote on the concession, but the process has started.
This is one of the key reasons that Senate Bill 5 was passed by the Ohio House and Senate and signed by Governor Kasich just over a month ago. Public employee costs have sky-rocketed in recent years. There is no management control of the public’s money, and the only solution those public officials can come up with is higher taxes. This is the primary reason school districts all over Ohio are failing.
They all have one thing in common; their labor costs are too high, and when those labor costs are analyzed, it is clear that the public officials have paid themselves 30%, or more, above the average wage of the non-public sector employee. It was their lack of discipline that led to the budget shortfalls, not a shortage of cash supplied by the community. Public officials seem to all share the same mentality, tax more to pay for their big spending.
Look at all the police cars escorting Joe Biden to a fundraiser for his boss. Seems like a waste of money to me.
I am proudly one of those 36%. I think S.B.5 is the only hope for the future of the state. It is the only tool on the horizon that will allow citizens to get these out-of-control costs under control. It is because of the passage of that bill that Lakota and the LEA even met at the table in record time and made a deal to eliminate the step increases. It is the LEA through the OEA (Ohio Education Association) that decided that S.B.5 would destroy their grip on politics and communities so they made a concession now to take the edge off. Because not only do they seek a new levy in November, but they also want to put on a softer face so enough Ohioans will see things their way and vote to repeal S.B.5. But consider that without S.B.5 as a threat, nobody would be talking. The LEA, the OEA or any government employee wouldn’t even consider negotiating. They haven’t in the past, and based on the rates of pay they have given themselves under the generosity of Ohio’s communities they won’t in the future.
It really comes down to this, if S.B.5 is repealed, and everything goes back to the way things were, then the situation we are seeing, where schools are going bankrupt, cities are struggling to avoid bankruptcy, and deficits are percolating in every government position for lack of tax money, yet the society paying the taxes are already spending 50% of all their income on taxes in some for or another, and it’s not enough, only bad things can happen. Those bad things will happen soon, before the 2012 presidential election. And when those bad things happen, if the state of Ohio does not have S.B.5 to protect ourselves, Ohio will fail miserably. It will push out its residence and business community with excessively high taxes to meet the greedy public employee expectations, or those public employees will bankrupt the whole system. And the devastation will be on the backs of those 54% who voted to repeal S.B.5.
Imagine that you were trying to change a flat tire. And our funding problem is flat. People can’t afford higher taxes so the air is out of the tire. So you want to change the old tire to a new tire, one that doesn’t require so much air to fill it. Air of course is the taxes we pay. So we jack up the car to change that tire. Senate Bill 5 is the jack we use to raise the car and replace the flat tire with a new one. And along comes a bunch of people that want the tire to stay flat, because they don’t want the car to move. They want to be stuck, because they benefit from the car being stuck. So they take away the jack.
Without the jack, how do we change the tire? You can’t. The tire will remain flat.
If that happens, the blame will be solely on the backs of the idiots that took away our jack. (S.B.5) People like me will survive. I’ll do like a lot of productive people will do; I certainly won’t look to open a new restaurant or business. I may not even want to live in the state. I might move to another state like Texas or Florida that doesn’t have such high taxes. Or I might just do the minimum to live so I don’t get taxed too much, because what’s the use in doing the extra work if some scumbag, politician is just going to pad their pockets with my hard work. Meanwhile, the public officials striving to do almost nothing to earn a six figure income all off tax money will find themselves far worse underfunded than they do now. And it will be their entire fault. They will be kings of their own wasteland, a kingdom of their own bankrupt making left scratching their heads and crying about how they arrived there. That’s when I’ll laugh in their face and remind them that they took the jack, so the car couldn’t move. Now they are stuck and rotting along the side of the road in a wasteland of parasites and will only have themselves to blame.
Rich Hoffman
https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com
2009 Constitutional
Amendment Casino gambling Passed
2008 Referendum Payday lending Failed
2008 Constitutional
Amendment Casino gambling Failed
2006 Constitutional
Amendment Minimum wage Passed
2006 Constitutional
Amendment Casino gambling Failed
2006 Constitutional
Amendment Pro-smoking measure Failed
I see the state looking toward casinos as a desperate ploy by bankrupt souls to cover costs they don’t have the courage to address any other way but by throwing money at the situation. The same people who foolishly conceive that by spending money on school levies, tend to also support infinite amounts of money poured into education, police departments, fire departments and all public services, because in their limited perspective of the world, spending money equals success. These are the same idiots that believe that spending money at a craps table, or by playing dice, or pulling the lever on a slot machine, a person can win.
