Tag: education funding

There is No Justice: The F.B.I and much of the legal world is up to no good as the Cohen case proves

So Michael Cohen is going to jail on March 6th for three years just because he was the attorney for President Trump. We have to remember what went on here, the F.B.I. kicked in the door of a sitting president’s lawyer to ransack the place in order to look for information for which they could extract to remove that elected president from office. And when they didn’t find that information they leaned on someone close to the president, in this case his personal attorney, to squeeze anything they could out in testimony so that they could build a case of getting rid of that. And when all they found were a few sketchy financial transactions they sent the attorney to jail for 3 years pretty much as a warning shot to anybody they‘d come after in the future—until President Trump was out of office. It’s a blood thirsty game and is deeply corrupt. And it is proof that there are many kinds of justice, and money can’t buy them all. The level of justice we are witnessing when the legal profession attacks one of its own in Michael Cohen and puts him in jail so that they can try to kick out the president sitting in the White House is as dirty as it gets especially in the context of history.

Remember when the “birther” movement was in full steam, when there were constitutional questions about whether or not Barack Obama could actually be president because it was unknown if he was actually born in the United States? As a kid he grew up in Indonesia and was raised by a globetrotting mother who associated openly with communists and radical thinkers and there is a lot of debate whether or not Obama actually knows who his dad is. He thinks he does but it’s highly likely that not even he is sure of it all. So how could the nation? It was a legitimate question to bring up and opponents to Obama did. But even for asking the question we were called “birthers.” The liberal contention was that it didn’t matter where Obama was born. He was a black man. He was president. To them it didn’t matter if Obama was born on the Moon, they would argue that nothing was going to remove their president from office, and they attacked anybody who thought otherwise.

Where are the same passions from the conservative side of things? What the intelligence agencies have been doing to Trump is all by itself very criminal, to the level of organized crime. A typical mafia boss has more ethics than the DNC and the F.B.I. based on what we’ve seen. The more we have learned about James Comey the more we understand how terrible the leadership of the F.B.I. truly was and this whole Mueller special investigation is a direct spawn of Comey’s radical antics, of actually stealing material from the Oval Office and leaking it to the press. Of wire tapping the transition team at Trump Tower and lying to FISA courts to attempt to undo an American election. All this stuff is so much more serious than questioning whether or not Obama was born in the United States. Yet the case against his birth in America is far stronger than any Russian collusion story.

Sure, Michael Cohen was a little slimy, in all reality, what attorney isn’t? The legal system itself is slimy, so why wouldn’t a good one be on the shady side? Personally speaking I could never defend a murder suspect or someone engaged in questionable activities as an attorney because I couldn’t put my ethical standards up for sale like that. If I didn’t believe in the client, I couldn’t do the work. Any attorney that can I think is slimy. Ethical defense is not up for sale and the way the legal system is presently states quite clearly that money can by such a thing. Obviously Donald Trump the billionaire working in a slimy town of New York where corruption ran everything had to conduct slimy activities to be in any kind of business and that’s why lawyers were hired, to handle slimy details. Cohen offered himself as just such a person so nobody is expecting a highly ethical figure in Trump’s attorney. Nobody ever did.

Yet the legal system understands that rule which is why they went after Cohen in the first place. In their need to find dirt on President Trump they went to the slimy figures in his life that are there by business necessity knowing that if they wanted to make some kind of case against the president, that they should start there. So they broke into Michael Cohen’s office sending a direct message to the President of the United States that nothing around him was safe. And the point of the Comey leaking of documents to inspire the investigation of his friend Bob Mueller was to set up the hope of impeachment if Democrats managed to take the House of Representatives at some point. Which was a reasonable calculation considering many Never-Trumper Republicans wanted to retire leaving so many seats vulnerable to Democrats. The whole game as been a scam and abuse of power and has resembled nothing regarding law and order. It’s all about power and politics. None of these legal actions have been about justice, only about retaining power and pushing out of power representatives elected within the context of the republic of America.

If we’ve learned anything from all this it is that the legal system is largely a travesty created only to control the flow of power to those who truly want to deny that America is a republic instead of a majority ruled democracy. Therefor they cannot accept that Donald Trump was elected president to upset that entire legal apple cart so they have used every dirty trick available at the highest level of politics to destroy the Trump presidency, which has not been successful and it won’t be. Every year since he jumped on the scene, I have liked Donald Trump more and more. I started out supporting him because of his business background and he had a chance to bring business logic to politics. I didn’t care that he was an over the top playboy over the years, I only cared that he bring business level decisions to the Executive Branch. But as I’ve watched him under fire and withstanding the heat, I like him more and more—and so do most Americans. People know what’s going on here, but even knowing it doesn’t prepare you for the audacious reality once it’s presented in all its ugliness. And the Cohen case is ugly. At best it is gross abuse of power by the highest powers in our political system and it deserve severe punishment for all the actors involved. I know where I am personally with all this, but I keep wondering when everyone else will catch on. I have no faith in the F.B.I. or the CIA, or even Homeland Security. I think those organizations are filled with perverts, power-hungry despots and general losers—which is why they seek government work instead of the bold frontier of private sector efforts. But this Cohen case only confirms what I have long suspected, and it can’t be allowed to stand. I’m not OK with it, I’ll say that much. In my view government works for the people who put them in power and I’m not a happy employer.

Rich Hoffman

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People Who Work in Government are Generally Stupid: Watch the movies ‘American Made’ and ‘Chappaquiddick’ to understand why they hate Trump

I recommend you do two things right now dear reader, go on Netflix and watch Chappaquiddick and watch wherever you can find it, American Made with Tom Cruise. I watched it on HBO. They were both remarkable films. Chappaquiddick of course is about how Ted Kennedy left a young girl riding in a car with him to die when he accidentally drove off the road in an inebriated condition in a bay where she drowned, and he escaped, mysteriously. What was astonishing about this movie even if it did attempt to paint Ted Kennedy in the best possible light was that he was so enormously stupid and incompetent. For a guy who was being groomed to be president of the United States the way his “handlers” treated him was astonishing. It was a really interesting look at life behind the scenes of a crises regarding people at the highest level of politics. It then becomes very clear why all those people who have come to handle presidents of the United States over the years have come to resent President Trump, a man who is street smart, instinctive and does not want their advice. Then you will really have your doors blown off when you watch American Made, about Barry Seal, the ex-TWA pilot who was coaxed by the CIA to become a drug smuggler for Pablo Escobar.

