Tag: Detroit

The Magnificence of the Soo Locks: Looking in the face of stolen American wealth by the looters of globalism

Yes, I had a lot of pride watching the 1000-foot freighter American Spirit moving through the Soo Locks just downstream from Lake Superior on its way back to Duluth, Minnesota, to pick up more taconite for markets at the bottom of Lake Huron for the steel industry. On average, the Soo Locks move 500 billion dollars of economic value through the locks along the St. Marys River, which borders the United States with Canada across from the rapids that drain from Lake Superior into Lake Huron. From the vantage point of the American side of the river in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, where Interstate I-75 simply ends at the border, there is an observation platform that allows viewers to watch the big ships come in and out of the locks in unique ways. There are similar lock systems worldwide on most of the major rivers, but this one at the bottom of Lake Superior was special. There is an economy on the Great Lakes in America that few understand the sheer magnitude of. Most countries would love to have the economy of such a freshwater system of travel, such vast inland seas, but they don’t. In America, the economy of the Great Lakes barely gets noticed because there are so many other things to pay attention to, and most people don’t ever get up to that part of the world. The little town of Sault Ste. Marie gets overlooked because it’s an hour north on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where the speed limit is 75 MPH. After all, there is the kind of remoteness that you only find out west. And most people never make the journey which they should. I felt privileged to be there and to watch such a large ship move through the locks. It was amazing to see such an engineering achievement and to study the history of Great Lake travel as economies were developed over the years, the sheer magnitude of human achievement. But then it was also sad because much of that economic vitality had been targeted by globalists in competing markets, and in the lower part of Michigan, Chicago, and down into Pennsylvania and Buffalo, those effects were obvious. 

Five hundred billion dollars of commerce is a lot, but in all honesty, there should be many more ships like the American Spirit I saw moving through the Soo Locks that day participating in commerce. And there would be if the steel towns of Pittsburg and Detroit had not been eviscerated by globalism the way they had, with many of those jobs now moved to China as part of the Desecrators of Davos plan to redistribute wealth around the world to plans of their design. In most cases, they have captured our political class in America and convinced them that globalism was to American benefit. Only now, at the start of a new century, do we see the scam for what it has always been. It was theft, and there is a lot more that America could do regarding the economy of the Great Lakes. But we had been suckered into thinking that environmentalism was the new priority. That the ambitions which built the Soo Locks in the first place were no longer relevant in the world. That fresh water and calm commerce were values Americans must have to ship away all those nasty, dirty jobs to China.

Meanwhile, markets in Duluth and all along Michigan were dried up and re-established in communist China to the disadvantage of America, and it was all done while we clapped at the endeavor. When the Soo Locks were built, Detroit was the world’s car capital. Most people around the globe bought a car from Detroit if they wanted one.   But not anymore. If people buy a car, it’s likely coming out of Asia or Europe. While America played nice and shared its wealth created by American capitalism, that wealth was confiscated by global thieves and given to the undeserving through legislative force.

America has the mines along Lake Superior to build a steel industry that the rest of the world would never be able to keep up with. And in the early days of travel along the St. Marys River, before there were locks, but simply rapids, the effort it took to ship goods from Lake Superior down into the rest of the country was enormous. Yet people did it for the chance to profit from the experience, and great industries were built in hopes of building that wealth and their lives along with it. The sheer ambition and the many shipwrecks that occurred just north of the Soo Locks navigating those challenging waters for the opportunity at a good life fueled by a thriving economy justified the massive amount of wreckage that lay at the bottom of the lakes and the many lives lost, in the hundreds of thousands. You didn’t see people crying over the deaths, they simply dusted themselves off, built more ships, and worked harder, and the result is the Soo Locks and massive vessels like the American Spirit shown in the included video. But the condition of travel today is a ghost of its former self. The economy along the Soo Locks should be in the trillions, and the steal produced from the Duluth taconite should be the best and most coveted in the world. It could be again if only we could recapture our political class into an America-first platform, which has been gaining steam lately now that we see that we’ve all been suckered by globalism. It’s a sad story that doesn’t need to be because the opportunity is literally staring us right in the face.