It is these types of minds that have led our civilization to the condition it’s in. To understand that world, study a casino. Here in Cincinnati, the closest major casino is Hollywood Casino’s in Lawrenceburg Indiana. At first glance, this is a neat place. The parking is cheap. The drinks are cheap. The lobby is extravagant. They have an excellent, all you can eat Egyptian Temple themed buffet that is spectacular. On the way into this palace where the hotel rooms are lavish, and quite impressive, designed to lure the drunk gambler or the illicit fly-by-night lovers to relish in some nocturnal sin, there are giveaways for Harley Davidson motorcycles and other “free gifts” that are designed like insect traps to emit pleasurable thoughts only to trap the poor creature into the actual ambush. The trap is the casino itself, where a smoky room and chaotic noise greets the would-be-gambler. Once inside the temptations of great wealth lures the player to a table, or a slot where the hopes and dreams of a lifetime are placed in the fate of the randomness of dice, cards or a computer selection.
I stood in this place and watched players for well over an hour. My lack of participation was alarming to many of the employees that watched me like a coyote roaming a hen house. What I witnessed in this trap was a decadent place that feeds off the ignorance of the players. I had heard stories for years of co-workers, and some of my own employees that had gambling problems. One woman is a little black woman who was a friend of mine named, “Fuzz.” Well, Fuzz every week when I gave her a check on Friday would proclaim, “time to hit them slots!” She looked forward all week to those slot machines. She spent all her money on those things. She was perpetually broke, and bought most of her attire at dollar stores. She was even on some government assistance even though she had a full-time job. I liked Fuzz, but I felt sorry for her. I’ve known one too many people like her. When I was younger I worked with a guy named Sonny who was addicted to the race tracks in Lebanon. Sonny spent all his money on the tracks, went through at least two wives that I know of, and ended up in a trailer in South Lebanon before meeting a dismal end due to alcohol related illnesses.
U.S.50 that Hollywood Casino is built off of used to be a country road leading into downtown Lawrenceburg. As promised by developers, the casino did bring some business to the surrounding area. There are some car dealerships, restaurants, and some shopping complexes, the same ones that seem to go in wherever large groups of people are brought together. One of the fears when Lawrenceburg first brought casinos to the neighborhood was that crime would go up, prostitution would sky rocket and there’d be drug dealers on every corner. Well, that was a bit dramatic. At first glance, Lawrenceburg’s economy did improve. They have retail there they wouldn’t have otherwise because of the casinos, and the prostitution and drug use are like they are everywhere else hidden from view. But, I have family out in Indiana and used to travel U.S. 50 a few times a year to visit them and I remember when the bridge for I-275 was being built by the power plant, so that’s how far back my memory goes. Back in those days, a strip joint was a far-away place. Newport was known as Little Vegas back then and there all the derelict men that wanted fast women and all the things organized crime provided was in some far away land. Not anymore. Concepts Show Club offers topless dancing right in downtown Lawrenceburg, there have been prostitution busts in a few massage parlors, which is carefully swept under the rug, because the local politicians love having the extra tax money to throw at government services, because as we can see historically, politicians use tax money to buy votes, and when there is more tax money collected, there is more money to buy votes. Casinos are simply disguised taxes. They are ways to pull more money away from “working people” so more money can be used to buy votes.
For the casino proposed in Cincinnati there are already discussions about having a strip club near that casino. I remember when Larry Flynt first brought Hustler of Hollywood to Cincinnati and all the controversy over putting that business in Monroe, and people were up in arms about having immoral business in Cincinnati.