I knew a lot of this information but I never really thought of Barry Seal the smuggler being at the center of the Iran Contra affair, the Clinton scandals in Arkansas and being the payoff man to Manuel Noriega. Looking at these distinctly 1980s events knowing what we do about how the FBI and the Department of Justice handled the Clinton email scandal and their attempts to remove Trump from presidential office before he even set foot in the White House it made the movie American Made that much more powerful. The two things that bothered me was the way that the CIA picked Barry Seal for the job, knowing he would become a drug smuggler, and actually allowing it to happen so that they could prop up a flood of cocaine into the United States and prop up insurgents in Central America with cash. Barry was a bit of a daredevil, so the CIA set him up with his own airport in Arkansas overlooked by Governor Clinton specifically and they gave him plenty of property to build a smuggling empire.

Much like Chappaquiddick when Ted Kennedy had just accidentally killed a young woman and was making calls the morning after from the desk of the sheriff’s office—because the Kennedy’s controlled all of politics in that region, there was a scene in American Made where Barry had just been arrested by the local law enforcement, the F.B.I. the ATF and other agencies and was hauled up before the state attorney general to spend many lifetimes in jail when President Clinton called her and commanded her to release the drug smuggler. I’m sure many of the scenes in the movie were exaggerated to compress time and events, but it was really strange to see it happening in a historical context. Then to have that same drug smuggler in the White House as an advisor to Oliver North and the Reagan initiative against drugs called “Just Say No.” They used Barry Seal to conduct a sting operation against Pablo Escobar which worked. But Escobar sent a hit squad into the United States to kill Barry Seal. Once assassinated the White House needed a new way to get guns to freedom fighters and drug runners in Central America so they used the Iranians, which spawned the Iran Contra Affair.

I have read books and books on all these topics individually but until the movie used Barry Seal to string them all together did it really click how things worked. It helps to look back in hindsight and knowing what we do today of course, but I thought it was amazing to put all these elements into one movie that had so much to do with how the world has been shaped today. It doesn’t take much of a fantastic mind to imagine that even today the people in politics who support open borders are doing so to help the drug trade funnel drugs into the United States. After all, the CIA was clearly involved at a high level into the whole operation and one can only imagine what the sinister desire was to allow it to happen. But on the most basic level it was to funnel cash into impoverished areas to act as change agents against communism and other anti-capitalist forces. Perhaps a good idea in intent, but a disaster into practice.

When I was a kid, even up to my mid 20s really, I thought of people in the F.B.I. and CIA as being elite law enforcement types who were the best of the best. The fully grown adult in me knows now that they are just people like anybody else and usually, they aren’t very smart. In fact, most people working in government are pretty stupid, which is why they are attracted to government and not the private sector. That is very disappointing, but a grim reality. Yet they struggle to maintain that illusion not just to themselves, that they are smart and important, that they go to GREAT effort to only allow puppet presidents of the people to be in the White House so not to shatter their reality with evidence. The real action is out there in the people like Barry Seal who do the work of these agencies, then are expendable when their work is done. We see the same kind of activity in our modern times around this whole attempt to destroy President Trump while real crimes were openly committed by these very same agencies. We don’t want to believe they could possibly do such a thing, but they obviously did.

Its one thing to know something, and I’ve heard stories from conspiracy theorists for years about the CIA drug smuggling and gun running operations—heck, that’s how ISIS was started by the Obama administration. Obama was in support of the Muslim Brotherhood caliphate all around the Mediterranean and Assad was standing in the way. In Syria the Assad family had previously fought the Muslim Brotherhood for control and weren’t about to allow some Islamic radicals to take control of the country from the family rule. So Assad gassed his own people and the Obama White House ran with the story to bring international pressure down on Assad. When that didn’t work the United States started funneling guns to rebels who then became ISIS. This is a very old story that happens over and over again. But what we all must ask ourselves is why it continues to happen.

The hatred of Trump is that he is truly a people’s president elected outside of the controls that were obviously in place in the two films I mentioned. In those movies, the presidents or potential presidents were just pawns of the greater politics involved, where the so-called Deep State operated. In the case of American Made, the Deep State was the CIA breaking the law for what they considered a greater good. Barry Seal was a criminal completely propped up by the CIA to make the drug runners in Columbia extremely wealthy so that they could destabilize the communism that was in fashion in Central America. And you can hear the same rationalizations from James Comey today about Trump, trying to justify why he broke the law to keep a people’s president out of the White House…. essentially because he felt he knew better than the rest of us how to deal with world affairs. And that is how these disasters happen.

I remember the events of my youth well, the Chappaquiddick situation and the antics of Barry Seal and I’m not going back to that. I voted for President Trump because I have lost faith in the F.B.I. and the CIA—in the Presidency itself. I am not going to sleep just so that losers in those intelligence agencies can give us the illusion of a Republic while they work behind the scenes under great illegal circumstances to overthrow our way of government. I do not find those options acceptable, and Trump is my solution to that long-standing problem. And if you want context dear reader, then watch those two movies and apply what you learn to our modern circumstances. And many answers will become quite clear for you.