Part of my journey to that region was to measure something I had been thinking about, travel along the vastness of the Great Lakes in the summer of 2022 to measure just such a thing ahead of the upcoming elections. It’s one thing to read about these economically depraved conditions; its another to see it for yourself while traveling specifically through Toledo, Ohio, Detroit, Michigan, and Flint, Michigan, all communities that directly benefited from Great Lakes shipping but have seen their cities decline accordingly due to the designs of globalism, which at this point can only be considered an invasion of the wealth and resources of the United States gained not by war, but by deceit. And if anybody were to take a journey like the one I described, they would see it for themselves. Lower Michigan has been deprived of opportunity, and the people have suffered noticeably. What has been going on becomes very clear as you travel up into the Upper Peninsula and watch the amount of traffic moving through the Soo Locks headed for southern markets. It’s impressive to see, but sad that there isn’t much more of it. The opportunity cost has been enormous. What is happening is something to be proud of, but when you realize how much lost opportunity has been shipped away to build up the wealth of other countries due to political tampering of global looters, a quiet rage begins to set in. It’s not something they show you on the nightly news, and most of America has no idea what has been happening because they haven’t seen it for themselves. But suppose you do make the trip, which I highly recommend doing. You will see a robbery, stolen wealth from America, and distributed to undeserving destinations worldwide. And it will certainly put things in perspective. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Real Gríma Wormtongue: Why we should all be proud of Donald Trump

What the Fu** is that piece of crap video Eminem did about Donald Trump? Doesn’t that idiot know that pumping the Black Panther fit to the air like he did in that video is a communist symbol, and that what he said and how he connected the world together had no semblance into reality? He can’t be that stupid, because if he is somebody owes us some money for his terrible public education. Everything about this video was pathetic including the little tag alongs standing in the background of a city destroyed by socialism—Detroit. Hell, I could stand in a parking garage and yell about all the things I don’t like about the world. At least when I did a similar video about what I didn’t like about Obama’s vision, I did some bull whip tricks that actually displayed some real talent. This stupid kid Eminem just stood there and yelled like a dumbass. And this guy was a celebrity? For what? Couldn’t he do something better and more creative than just yelling about things he obviously knows nothing about?

I am so proud of Donald Trump right now that I can’t hardly contain my enthusiasm. As I write this he just signed an executive order to unwind Obamacare paving the way for sweeping changes to health-insurance regulations. That’s a good thing because obviously the Republicans in the Senate who have taken millions of dollars from the insurance lobby refused to act hoping to paint the president in on a loser so they could force him to break a campaign promise and be rid of him by 2020. Those Republicans were more than happy to let all of our insurance premiums rise while they remained under federal protection insulated from the realities of their failures—but Trump went around them. Trump’s attack is a twofold event, first he will show the public what happens under an executive order where competition is introduced to the insurance exchanges—driving down rates over state lines. Secondly, he is going to outlast the Republicans who stood against him, and when he knocks them out of office there will be a Trump friendly Senator there ready to take the vacant seat. It might take a few years, but Trump will get his votes to make all this legal during his terms in office to make everything official by law. But standing around waiting for losers like John McCain just isn’t going to work, and Trump’s not waiting. Instead he is taking his message to the American people like he did last night in Pennsylvania. I watched that speech and the interview he did in front of a live audience at that same event with Sean Hannity with and swelling pride that I can’t remember ever happening. This is what it looks like to win, and to push back against the villains of our world.