That requires a different definition of employment. Does the employee get paid to make something, or do they simply entertain for the sake of amusement. For instance, a grill cook at Wendy’s makes a burger so he exchanges his time and contributions to the construction of a hamburger. But what about a casino owner, what are they producing? They are producing jobs, but what kind of jobs? The product a casino produces is hope. The cocktail waitresses do deliver the drinks from the bar, where the bartender makes the drink. But the function of both is to diminish the senses of the customer so they spend more money on hope. And those are the types of jobs casinos bring to a community. Yes, they do create jobs, but they do so by being a parasite to the community they serve. Casinos are like sex to what production oriented business is to romance. Sex is quick and easy. Romance can take a whole evening or even a weekend. Sex is tearing off the cloths of your mate on a beach in some exotic location after four or five drinks at the bar. Romance is having your mate go out to dinner without her underwear, and letting her know through the evening that you know it, but you don’t touch her. You go to dinner, you go to your movie, you behave respectfully showing restraint, then when it comes time to do the deed, you make it last for a couple of hours. However in the minds of some, sex and romance is the same thing and these are the same people who think casino business and regular business is the same thing. They are not.
Most business owners I know would prefer not to have strip clubs and casinos near their businesses because they provide temptations to employees to take too long at lunch, and to waste their money. An employee with empty pockets and a desperate heart is an unreliable employee. They cost an employer in thousands of uncalculated ways. It’s one thing when a casino is in some out-of-the-way place, because it takes effort and planning to get there, because casinos are subconsciously looked upon as places of low quality. The casino in Davenport Iowa when I visited that city years ago cheapened in my eyes the entire state, because it said to me that the state was desperate for money, that the political leaders took the cheap sex route no different than porn as a way to solve their financial problems. I thought the same thing in Kalamazoo Michigan when I saw casinos there. It said to me, “I’m desperate for money, so desperate that we seek to drain every last dime out of our local economy and the people that support it.” And we all feel the same way about Vegas. It’s cheap, sleazy, and speaks of raw sex. That’s why it’s so popular for bachelor parties to go to Vegas. Men don’t go there to be good. They go there to be bad.
So casino planners that speak of urban development being solved by casinos are extremely short-sighted. If anything, downtown Cincinnati would become even more of a temporary tourist destination. Why would residents want to move next to a casino in a multi-million dollar real-estate development? They won’t. People who can afford such things will still fly to Vegas, so they don’t have to stare their sins in the face every day from the balcony of their homes.
So if I were the Governor and I knew that the constitution of Ohio had been beat into submission by thousands of weak souls what didn’t put it on the ballot just once, but three times since 2006 and I knew that the casino deal is a very progressive plan to implement on the state, I’d drag my feet too, or I would at least not make it easy for them. I wouldn’t want those businesses desiring to bring casinos to Ohio to feel comfortable with using Ohio and its people to just rob and loot the wealth of our communities, without making them jump through hoops to test their sincerity. But that’s the problem with fairness. The right thing is to show equal opportunity to all business no matter if you like it or not. The marketplace needs to decide what succeeds or fails, and government has no place in the regulation of such things even if the business is evil and vile.
So whatever Kasich’s motives are, he shouldn’t be using regulation to discourage casinos from setting up shop in Ohio. But I cannot be angry with him, because the casinos themselves, and how they came to be are progressive institutions that I find repulsive and they should have went away when voters said in 2006 that they didn’t want casinos in Ohio. Instead, they did as all government does when they don’t get their way, just as in school levies, they just kept putting it on the ballot until resistance to them gave up, and the amendment passed. That’s how we obtained casinos in Ohio, under the strong-armed tactics of thugs, corrupt politicians looking for a financial bail-out from all the votes they’ve purchased with tax money and out-right-thieves that are licking their lips to take all the money they can from the weak, like my friend Fuzz, and Sonny till there is nothing left but a corpse.
For the rest, those small little minds that are so enticed with bright lights, cheap 19 year old women and their bare breasts, and the fantasy that wasting your night in a casino constitutes nightlife, nothing can help you. You are the same people that believe in collective bargaining as a right given to you by FDR. You are children of LBJ’s Great Society and seek to cover the sins of not only your deepest desires, but your political subscription to that mythical society paid for by the future. You’re guilt causes you to endorse policies you know are wrong because the guilt of your poorly lived lives is too great for you to carry alone. So you seek easy money through casinos to lessen your burden.