Rich Hoffman

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Breaking the Vico Cycle: Capitalism is the key to the truth

Another aspect of the direction of our curiosity that we will have to come to terms with, as a human race, is that we’ve been here before. We are on the Vico cycle and honestly, I’d like to see us break that trend and not make the mistakes of that past that were made. That is the reason behind most conspiracies, is that the ruling powers don’t want to admit that they are on the same trajectory. They want to believe that their government, their religion, their political philosophy is the latest and greatest and that this time they have it different. I have spent much of the last thirty years studying ancient cultures and comparative mythologies so my opinions are built on a vast understanding of the problem which most people and institutions wish not to think about. As much as I love NASA, the Republican Party and even the Christian religion, I understand their limits which are going to come undone now that information is decentralized and adventure is again becoming monetized. Without question once we allow for space tourism that cat will be out of the bag, we will discover ourselves on the face of the moon, and along the old ancient sea shores of Mars. We will find the source of many of our ancient mythologies and it will be difficult to come to terms with. Our institutions will struggle to find their relevancy, our religions will blow apart, and our politics will collapse in on itself with the realization that we’ve done it all before.

That is why it is important to understand that the only real value that there is in the entire universe is that which is created through human productivity. Of course the governments of the world have had a tough time sending rovers to Mars and taking pictures of the moon and having to scrub the photos of archaeological evidence of previous cultures already there. For me personally there were three main things that brought my mind to this obvious reality, the first was in learning about the Cholula pyramid in Mexico south of Teotihuacan. It is the largest pyramid by volume known so far in the world and it is nearly completely covered with dirt that makes it look like a natural hill over 200 ft tall. On its top is a Catholic church Iglesia de Nuestra Señora de los Remedios, built there by the Spanish conquistadors to make their mark and attempt to erase the religions of their predecessors as they made themselves the change agent of Mayan and Aztec life.

The second was the realization that in my area of Ohio, within the United States there used to be a vast kingdom of giant humans, people over 7 ft tall, who inhabited the area and were buried in many of the giant mound complexes so known to the region. One such mound is just down the road from my home, about 5 miles or so and is of a similar size as the Silbury Hill complex at Avebury in England. The top of the mound had been looted many years ago but has otherwise not been properly excavated even through the very nice college of Miami University is just down the road. Up the Great Miami River is a twin of this mound called the Miamisburg Mound which is of a similar size and scope. It had an excavation at the end of the 1800s, they found a few bones and nobody has touched it again since.

There is no desire to touch it again by our institutional knowledge. Instead our political system has used the American Indian as an excuse to do nothing creating an artificial constraint called the NAGPRA. The third thing was in reading the great James Joyce classic novel, Finnegan’s Wake. That’s where the whole Vico cycle came alive to me and I realized that Joyce had written the book in a coded language to hide its contents from the political and religious powers of our times, so that only clever, smart people could unlock them. Knowing just those three things—and there are many others, but for me those three things confirmed my suspicions beyond any reasonable doubt that we will find our own history in outer space and learn that life on earth was just one more conquered frontier on our quest to survive.

Human society didn’t just do one thing for millions of years then suddenly blossom into thriving civilizations building magnificent pyramids and telling stories of monsters and gods battling it out in the cosmos. Those stories were told before a long time ago in places beyond earth. What is hard to admit to ourselves is that our political order and our institutions in general are more interested in their own power than they are in the science of discovery. Even the puritanical scientist that claims they want to save the whale, the polar ice caps, or even the history of the moon and Mars are hungry to make their sponsors happy with their results which of course come from institutions and politics that desire to keep all this information from the public so that they can hold power for just a little while longer. At least you can trust the healthy industrialist which seeks to monetize discovery because the value of that ambition is a measurable claim, we can all trust. Science we cannot because they are often funded by the political order of our day and their results often are skewed so that they can gather up money for efforts that don’t contribute to any real productivity, which leaves them always at the mercy of those who are willing to give them money to publish results the current political order desires.

That is why they make fun of those who point to Mars and to other celestial bodies and say that the origin of mankind didn’t come from some monkey in the desert or on the plains of Africa, but they fled from some tragedy out there beyond the barriers of earth and they sought refuge in a new and vast world after they lost their homelands due to circumstances that are yet to be revealed. And now we are plotting a course to return and to discover the truth of it all, which we always needed to know, but for which our present politics just couldn’t fathom. To study how even the F.B.I. could seek to destroy President Trump because he was truly elected a people’s president and is as independent of the old order as the modern age would allow us to get, then it isn’t hard to understand why NASA must scrub photos from the moon and Mars that show signs of life for which their bosses have said, the public will learn of it when they are ready, when their religions will allow them to grasp the truth. But in reality what they really mean is that they want to hold power for as long as possible because once humans colonize the planet, they will no longer care about what politicians or church leaders think on earth. They will be on the frontier experiencing a whole new way of life, one that is determined by the value of productivity, not ancient reverence to dying ideas.

If you want to know the truth about science consider that what they are saying they are seeing on Mars has already been covered up right here on earth, at Cholula, at the Ohio mounds, within the book Finnegan’s Wake. If we can’t deal with the reality right in front of us, what are we going to do when there is no civilization to hide it through a barrier of civility? That is why values have to be determined now and finally—a system of understanding reached that is divorced of past sins. Capitalism is the only real truth that there ever was and once we bring that to the stars we can’t allow for the suppression of the obvious. We have to come to terms with it and not make the same mistakes again. Its time for the Vico cycle to end.

Rich Hoffman

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The Funeral of George H. W. Bush: It was a lot like the movie Soylent Green

The funeral of Bush 41 I thought was nice. I always liked George Bush the senior, and the younger, 43 as he is often termed—as people. But I do not think they were very good presidents, at least in the way I would expect out of a Republican in the White House. But I didn’t dislike them, although I remember very well how much the media did. So I shared with many the observations that the media was all too friendly toward George Bush in his death, very much contrary to what they had been during his life. That of course provoked the question as to why. As odd as it was to see the Trumps sitting with the Obamas and the Clintons and to even have Jimmy Carter there as well it was also institutionally satisfying, and it was good that President Trump attended and said nice things along the way. But the invisible strings of conformity that stirred about the entire event reminded me an awful lot of the old movie Soylent Green. Through life the people are harvested as commodities of the state, but upon their death they were ushered into the afterlife with warm music and revelry before being eaten by society itself.