These events as they are happening, the Vegas shooting and the lack of clear investigative evidence forthcoming from the authorities there, the treachery of John McCain, the chidings of Ben Sasse, the manipulations of Mitch McConnel—the lack of effort by Paul Ryan, the utterances of the broken Hillary Clinton and all her Democrats remind me of the fictional character of Gríma Wormtongue from the Lord of the Rings novels by J.R.R. Tolkien. You really must turn to the vast imaginings of fiction to behold the scale of the evil that is on full display and to understand what a miracle it is that Donald Trump is willing to stand against it unfettered with regret, fear or even the slightest bit of doubt. Donald Trump knows the game and he’s exposing it in ways nobody could have imagined. Even the events of the Hollywood meltdown over Harvey Weinstein can be attributed to the pressure Trump applies to the world around him. The liberal media had no choice but to go after Weinstein since they’ve spent the last year in full attack mode against the Trump family. Nothing stuck to the Trump’s but that same media had to then look to their own—and there was a lot of dirty rotten ugliness that was exposed very quickly. Just consider the case of Hillary Clinton, her top aide’s husband is now in jail for his sexual exploits with underaged girls. One of her top Hollywood donors is now fleeing the country due to three decades of severe sexual abuse of women he conducted and likely he raped others, which means he could be facing charges. How could anybody look at Trump with the anger Eminem articulated and not see the vast evil surrounding Hillary Clinton? Forget about partisanship interpretations. At the most fundamental human level, how could anybody see anything other than vast villainy on behalf of the Democrats? And Trump just by refusing to buckle under the pressure is flushing out all these Wormtongues who are falling by the day lately. It’s a dream come true for me.

It’s been seven years since I did the Whip Stunt to Save America video shown below. It didn’t get seen by as many people as Eminem’s crap did. You can bet that Google, Yahoo, and MSN have me on every kind of blacklist they can put on their search engines, but the right people still listened to what I had to say. The message does get out because my target audience is smart people, and they understand what we are fighting, which is a kind of evil only defined in Biblical context or in our most extravagant fantasies. I’ve been naming the Wormtongues for a long time and it costs me plenty. You never really know how something will work out, all you really can do is identify a problem and hope that enough people act on your truth to make a difference. In my wildest fantasies I never expected a Donald Trump to come along and to become such a wonderful president. I never thought it possible that all these problems could be solved without a violent revolution. I mean I never planned to let losers like Eminem ruin my country the way they ruined their city of Detroit, or even Chicago. In the past I had a chance to work with people like Harvey Weinstein and to make millions of dollars as a writer in movies—but I didn’t because I couldn’t break bread with those people. It was never an option to take the money and run and to be a part of destroying my country in the process. I made that decision a long time ago and for me it all came to a point with that video. It was within a week of that video that I started this blog site—to help educate the right people to think the right way about things and to essentially build a resistance against the progressive insurgents I saw taking over everything.

Now those insurgents—the anti-American forces in the NFL, Hollywood, the music industry, and the media in general are on the run and for a change–they are actually terrified, and they deserve to be. You can see that fear on Eminem’s bitchy little face. They have been bad people who were attempting to take over our country. I knew it a long time ago and now it’s more obvious than ever. I can’t say enough about Trump. He likely has saved so many lives by avoiding an all-out civil war—and I appreciate him so much for it. Typically, presidents don’t get credit for avoiding wars—only in winning them. But Trump has turned our culture war into one that has been fought by words rather than bullets—and we’re on the winning side for a change. That makes me very appreciative of what he’s doing. Obviously, a lot of people don’t see it yet, but history will certainly not be blind to the fact of the Trump legacy. Everyone will be a lot better off once he’s finished.

Rich Hoffman
Sign up for Second Call Defense here:  http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707  Use my name to get added benefits.

Labor Unions Caused Detroit Bankruptcy: Michael Moore’s lost sense of purpose

I spoke about this a bit the other day, but now that the dust has settled more details are necessary in regard to the Detroit bankruptcy.  Darryl Parks during his Saturday program on 700 WLW did a wonderful couple of segments about the Detroit situation which deserves to be highlighted, and can be heard below.  Darryl as he usually does comes to these types of topics armed with many facts and in this case many I did not know about the Motor City.  I have family who lived in Michigan and worked in the auto industries who were big union supporters.  Every year my family visited them at least once, so I learned a lot about Michigan during these childhood adventures, especially during the 70s and 80s when I was growing up.  I watched firsthand the decline that Darryl Parks articulated during his program.  I watched Detroit go from the richest city in the United States in 1965 to currently the poorest.  I knew that Detroit was at one time a source of entertainment as The Lone Ranger radio program was launched from Detroit and the city still owns the rights to the Howdy Doody puppet.  Detroit at one point in its very recent history was a center for art, entertainment, and manufacturing—which drove the entire economy.  But what destroyed Detroit is a reoccurring theme everywhere in modern America, the notion of collectivism framed within the labor union movement which is failing on a massive scale.  Click Darryl’s broadcast below to begin to understand how many labor unions are listed as creditors in the Detroit bankruptcy and it will quickly become clear how destructive unions have been on the American economy, the role they’ve played in wage inflation, and the way they’ve prevented the proper management of Detroit’s resources.