Rich Hoffman
https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com
As voters hit the polls yesterday there were petition booths set up to repeal S.B.5. I have to laugh at the type of people who are behind this movement. These are people that subscribe to Keynes economic theory, which in short believes that money spent equals value. This is a preposterous idea, one that is abysmally off center and has no grounding in reality.
S.B.5 is the only way school districts can get their costs under control and the unions are terrified that once the scheme is revealed to people, which is what is happening, that they’ll loose forever their power in politics, and they should lose that power. I don’t even recognize the right of a union to exist in the public sector. Unions have no place in American society. They are creatures of LBJ’s Great Society that reflected FDR’s Second Bill of Rights. Booth of those Presidents were ego driven fools that wanted to live on forever to memorialize their power and prestige in the minds of people deep into the future. It is these types of people the Constitution was designed to protect us from. The reason that Keynesian economic theories fail is that they don’t account for the faults of the human mind. They assume that the privileged few who rule are without corrupt intentions. Unfortunately, those who crave power are often prone to corruption. They might start off with good intentions, but the job and temptations often ruin their minds. That’s why term limits are so important.
What is terrifyingly obvious once a little investigation is applied to school systems is that superintendents as a group seem prone to fill empty aspects of their lives with the value of money. That’s where Keynes fails as an economist, it does not account for corruption and failures of the human heart.
In the story with Doc, we discussed how Lakota wanted to hire a superintendent at 300K per year, and the arguments are that Lakota is a massive school with a lot of students and that’s what a position with such responsibility merits. Well, traditionally, the President of the United States is the highest-paid public employee. President Obama currently earns $400,000 per year, along with a $150,000 expense account, a $100,000 nontaxable travel account and $19,000 for entertainment. The most recent raise in salary was approved by Congress and President Bill Clinton in 1999 and went into effect in 2001; prior to the change, the President earned $200,000, plus expense accounts. By the time you add up the car allowances of superintendents and all other benefits, they are getting paid too close to what the President of the United States is making for running the whole nation, not just a school district. So this gives some idea how far off base these numbers are for pay scales.
I am proud that WLW has covered this issue, and have done so boldly for quite some time. It also gives me great pleasure to know that these education stories are now being covered by television. To learn more, get ready for the I-Team report by Brendan Keefe on Monday, May 9, 2011 on Channel 9 at 6 PM. It will open your eyes, and close your wallet and teach you things you never thought were possible from the people we entrust with our children’s lives.
Rich Hoffman
https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com
Few people really understand, because it’s now been a couple of generation’s old, but life in America is not supposed to be as it is, and two definitive dates have moved America toward a socialist system that has greatly hampered the explosive growth that made our nation great. Those dates are the year of 1913 when the Federal Reserve was created, and income tax was implemented. The second is 1944 where a king seeking president in FDR created with great audacity the thought of a Second Bill of Rights.
In 1944, FDR was fulfilling a long sought after promise of progressives, which his cousin Teddy Roosevelt helped begin, to create a better, more fair world, which were a direct play-book from socialist thought. FDR like his cousin, whom I admire because of his energy and intelligence, suffered from a desire for power, and a belief that he was one of the elites that were enamored by God to help the less-fortunate.
American exceptionalism is unique because the people who fought and survived in this growing nation bred children that reflected the tenacity of the pioneers that worked hard, were inventive, and loved freedom. But as more and more immigrants came from Europe, with European ideas those ideas began to compete with the ideas of our Founding Fathers, which were working dramatically, as is evidence in the great number of inventions and rapid expansion of our cityscapes in a very short time, even while the nation was still reeling from the Civil War.
Walter Lippmann, the hero of modern media, was a progressive and advocate of The Second Bill of Rights. It was a young Lippmann that sat in Teddy’s home in the last days of TR and attempted to coax Teddy to continue the progressive march, which TR had lost interest in after Taft left the presidency. TR primarily became a progressive to fight his old friend in President Taft because he felt pushed out of the Republican Party. But younger cousin FDR was a true blue progressive which is a fancy word for a socialist and the New Deal was a socialist concept.