The aspects of the Bush funeral which I fundamentally disagree with, and which the press and seemingly everyone celebrated was that the former president was a sacrificial person who gave his life to service for others, and now that he was no longer a threat to the order of things as a Republican, it was OK to honor him. All the attributes that were celebrated mostly are concepts that are anti-individual and pro collectivist which is the subtle undertone to the entire exercise. The message to all other Republicans by the press, the not so subtle part of their message was that if you want to be liked by the media, then the attributes of George Bush that involved self-sacrifice, service and humility are the way to get there. While those traits are largely Christian tenants of value, that doesn’t mean that the old foe of Marxism isn’t present. To understand that idea you have to understand European history and the role that the Catholic Church played on controlling so many people’s lives, in a very negative way. Then you’d have to know that Karl Marx desired to exploit that inbreed trait into the targets of his philosophy work so much inspired by Immanuel Kant. To focus thoughts on others is the way to eternal redemption. To focus on yourself is the way of the evil vices of capitalism!

George Bush was a rich man who inherited a lot of money from his father and sought to dispel the guilt that a Marxist leaning society injected upon him with service in the military, then in government for much of his life. He wanted very much to be a good man and he was, unfortunately the way that good was defined for him meant that he needed to be a collectivist. So his great wealth created a paradox for him and his extended family that was deliberately hard to negotiate. The minefield however was set up by the institutional culture for which the media represents. Their value system is subservience to the needs of the machine, sacrifice and honor as determined by the amount of sacrifice an individual makes toward the institutions they occupy.

This institutional element has become much more pronounced now in the age of Trump because so many of them are coming unraveled, and it is the source of the hatred of the current President. The odd exchange of the Trumps sitting down next to law breakers and social reformers hell-bent on taking society toward infinite collectivism was a clash of ideas that were unavoidable, yet they were brought together out of respect for a presidency that is the lead seat of American institutionalism looked at in entirely different ways. The paradox was revealed in the life of George Bush as his son George W. Bush conducted the eulogy of his father’s life and what a great job he did. While summarizing the merits of such a sacrificial being he managed to paint a picture of quite an interesting character who still sky dived late in his life and loved to watch cop dramas on television. For me I found those aspects appealing. To the institutionalists it was the sacrifice. But everyone was generally brought together by some notion of a recently deceased American president.

The media in this case are the institutional representatives that look at the life of all conservatives as bacteria in the body of collective experience. But anybody familiar with biology knows that bacteria is a useful element, its villainy is purely relative. The media hated the Bush family because they were Republicans but as the country grew away from that kind of conservative thought, the public has grown tired of the media. It was an odd thing to hear Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple lecture the world that any form of hate had no place on their platforms. As much as I love Apple products—and I do, and I know Rush Limbaugh does as well, clearly Tim Cook would view my support of the Second Amendment and liberal activism as hate speech and is suggesting that I’m not welcome to the company. But it’s not lost on me that most people who call themselves liberals, especially the creative types, use Apple as their primary functionary to interact with cyberspace. And most of them participate in hate speech. I have no doubt that if a survey of ANTIFA members were taken as to what phone system they used most it would be Apple if they could actually afford the product. Is Apple as a company talking to them?

The harassment of the Bush family by the media over all the years created Donald Trump. George W. Bush and his dad and brother took a terrible beating needlessly by just the same kind of people who tend to buy Apple products, the Hollywood left, the media culture, the hipsters and saggy assed getto thugs, the drug mules who cross the border then claim that America owes them something as illegal immigrants. It was their collective ooze for which the media pronounced was civil conduct and once George Bush the senior was laid to rest, it was OK to pay respect to him in that sacrificed state, as an essence of life to be consumed by the masses, a throw back to the days before there was a Donald Trump in the White House, rather than the man who loved his wife dearly and was a damn good father to his kids. There is a lot very evil about the process, the way that all the good things about George H. W. Bush were punished and all the bad things about him adored. It was quite an interesting paradox which comes from a society that has a schizophrenic relationship with itself. It was very clear to me, that the institutions of our modern life values death and consumption far more than productivity and effort. And that is the hard lesson that was very much on full display at the funeral of the 41st President of the United States.

Rich Hoffman

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I Still Believe in Santa Claus: Why the magic of childhood is more important than the dissapointments of reality

It seems to be happening all across the country, particularly among substitute teachers but one at the Cedar Hill School in Montville, New Jersey was particularly disturbing since it was targeting 5 to 6-year-old kids, and that is the trend of telling them that there is no Santa and therefore, no hope in the world for them to look forward to. I haven’t yet read or heard any commentary on this topic that really dug into the root of the issue as it is so horrendous that normal people just can’t get their mind around why an adult of any kind would do such a thing. To understand the big picture of what is going on we have to understand why we have the mythologies of Santa and Easter Bunnies, and Tooth Fairies to begin with. We also must understand why teachers in public schools are against children’s expansion of knowledge for which all imaginative endeavors are designed to evoke. The quest to destroy Santa in the lives of young children is the progressive fulfillment of a much larger desire, the destruction of individual needs and the shared experience of collective endeavor. The notion of a Santa Claus fulfilling the wishes of individual children is a repulsive idea to most progressives, so they use the beat down over caffeinated employees of public education to do their bidding.

My oldest daughter and I had an interesting debate on Santa Claus a few years ago as she was inclined to think that she didn’t want her child to accept falsehoods of hope and become dependent on a jolly old man dressed in red to bring him presents for being a good little boy, “good” being defined by parameters she may or may not agree with. Such as if good meant complete compliance to the state then she couldn’t support such a thing, but if good meant acting in accordance with his individual integrity, then perhaps so. Due to the lack of understanding of what “good” meant at Christmas time, then she was inclined to pass on the mythic experience all together. But my thing to her was that all kids as they built conceptual knowledge in their brains needed mythic elements to elevate their consciousness. So the basic foundations of goodness and hope for which the Christmas season is so emphatic were healthy for a growing mind until they could afford to function on their own. After all, a child has no means of interacting with the world and their conceptual knowledge is lacking due to their limited experiences in life, so we create stories to help them arrive at those important foundations as their brains develop.