When Michael Moore made his first big film Roger and Me, I enjoyed it as I shared with Moore a love of the Midwest.  His film was about the decline of the auto industry in Flint, Michigan and the loss of entire neighborhoods becoming a gigantic ghost town.  But Moore lost me all those years ago in 1989 when he assumed that General Motors CEO Roger Smith had a duty to the people of Flint to give back to the community his large wages so that fewer jobs would be lost.  Moore’s position in the film was typical of most union households in Central and Lower Michigan from the 70’s to the 90’s that was raised on soft communism disguised as American patriotism.  Moore’s beliefs were harder than socialism, and shy of Russian, or Chinese communism but were certainly anti-capitalism in their nature.  Moore failed to understand that it was capitalism that brought jobs to his town of Flint which is just north of Detroit.  It was communism that had infiltrated the labor unions and made Moore believe that Roger Smith owed Flint, Michigan anything.

The film launched Moore into the national spotlight as a left leaning media was hungry to team up with someone who could capture their instructed beliefs into a film format.  But the parasitic nature of the type of contracts the unions negotiated for themselves continued.  Jobs left the Detroit area for destinations that were not friendly to labor unions, like China, and Mexico, countries already utilizing a social philosophy of socialism and communism.  I liked my family members, but found myself in contention with the adults who had cars in the driveway with bumper stickers stating, “Buy American” which was a typical union slogan at the time even though the Japanese were making better cars cheaper.  Their assertion was the same as Michael Moore’s, and that was people had an obligation to buy an American car built with union labor because of some misguided patriotic duty.  All those elements never added up to my mind, even at the ages of 8 through 15 when my years in Lower Michigan were most active.  No matter how much the adults from that side of the family yelled their philosophy never made sense to me.

When I was 18 years old I worked in a metal stamping plant while I was majoring in economics in college.  The economic professors didn’t seem to understand the real world of manufacturing the way I did because I worked in a real metal stamping plant known as the meat grinder at the time.  I saw many very serious injuries and I learned quickly that the parts we made at this facility required salesmen to sell them to a distributer somewhere in the world and that purchasing had to find the metal coils somewhere so we’d have materials enough to manufacture the goods.  I worked with some tough, rough neck people and fights on the shop floor were common.  When I first started at this place a man older than me by about 10 years picked a fight in the break room.  I launched a full can of Coke at his head and luckily missed his forehead by only a few inches.  The can exploded against the wall and after the man saw how serious I was about winning the fight decided to befriend me, and we remained friends for all the years I worked there.  There were many other fights that involved serious cuts, broken bones, knocked out teeth and eyeballs that were actually removed from their sockets.  The foremen would look the other way, especially in my case because I without question out produced everyone in the building.  My manufacturing rates were very high.  I didn’t work so hard because of fear for my job, or to earn praise from the foremen, but because I enjoyed it.  I liked working fast—I enjoyed pushing myself with sweat pouring off my body.  The fights came from the workers who were trying to unionize this facility and wanted to bring me in line with everyone else.

The college professors had no advice for my young mind as they leaned toward labor’s position in the matter when I asked about it.  Their arguments I know now were Keynesian in their nature and rooted in European socialism, but at the time, I assumed they knew what they were talking about.  Because of the economic professor at the college I was attending I tried to understand the union mentality so I listened to the advocates instead of fighting them.  This led them to ask me to present a list of union demands to the company president.  Even though everyone in the company was much older than I was, they wanted an 18-year-old kid to approach management and negotiate on their behalf.  So I did.

I sat across from the President and gave him the grievances from the workers but as I sat there I saw the man who ran the company with his hands that were too smooth from lack of work, a belly that was too fat from eating in too many nice restaurants and was having an affair with his secretary who was half his age.  But I also saw a guy who was taking all the risks in the company.  If sales were down, it was his fault.  If supply could not be meant, it was his fault.  If he didn’t grease enough wheels at OSHA politically, then it was his fault.  In essence I felt the grievances from the workers were stupid, short-sighted and childish.  At the end of the day the “workers” were able to go home and forget about the work they did while the president was always tuned in to what was happening, even when he was on the golf course—because he was the risk taker.  For the employees to declare that their labor was worth the same as those who took the risks it was preposterous.