A much older Walter Lippmann stated at the time that the New Dealers would “Rather not have a recovery if the revival of private initiative means a resumption of private control in the management of corporate business…the essence of the New Deal is the reduction of private corporate control by collective bargaining and labor legislation, on the one side, and by restrictive, competitive and deterrent government action on the other side.” That statement embodies most everything that the press speaks to this day, and socialist leaning union members, film makers, and politicians that hide their beliefs in socialism behind the Democratic Party, or under the more encompassing term, progressive.
Here is FDR reading his Second Bill of Rights from 1944. Just like a king from a far away land, he consults his subjects in a similar manner, which is fundamentally an incorrect American philosophy. Unfortunately, for those in society that have a tendency to be skittish by nature, socialism is an attractive idea because they naturally lack courage. Those are the kind of people who embraced FDR and his New Deal policies.
“The Economic Bill of Rights”
Excerpt from President Roosevelt’s January 11, 1944 message to the Congress of the United States on the State of the Union[1]:
“ It is our duty now to begin to lay the plans and determine the strategy for the winning of a lasting peace and the establishment of an American standard of living higher than ever before known. We cannot be content, no matter how high that general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our people—whether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth—is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, and insecure.
This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political rights—among them the right of free speech, free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. They were our rights to life and liberty.
As our nation has grown in size and stature, however—as our industrial economy expanded—these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.
We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. “Necessitous men are not free men.”[2] People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.
In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all—regardless of station, race, or creed.
Among these are:
The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;
The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;
The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;
The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;
The right of every family to a decent home;
The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;
The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;
The right to a good education.
All of these rights spell security. And after this war is won we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being.
Americas own rightful place in the world depends in large part upon how fully these and similar rights have been carried into practice for all our citizens.
For unless there is security here at home there cannot be lasting peace in the world.
FDR attempted to hang on to his presidency by running for 4 terms. It is because of him that the United States began term limits for the presidency, like a king that seeks the meaning of his existence in an elected position. It was easy for FDR to continue getting elected, because the weak side of human nature will always like the person that gives them things, and FDR was giving away things that weren’t his. He is most responsible for the budget mess that we are currently in. And he wasn’t the end. Today, the progressive tradition is alive and well in financiers like George Soros, Presidents like Barrack Obama, and appointments to the Obama administration such as regulatory tzar, Cass Sunstein.
Cass Sunstein is working toward a different kind of America. People like me completely reject what Cass proposes.
This is a video from Cass Sunstein during 2006, long before he was Obama’s regulatory tzar. He is exactly why the FDR’s Second Bill of Rights would never work, because people like Cass are weak-kneed intellectuals that would rather have price fixes instead of allowing competition to drive the market.
My mind has been emancipated individually, so Cass is wrong, completely wrong. In fact, he’s so far off base he’s not even in the same city of the team he thinks he’s playing for. If he had things his way, to put it in everyday terms, if you let Cass Sunstein manage the NFL, every player at each position would have to weigh the same, would have to run just as fast, would be able to bench press the same amounts, the QB’s would have to be identical, because neither team would be allowed to have an advantage over the other team. That is basically the world FDR, and Cass Sunstein have been trying to create for the United States. It is socialism. Pure and simple.
The ghosts of these follies continue to resonate in the minds of people everywhere. It is these Second Bill of Rights that are uttered in union protests. They want the promises made by a man who had no right to squander American Ingenuity by robbing private industry and giving it to all those who are too lazy to match the task, yet had the power of the vote. So the man in FDR gave people something for nothing and took from those that had something at the expense of the future, and he did it for his quest of kingdom, the oldest, and most primal desire known to man.
I can say that I recognize nothing in the Second Bill of Rights. If it isn’t in the Constitution it doesn’t exists. I will continue to pay my income tax, which progressives are robbing from me. I will pay my Social Security, and my Medicare which progressives are robbing from me out of respect for the law, even though I believe the minds behind the law are no better than insects. But I will never take a check from the government. I will never cash in on a “pay day” of spoils provided by “the system.” I want nothing to do with it, and once they’ve robbed me of my money, that money is corrupted by their corrupt hands and I no longer want it.
Thus, that is the essence of taxation and the term “collective bargaining.”
Rich Hoffman
https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com
I’m glad that after 10 years, Osama bin Laden is finally gone. He brought it on himself. But, the impact on our airline industry will forever live in memorial to that black-hearted terrorist.