That is after all why we do the things we do for children. When they are young their minds are hopeful and filled with boundless optimism, and that is needed because they must overcome so many things just to arrive at 5 to 6 years old. They have to learn to walk, talk, read, interact with lots of other people, and they do so with optimism because that is the foundation needed for learning. If a child fell on their first opportunity to walk and just stayed flat on their face waiting for someone to pick them up, they’d be ruined for life and would never learn anything. They must have that desire to keep getting up and trying things over and over again until they succeed. That is the basis of all learning. Parents who rush to pick their children up after every little boo boo are actually destroying their minds. They mean well, but the point of growing up is to gain experience and if experience is denied then great harm comes to the children effected. It is good to let kids fall and get cut. It is good for them to run in the rain and get a little sick, so that their immune systems develop into a healthy defense of their bodies as they get older. It is good for children to stumble and fall because they will have a great wealth of knowledge to live as productive adults later on. Sometimes being a great parent is to let kids get cut up and battered a bit when they are kids so they know how to avoid much more dangerous things when they are older. The world today is filled with neurotic adults who were too coddled as children who cry at every little smashed insect and hurt feeling.

And that is why we give kids the magic of a positive and fulfilling childhood so that when they do become adults they can have as many tools to work with intellectually as possible and they can then in turn give good childhoods to their children. I would say that the quality of a childhood largely determines the quality of the adult. If a kid has a bad childhood, they will become damaged adults, so the mythologies of childhood are infinitely important to the furtherance of the human race. As adults its our jobs to provide as much knowledge and optimism as possible because at a certain point in their lives they stop being kids and become adults. The destructive teenage years are certainly that shattering of reality where life becomes disillusioning. But the process of life often is, so as humans we have mitigated that disappointment by providing children with wonderful ideas so that once they become adults they have good memories to endure them through the many disappointments. That’s not to say that children should always stay that way, at a young age their brains are not yet ready for the rigors of adult life, so we create intellectual tools to assist them during this critical period of their lives until mature brain development occurs and a human being is ready for the world. In that context Santa Claus is a wonderful conceptual invention of mythology and culture and it teaches young people the best about what life has to offer.

Of course, if you want to destroy a person the best way to do it is by removing their conceptual aptitude, take away their hopes and dreams so that they resort to the basic function of a non-thinking animal. And this is just what progressive types are looking for in creating compliant people for tomorrow’s authoritarian regimes of political masters, a voting population that will keep them in power because they are stupid, and hopeless. And without question that substitute teacher had at some point in their life had their hopes removed and was frustrated with the enthusiasm of youth because guilt was likely the emotion they had about their own lives and how poorly they’ve managed it. That hatred of the pure and innocent comes usually from people who have had all hope removed from their own lives and it is the ultimate act of selfishness to rob children of their own opportunities by adults who have obviously given up. It’s simply not fair to the children to have adults attempt to take from them hopes and dreams of a bigger and better world. Even though such an idea is a conceptual fantasy ultimately kids grow up to become what they thought about most. And thinking about Santa Claus at that magical time of innocence is one of the best things adults can do for helpless children still growing intellectually. And it is terribly evil for anybody to seek to rob kids of that opportunity. Especially those employed by the state as public-school teachers who put progressive objectives ahead of intellectual development. It is for all those reasons that I still believe in Santa, and likely always will!

Rich Hoffman

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Everything You Need to Know About Roger Stone, Julian Assange and Robert Mueller: Why its moral and obligatory to fight the institutional terrorism of the F.B.I.

First, I will have to say that I think Roger Stone was in direct contact with Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy, even though now he says he wasn’t. I have no problem with him presenting his case to the F.B.I. the way he is because strategically it’s the correct and moral thing to do. Additionally, his interview with George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s Sunday Morning show was fabulous. I would advise everyone to watch it and take notes. When I wrote the article the other day about endeavoring to always be the smartest person in the room, Roger Stone is a great example of how effective such a person can be. Stone was fantastic in his interview and set the chessboard up wonderfully against the Mueller special counsel probe that is completely politically motivated and is entirely constructed to destroy the Republican Party that has evolved under the Trump presidency. While lying to federal agents is against the law and nobody should do it, when the other side is lying as they did about the Clinton emails and DNC tampering in the election of 2016 with F.B.I. involvement and help from the Department of Justice and the Obama White House itself, Republicans can’t disadvantage themselves if that is the way the game is being played, and it is.

The name of the game is fear and if you make yourself smarter than your opponent any tactician knows that the battle is usually over before it ever begins and that is what Roger Stone is doing to the F.B.I. Mueller’s investigation is doing what they always do, isolate their target by getting testimony on all their support systems. Because humans still have a very primitive need to be liked and accepted by their peers, so the F.B.I. in these types of investigations will put the squeeze on a target’s family and friends to get a plea deal started so that the target will maintain the stability of partners through loyalty. This is how the F.B.I. gets people to “flip” in their testimony. Catch them in some other crime, give them a plea path out of it if they will lie before God to save their skins from eternal damnation in the jails of America. That is how the game is played, yet Roger Stone made it known to the world that he wasn’t going to play which puts Mueller in a precarious spot. If they indict Roger Stone and he doesn’t cave to the pressure, then all this work they have wasted millions of dollars on goes nowhere. If they don’t indict Roger Stone, then their case goes nowhere. They essentially have checkmated themselves out of the game which is why they are stalling with the results.