I gave the demands back to the union organizers and told them I would not represent them.  They attempted to reorganize without my help and fell flat on their face.  Whenever they tried to cut back on their labor hours to force reductions in manufacturing rates the foreman would give me extra overtime to cover their slack.  When they tried to paint me as a “scab,” we went out in the parking lot and solved the problem, and a lot of people got hurt.  But I never yielded my beliefs on the matter and everyone ended up shaking hands in the end, even over broken bones and busted lips.  It was these types of people who made America a manufacturing powerhouse—but only as individuals.  The collectivism of labor unions destroyed this trait, which makes America less competitive globally, which is why the labor movement was introduced to America by European insurgents wanting to level the playing field for all economically.    And this is what happened in Detroit.  The unions got what they wanted and nobody fought them on it.  When the companies gave a little, the unions asked for more.  The companies became frustrated and just packed up and voted with their feet and behind them all the competent workers left to follow the jobs and Detroit went from being the wealthiest city in America to the poorest in just a few decades of bad policy and bad social philosophy.

To this very day I despise labor unions because they fight against individual responsibility and merit.  They are simply gangs of thugs who attempt to extort away from the companies they work for values they have not earned.  Collective bargaining is the absolute dumbest idea in economic theory.  All people are not of equal value, some workers are faster, stronger, smarter, more efficient, more technically savvy—and they are not all deserving of equal pay.  To force companies or governments to pay wages on collective bargaining takes away the incentive of the very good to perform well, because slugs, malcontents, and the ungifted receive the same wages for doing much, much less.  This is what killed manufacturing in Southern Michigan and more specifically destroyed Detroit.

The disease of economics that destroyed Detroit is the same idiocy that is at work in our public schools, the IRS scandal, and virtually every branch of government as it is only in the public sector that unions have managed to survive as they have embedded themselves on financial supply that cannot pack up and move out of the country to flee the parasites of economics.  This put the burden on tax payers to cover the labor costs and in Detroit’s case, smart people moved leaving behind a city of dependents that did not pay taxes.   In just the last five years Detroit went from having a balanced budget to being billions of dollars in the hole—because they do not have a tax base to support their unionized legacy costs.  They ran tax payers out-of-town with tax rates that were too high and attempting to sell the concept with “shared sacrifice” which is to say, “wealth redistribution” stolen from the earned and given to the unearned.

Detroit is the first major city in modern America to see such an impact of their mismanagement, but many cities are short in toe.  Michael Moore in his film Roger and Me stumbled around revealing his utterly failed philosophy about the way life works as his arguments are only based on observations and not the cause.  Further, Matt Damon’s new film Elysium set in the year 2154, where the very wealthy live on a man-made space station while the rest of the population resides on a ruined earth, never really covers what ruined earth.  Damon like Moore has been given the progressive task to communicate the union message to mainstream America which continually falls short on logical thinkers who know better.  In Damon’s film he takes on a mission that could bring equality to the two polarized worlds.  The nature of the story might as well be the same as Detroit versus the suburbs where smart people of value flee the type of people who make themselves social parasites and consume much more than they contribute productively.  Progressives somehow think the math will just work out in the end, but it never does.  Even as a child I saw what was happening to Detroit and I wanted no part of it in my life—and I have lived by those terms.  But not everyone is as combative as I am on issues they believe in, and most will think what I do, but they will not fight.  They will simply pack up and move to someplace else that offers less imposition on their lifestyles, which is the root cause for why Detroit has failed as a city.  Detroit imposed themselves on the productive, forcing them out-of-town leaving behind only the destitute like Michael Moore to look about their neighborhoods and wonder what happened.  The only word their failed philosophies have for the tragedy is “greed” but it is much more complicated than that.   The real villain is “financial incentive” and in the case of Detroit, the lack thereof.

Rich Hoffman

“Justice Comes with the Crack of a Whip!”

www.tailofthedragonbook.com