Well, it doesn’t need to be. In fact, many of us have watched this whole transformation occurring right before our eyes, the kinds of things that brought us Social Security, Medicare, and even the IRS are happening to our airline industry right now by panicky politicians. Their motive is to obtain a vote from a terrified public by clamping more and more regulations onto air travel to the point where flying is no longer enjoyable. In fact, it’s to be dreaded. It is now normal to catch a flight to Chicago which is only a 4 to 5 hour drive by car, arriving at the airport an hour and a half before the flight, to ensure that you can get through security. Then by the time you are seated, the plane taxi’s to the runway and you actually get into the air, make your flight, land, taxi into your terminal, pick up your luggage, you could have driven your car and arrived at the same time and not had to deal with intrusive TSA agents or lost luggage.
Instead, this clip by Brendan Keefe is how flying is supposed to be. People that need to be in New York, or Chicago for a morning meeting don’t need their time wasted by government bureaucrats. Bureaucrats make their living wasting time, so that is why they don’t value it. The people in the clip below should be able to get to the city of their destination, have their meeting, do some shopping, and be back home for dinner with their families without any trouble what-so-ever. The only difference between the traditional airlines and the clip below is the government regulation and interference which they impose on everyone under the guise of “protection.”
Instead, this is what air travel has been reduced to. Here is a clip of former Miss USA being groped by TSA agents. Not only is her time wasted in the lines, but she is physically molested. Is this what the value of her ticket buys her?
The function of flight is the same between the large airport with the major airlines and the smaller airport with the smaller, individually owned planes. The only difference is government interference, and nothing displays the complete failure of government endeavor better than this obvious difference shown in the clip by Brendan. The function of flight is to get where you want to go and to get there without your time wasted. It is not acceptable to endure extra pain or suffering because our government couldn’t do its job to begin with failing to recognize the role of radicals in the world and how to spot them in an airport.
I’ve thought about the 9/11 hijackings a lot over the years, which is what started all this mess. The terrorists used box cutters to run airplanes into the World Trade Center buildings which caused so much devastation to the American psyche it’s almost unfathomable, even to this day. I can say that if I had been on that plane a knife would not have held back a whole plane full of people from stopping the terrorists. I mean a knife cuts, but there’s ways to deal with that, even with multiple attackers. I can only offer that people were so shocked by the act that they were frozen with surprise. If America should have learned anything from 9/11 it’s how to deal with that kind of situation in the future, and that instead of complying with a terrorists demands, two or three of the passengers would overwhelm the attackers before trouble got out of control in the future. Not what has happened, which is to avoid every possible danger in every possible circumstance, and to stop being Americans.
The terrorists succeeded.
Americans need to stop being wimps that just take this kind of stuff without a fight. It’s not a big deal to get 20 or 30 stitches if you can stop a plane from crashing. If the pilots are killed, the tower can talk down a bold passenger into a large river or lake for a controlled crash landing. But the key here is in being bold. There are still bold people in America. But, because of the TSA rules, they’ll fly themselves instead of being inconvenienced by the larger airlines which isn’t good for business.
So once again, government hurts business. The movers and shakers of the world will stop flying first class and just get a private plane. The strong will find some other form of transportation. That leaves everyone else to travel with the traditional airlines and to put-up and shut-up to follow the ridiculous rules of the TSA which is just one more nail in the coffin of freedom. That coffin was buried at sea long before the body of Osama hit the water.
Rich Hoffman
https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com
“Our problem is not merely to help the students to adjust themselves to world life, but to make them as unlike their fathers as we can. While we are followers of Jefferson, there is one principle of Jefferson’s which no longer can obtain in the practical politics of America. You know that it was Jefferson who said that the best government is that which does as little governing as possible…but that time has passed. America is not now and cannot in the future be a place for unrestricted individual enterprise. The people of the United States do not wish to curtail the activities of this Government; they wish, rather, to enlarge them and with every enlargement, with the mere growth, indeed of the country itself, there must come, of course, the inevitable increase of expense…It is not expenditure but extravagance that we should fear being criticized for.”