A smart person never has anything to fear because they are prepared for anything, and they always understand the game that is being played, not the one they wish was played. We might all want an honest system of government and be able to trust the F.B.I. but we can’t. They are corrupt by institutional necessity and will always seek to protect the institutions they serve over individual preservation. And they sustain this behavior by tricking individuals into supporting this structure at all cost to themselves with these invisible criteria which is always defined by perspective, the truth. In an altruistic society, which America has become, the individual is expected to sacrifice themselves for the benefit of the institution. Conversely individuals like James Comey, Robert Mueller and Hillary Clinton can lie to the faces of everyone and still think of themselves as sanctimonious because they serve the institutions, not the individuals, so as long as they lie to save an institution, they rationalize that it is a moral endeavor. But if Roger Stone lies to save himself, or Donald Trump for that matter—they consider it evil because serving the needs of the individual from the perspective of the institutionalist is evil.

The real story behind Wikileaks is that they uncovered crimes that the DNC were conducting, and if there were really a desire for freedom of the press, Julian Assange would have won the Pulitzer Prize for it already. But Wikileaks is all about individualized knowledge that exists to keep institutions in check, and that from the perspective of the F.B.I. makes them evil—by their own definitions. Democrats and the American press see nothing wrong with trying to blame the Russians for their loss to Donald Trump in the 2016 Election because it fulfills several tactical parameters of objectives for which they are starving. First Russia backs Syria and in other ways Iran. They also have backed North Korea so if you are an anti-Israel globalist who wants to see western influences crushed in the Middle East you want to assist the enemy of your enemy. If American ambitions could be tricked into fighting Russia, then a war that obtains their globalist objectives could take place and advance their position while their real antics go unpunished and undetected by the America public. So if by provoking Russia with a phony story started World War III, Democrats would have no problem with that. They don’t care how many people would die, because remember, they are serving institutions, not people.

Wikileaks is functioning the way media was supposed to, as well as The Drudge Report and in a lot of cases Alex Jones. Even with all this new technology it was never intended by Google and Facebook to empower people, which it has done, it was always to corral them into little pins of political discourse that could be controlled by a “like” button. The same essential techniques that are used to “flip” witnesses under F.B.I. indictment. It’s all about peer pressure and forcing individuals to crave the opinions of their friends and family over the justice or righteousness as defined by individualized sanctity.

That’s why I say Roger Stone is smart. Sure, he’s probably lying to protect Julian Assange, because that is where the F.B.I. is going, to try to paint a picture of Russians giving Assange information that was then given to the public to destroy Hillary Clinton. But the original crime was Hilary Clinton, and her actions. The powers of government conspired together to cover it all up as well as the press, so they are all guilty of lying to the public and in doing anything possible to protect the institutions behind so much corruption. But Roger Stone has denied them of all that. There is essentially nothing the F.B.I. can do to Roger Stone now that he went on the Stephanopoulos show and laid out his case instead of allowing the F.B.I. to stick him behind bars before the story could get out. The story of honesty isn’t about Stone, Assange, or Donald Trump—its about the power of our government to cover-up a story and to use false narratives to suppress the truth. So, if you love Truth, Justice, and the American Way, you will love the Roger Stone interview on ABC shown on Sunday morning of the first weekend of December 2018. It’s not because Roger Stone may have lied that you will like it, but because he refused to play a game that gives power to the institutions over the individuals that make it up. And that is a new thing for Republicans, and something that could easily change the course of history.

Rich Hoffman

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The Greatest Weapon in the World: To always endeavor to be the smartest person in the room

There is a certain mentality that you must have if you want to be able to stand up to bullies like the current F.B.I. and all the power they have, or if in general you want to be a leader of people in whatever capacity. You, as a person must endeavor to be the smartest person in the room. If you are, no tyrannical bully can ever gain the leverage of fear against you and make silly threats for which you can never deal with. This is essentially why Donald Trump is so successful in whatever he does. Being the smartest person in the room in my experience doesn’t come from genetic inheritance as much as it comes from hard work. If you put in the time to become intelligent, you will have leveraged yourself into the most fundamental position any leader needs to be in. If you are the smartest person in the room, especially in America, you will ultimately become the decision maker for a lot of people because people will naturally follow you. So in that context you never have to fear the power of a corrupt law enforcement officer or a ruthless dictator, because intelligence most of the time all by itself is enough to wipe them out.

A lot of people assume that I’m the kind of person who would start shooting up bad guys at the first sign of trouble. But honestly, I have done a lot more damage to villainous people with my mind. When things do get bad, which doesn’t happen much, but over the years happens from time to time, I seldom have to use violence to make my point. Sometimes it evolves into that because the people you are dealing with are not very smart so they have no other weapons to work with but violence. However most of the time, just being the smartest person in the room is enough to diffuse anything and advance any topic.

From personal experience I have dealt with a lot of different people, some who would claim to be the richest and most powerful in all of Cincinnati financially. Others politically. My kids and I were talking the other day about how different Over-the-Rhine was today in downtown Cincinnati than it was almost thirty years ago when I lived on the campus of the University of Cincinnati for a while and accepted a dare to walk from Central Parkway up to Bogarts by way of Vine Street, which at that time was ripe with many, many criminal elements. I did so and not a single person bothered me. A lot of people looked at me very intensely, but not a single person engaged with me the way people might think would happen by way or robbery, or some other physical assault. I felt I could deal with any problem that anybody might throw at me and it showed in my personality which nobody wanted anything to do with. It wasn’t that I was a big guy, or that I was heavily armed. In fact, I didn’t have any weapons on me during that walk. All I had was what I knew. On a separate occasion a few years earlier, I was on a date in downtown Cincinnati where I am sure the intention was a robbery. I was taking my wife to a downtown restaurant but we parked near the courthouse because I felt that was a place where vandalism might be the least but on our way a large group of very scary looking inner city dwellers covered in gold chains and all the stereotypes of a rap video blocked our passage. After a quick qualifying conversation with a very large leader of the group, easily over 6’5” he decided that we weren’t worth the trouble. He asked me for our money, I told him we didn’t have any. He said to me that you don’t have a girl like “dat” without “no” kind of money.” My response was to ask him why not. That was probably the last thing he was prepared to hear. Most people obviously just gave him the money and went about their way. The fear of being hurt by him was enough. But when I asked him why it put the burden on him to respond with his true intentions. He elected to move on with his little gang of thugs because their imaginations as to why I was confident were running wild and it wasn’t worth the risk. I could tell an even worse story about Washington D.C. when I had to go out at 2 AM in a really bad part of the city to find milk for my kids as we were staying in a hotel nearby. I got the milk but no further trouble much to the shock of the people who heard about the story later.

I have had an unusual life in that I have been to court many, many times. I’ve nearly been put in jail more times than I can count. I have personally known hit men, famous Bengal players who were major drug dealers after their playing days were over. I used to repo cars for a living and have been shot at several times but I never was consumed by that lifestyle. I always lived outside of its grip. One time when all my friends were in jail on the campus of Miami University because we got into a huge fight with the football team at a bar there I was the only one not put in jail and I managed to talk reason to the officers to get a quick release of my friends, not that they deserved it over a weekend so they didn’t have to wait for an arraignment on the following Monday. On several occasions I’ve defended myself successfully in court as my own attorney because why hire someone not as smart as you to deal with something you have a stake in. And in saying all this I’m not saying that biologically I was ever the smartest, I have been friends with people with IQs near 200, I’m thinking of at least 2 people as I write this, which is very rare. I received my intelligence the old-fashioned way, through very hard work. I started reading as a young person not yet ten. As a teenager I continued that trend more than my peers. Then as a young adult I really took off starting a habit of at least one book a week of all different topics. After a few years you discover that no matter who you are dealing with, being well read gives you an advantage in almost any conflict. I have always had a personality that challenged authority which is why I got into so much trouble. But the more books I read the less trouble I found myself in which was an interesting ratio. I kept doing it and have found that after thirty years of that behavior, you can do the math. Nobody can really fight you if you know more about things than they do. Even if they resort to physical encounters, all those things you learn I think are far more powerful weapons than any gun. I’m an advocate of concealed carry but honestly, I doubt I would ever use it since I feel that I can defeat any situation without coming to that scenario. It helps to always be the smartest person in the room and if you commit yourself to that, you’d be surprised how safe in the world you really are.

I say all that because these are scary times, obviously in the world of politics the old world of brute force and stupidity—which I’d term the Robert Mueller investigation—is fighting the election of Donald Trump and those of us who put him into office. All they have is fear to use to defend their control on the world. If you know better, all their primary weapons are worthless. If you are the smartest person in the room there is no jail they can put you in, no gun they can draw, or legalism they can use to put pressure on you to flip to save your beloved family members. I feel sorry in a lot of ways for people like Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen and even General Flynn. They were smart and powerful guys in their specific professions, but when it comes to being smart about life, they are still prone to being victimized by an F.B.I. that thinks it has intelligence leverage over them, so they can make threats and get a desired response from those witnesses because they aren’t smart enough about more topics in the world to defend themselves. But in all honesty, I can at least report that the tactics used by the F.B.I. are those of very stupid people who have no case and are no different from those street thugs I mentioned who thought about robbing me many years ago in Cincinnati. They have size, strength and weapons, but not intelligence—because intelligence takes work to nature and most people don’t do it, leaving them always at a disadvantage to those who do. If you really want to be a tough person who can stand up to anything, then read a book. And not just one, but one ever week and you will discover dear reader that will be the most powerful weapon you can ever have, and guess what—nobody in the world can take it away from you.

Rich Hoffman

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Mike Brown is Terrible for the Cincinnati Bengals: Embracing a losing mentality is bad for creating value for his customer base

Long ago I wrote an article about why the Cincinnati Bengals would never be a championship team, even if they could load their team with all first-round draft picks. It was never about talent; the Bengals have always had great talent that was worth watching. I usually go to a few games a year even though I am not particularly keen on the Bengals because of their losing reputation, and I really enjoy watching Carlos Dunlap play, along with Andy Dalton and A.J. Green. There are others as well. There is a lot to like about having the Bengals in Cincinnati and the NFL experience in general, but I typically don’t get very excited about them because of their front office approach to the customer base. Mike Brown as an owner never really understood what his role was as an owner and people do resent him for it. Sure they buy the product the way people in Russia bought bread during the height of communism, because there wasn’t any other option. Mike Brown was happy to just barely get by and keep his team in the black financially, but he has shown that he doesn’t care about the customer in the stands buying his product.

Since I do love the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, I did go to the home Bengal game when they played in Cincinnati at the end of October. Tampa Bay has been good some years and not so good other years, like this year. But what I see out of their organization every year is an attempt to win. They may get the combinations wrong, but at least they try, so I remain a loyal fan. As many who have read here for years know, I became a Tampa Bay fan because Mike Brown fired Sam Wyche when he was the head coach of the Bengals back in 1992 for one bad season. I never thought it was fair and I followed Sam Wyche to Tampa and remained a fan even after all the many coaching changes there because I simply think the Glazers are good owners and I cheer for their teams because I like them as people. Good people, good product, good public. Tampa Bay is a great place to watch a game win or lose, because you always feel they are trying.

However, after the Buc, Bengal game on a very beautiful day in Cincinnati where the home team held on to win in a close game that was very exciting I was in the Club section using the restroom after and by the way the fans were talking you’d think that the Bengals had lost. The talk after the game was that it was a miracle that Marvin Lewis didn’t find a way to lose the game, not that the home town Bengals had won, and I actually felt sorry for the team. Honestly, the Bengals played a good game. The Bucs at the time were playoff contenders so there was a lot for Bengal fans to be happy about. But the reputation of the team has left a fog over the entire organization that was costing them millions and millions of dollars and it was quite embarrassing.