That is a quote from the father of modern education and president of progressive policy who along with Social Gospel soldiers such as John Dewey created the situation you see on the below chart. The quotes are from Woodrow Wilson.
Check out the source article of this chart at: http://www.theblaze.com/stories/the-charts-that-show-why-the-u-s-is-screwed/
The new strategy among school systems to pass levies is to not advertise them in the traditional way, to not put out signs, to not send out mailers, and to attempt to keep things quiet so that majorities of the voting people don’t show up. Those who do show up are usually the employees of the school system, or those radical parents that are hoping to use the school to mold their children into miracles of future productivity, which they as parents lack the ability to accomplish on their own. Listen to Darryl Parks of 700 WLW cover this warning along with the pressing coming from extremely high gas prices.
Government, and schools are part of the government, are in a perpetual state of attempted growth. This is why government officials are often concerned with unemployment numbers. Government, especially progressive government, seeks to create a job to be filled by a living body. The focus is not on the productivity of that employee, but simply on creating a position and filling that position with a warm body. This is why government is so extraordinarily inefficient. And schools are no different. They are heavily staffed with senseless positions so that the school system can flaunt the numbers as if the number of employees a district carries is a proper measure of productivity. It’s not. Schools carry too many assistants at the administration level; there are too many councilors, and media specialists. And the invisible culprits to a school budget are substitute teachers where the normal teacher takes one of their many personal days (3) at Lakota and 15 sick days and must hire a substitute teacher so the district is not only paying the teacher for not being in the classroom, but must hire a substitute teacher to fill in. Now remember that teachers are only in the classroom for 9 months out of a year, so every calendar year a teacher is able to take 18 days off with pay, which requires a substitute teacher. Consider that the average month on a 5 day work week is approximately 20 days.
Government is a corrosive, corruptible creature, and teachers are a reflection of everything that’s wrong with it. They take too much and do too little. Tocqueville proclaimed in 1840 “Having thus taken each citizen in turn in the powerful grasp and shaped him to its will, government then extends its embrace to include the whole of society. It covers the whole of social life with a network of petty, complicated rules that are both minute and uniform, through which even men of the greatest originality and the most vigorous temperament cannot force their heads above the crowd. It does not break men’s will, but softens, bends, and guides it; it seldom enjoins, but often inhibits, action; it does not destroy anything, but prevents much from being born; it is not at all tyrannical, but in hinders, restrains, enervates, stifles, and stultifies so much that in the end each nation is no more than a flock of timid and hardworking animals with the government as its shepherd.”
That’s what is coming out of our schools where the kids coming out of this public education system being taught by teachers that take 18 days off over a 9 month period and are off over the summer averaging a yearly salary of 55K in Ohio to 62K in some of the wealthier districts. Kids are being raised in this environment and they expect to be given a job like this when they graduate from college someday. Tocqueville was 100% correct in his assessment, the seduction of the weak, to become herded by a government shepherd in exchange for a good wage to perform in a mediocre way. This is what our tax money is funding, and essentially why schools continue to ask for more and more money in taxes.
Few tax payers ever really consider how much they actually pay in taxes, which robs them of money for themselves and gives it them to the mediocre only to feed a government monster with a big appetite.
If you listened to Darryl’s radio broadcast he also covered gas prices. There are two reasons for the dramatic increase at the pumps; one is that the Fed as driven up inflation, by printing too much money, and the second is that there are a lot of hidden taxes in our gas. In Ohio it’s between .47-.48 cents per gallon. This is why states like Tennessee and Georgia are .30 cents cheaper per gallon, because of the tax allocation between the states. Where is all that money going? What about all the sales tax we send to the state? And the federal tax. We are taxed on everything, and schools want to continue to tax our property to fund mediocrity when they’ve irresponsibly spent the money. All they know to do is to ask for more!
We have allowed ourselves to be herded around by the meek of society, people who are not the best we have to offer, but are the flocks of mediocrity that will bring a nation to its knees in lack of competition. We have thrown countless dollars at these flocks and they eat them mindlessly like cows eating straw from our hands with nothing to do with the energy the food gives but to convert it to fat.
I’ve changed my primary job 6 times over my lifetime so far and I’ve never taken an unemployment check. Every time I’ve ever lost a job it was not from anything that was my fault. Yet it never occurred to me to file for unemployment. Heck, I’ve actually been impelled by sharp metal rods that went into one side of my hand and came out the other, I’ve had the skin ripped off the end of my fingers and pulled completely off, fingernail and all. I simply picked up the skin, cleaned it, and slid everything back in place, got my stitches and reported back to work by the time to leave for the day, and I never missed work for such things, and I never took a workman’s compensation payment. The people those Senate Democrats are talking to are those flocks of helpless little animals that just want a friendly hand to reach into the fence to feed them.
How is what Harry is saying any different from what this farmer is saying?
And that’s where your tax money is going ladies and gentlemen. Remember, if you vote for a school levy, a social welfare levy, a tax increase of any kind…………………………..you’re stupid!
“If we can prevent the government from wasting the labor of the people, under the pretense of caring for them, they will be happy.” Thomas Jefferson.
And to perform the scam this time, on this election on Tuesday, school systems, labor leaders, and bureaucrats everywhere are prying that nobody shows up to vote. Voting is still the most powerful weapon we have over the thieves that seek to rob us. Have the courage to use it and take the time to protect yourself from further tax increases on Tuesday. Only by cutting the revenue that feeds the monster which is government, can you hope to restrict the power it has to inflict itself upon your life.
Rich Hoffman
https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com
I spent my twenties reading Joseph Campbell who was an intellectual very well-respected among virtually everyone no matter what the political affiliation. And after I read every Campbell book, some of them several times, I read his autobiography by Stephen and Robin Larsen called A Fire in the Mind, The Life of Joseph Campbell and I remembered with some surprise the quote from that book on page 466 paragraph 3, “Campbell believed in a great revolution of the spirit, and deplored the authority figures of the world who sought to keep human-kind in line. While he seemed to be siding with the powers that be, on the other hand he felt that the revolution of the Marxists and the Maoists was no real revolution but only the triumph of a new kind of collectivism, perhaps even worse than the old religious orthodoxies, because it had totally repudiated the spiritual element—and even worse, the celebration of individuality.” That comment came on March 10th in 1969. It made Campbell very upset that many of his students at Sara Lawrence College were missing class to protest the war and that is the context of his comments.
Well, those Marxists and Maoists that were skipping Joseph Campbell’s class are now the old hippies and idealists that are in public office now. In 1979 lobbyists committed to the 10 Planks of Communism finally convinced Jimmy Carter to begin a Department of Education founded by those Maoists and Marxists types and since then they have penetrated our schools with the ideology of collectivism instead of actual fundamental education. It was during this period that the United States went from ranking second in education to other countries to fourteenth in the 1990’s just 15 years after the start of The Department of Education. That’s quite a sharp decline.
Today is my 23rd wedding anniversary with my wife. She knows what to give me, a guy that reads and writes continuously while watching the news and cutting hours of radio broadcasts into digestible bits so people who miss valuable information can hear them at their convenience. So she made me an American flag blanket which she gave me this morning.
Those disgusting old hippies, goons, freaks, losers, Marxists, Maoists and thieving intellectuals that wish they encompassed just a fraction of the mind of someone like Joseph Campbell are now taking our nation on a path as seen in this chart by David Murrain, and this is something I take very personal, because it’s my country they’re attacking, and have been for a long time.
You can see more from the work of David Murrain at this link.
https://www.breakingthecodeofhistory.com/about.htm
Who is David Murrain, check him out here:
Here is another bit from David on the devaluation of American currency.
I agree with the Bull Dog from 700 WLW that Donald Trump is the kind of guy that can level out that curve. He may not be the guy everyone loves, but we need a media equivalent to the Marxists, Socialists, Maoists, radical extremists, union interests composed of the same elements, that are embedded in our culture and it will take someone like Trump to do it. If someone comes up with better candidate, fine, but the Bull Dog articulates the problem very well in this bit.
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To repair the nation it will take each and every person that makes up that nation to do their part, be good individuals and work toward the goal of renewal, and we’ll do it one stitch at a time, or one word at a time, but we will get there because I have committed myself to as much in this next phase of my marriage. That’s why my wife gave me that gift, to show her support of my effort.
Rich Hoffman
https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com