Like I said, I go to a few games a year. I love the Club section because it’s usually a business class of people and I like the indoor amenities. There’s room to get up and walk around that you don’t get throughout the rest of the stadium. But I noticed that during the entire game almost no seats around us filled up with people. While the season ticket holders and hard-core blue-collar fans who have invested many of thousands of personal dollars into the Bengals and are willing to overlook the Bengal faults due to their own large investments into the NFL experience, the business class people see clearly what is going on with the Bengal organization and they aren’t supporting them even when they get free tickets through business associations. They simply have better things to do with their lives than watch losers play. Because business people know that even when losers sometimes win by accident, they are still losers, and that is the state of the current Bengal ownership under Mike Brown and they reject the product wholesale. When you can’t even give away free tickets, there is a problem with the product.

In business we are all trained, especially these days to give value to the customer, the people who pay for your product. If they aren’t getting value, what incentive do they have to continue using the product. The days of old top down relationships with the customer that large companies and monopolies had could afford to ignore the customer experience somewhat. For instance, the reason GM is failing isn’t because of large tariffs, but because they have a lackluster labor force that builds bad cars people don’t want. People bought them back when only America was building cars. But when there are better options, people will go where their value is massaged. In the case of GM put a Chevy Cruz next to a Toyota Corolla and the differences are obvious. I personally still support the GM brand, my family likes the cross-overs, but for sedans, there isn’t any question as to quality between the two. It’s the same with the NFL, Mike Brown thinks that just having a professional football team is all it takes, and up until a few years ago he was partially right. People were happy to have an NFL team in their city whether they were winners or losers, just the experience was worth the cost of the product. But times have changed, where the Bengals haven’t.

With the advent of Fantasy Football and the video game culture of Madden, the new generation of football fans are less inclined to love the home town team as they are players that they can invest in. The loyalty to the team as a whole has been broken up in these days of more individualized experiences such as we see with the smart phone revolution. That means that if a football team doesn’t occasionally win a big championship fans will drift away onto other interests, and the product will be permanently impacted. It’s a simple value stream kind of thing that any business would track trying to ensure that the customer experience is something they could build a business on. The Mike Brown assumption that people will buy his product regardless of what decisions he makes is really quite an insult especially to the business class people who spend their entire work week trying to figure out how to make their customers happy only to spend their leisure time getting spit in the face by Mike Brown. The final straw for Cincinnati fans was a few years ago when the Bengals were winning a playoff game against Pittsburg and they blew the ending with stupid penalties. Marvin Lewis stuck by those players not trying to recruit better personalities in the offseason and for smart people, they saw a lazy coach who was just riding the cart Mike Brown was pushing. And that was why fans were in the bathroom on a really wonderful day with a Bengal win against a good team complaining about Marvin Lewis when they should have been celebrating.

Whether the product is government, entertainment, or general business, the first obligation is to the people who give you money for that service. A few years ago when there was only the Post Office, there wasn’t anywhere to complain about the lazy postal worker who carelessly threw mail on our front porches. But with the rise of FedEx and UPS, that changed. The same with phone companies, it used to be that if you made a call outside of your home zip code, you would be charged for long distance communication. Now there are many communication options and those costs are long gone. And when it comes to sports, there are lots and lots of options and these days it’s actually more fun to watch them on the big magnificent televisions in the comfort of our homes. I still like to hear the roar of a crowd and see things in person, but if the customer experience sucks, I’ll just stay home. And that is what is happening to the Bengals. I wish I hadn’t been right all those years ago, but as usual, unfortunately I was. The Bengals under Mike Brown ownership will never win a championship. He has disrespected the customer base to a point that it will never recover and that’s a shame. Especially when Cincinnati has given him so much by way of tax relief and other benefits. Mike Brown didn’t respect Cincinnati enough to at least try to win. He is happy with mediocrity and his insult to all of us is that he insists that we like it.

I’d love to love the Bengals and take my grandkids down to the field to get autographs by really good people and players like Carlos Dunlap. But because of Mike Brown’s terrible leadership, I just can’t.

Rich Hoffman

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Standing with Wikileaks: The reason what Bob Mueller is doing is sheer evil

I’ll never forget that evening where I had the opportunity to visit the Embassy of Ecuador in London where Julian Assange was held up under international attempts at his arrest. That particular day I had a nice tour of London visiting Parliament, then Buckingham Palace before having dinner at one of the best and most expensive restaurants in all of London, Ramsey’s by Gordon Ramsey himself. After dinner we went shopping at Harrod’s which was another best of the best type of experience, and in the middle of all that we stopped by to see the center of the universe of all controversy regarding free speech at the Embassy where Julian Assange operated as the lead editor of Wikileaks. Donald Trump had just been elected president and the world was changing. Brexit was on everyone’s mind and the powerful in the political halls around the world shuddered by what Wikileaks was able to reveal through true journalism, and everyone hated Assange for it. My visit that day put everything in a nice perspective for me because we had seen the highs and lows of life all in one day in London and the context of it all was unmistakable. I didn’t think of it at the time but it was one of the most important days of my life.

So I found it odd that as much as I think the Mueller investigation into the Trump presidency is a phony political endeavor I was quite shocked by the reckless nature of the Mueller team trying to pin a false story about Paul Manafort in jail in framing Julian Assange with a character assassination under penalty of breaking the plea deal the FBI special investigation team had with the former Trump campaign manager confined to solitary. Mueller was obviously trying to steer his case to Wikileaks which released a lot of emails from John Podesta which caused Hillary Clinton so much damage, far more than anything else did in the election of 2016. But the problem is, what was revealed by Podesta were the kind of things the United States F.B.I. and press in general should have been revealing, because there were serious infractions of the law going on. It wasn’t Wikileaks fault that they were exposing that material, it was Podesta’s fault for committing the acts then falling for a phishing scheme to extract their confinement from his personal computer by hostile agents outside of the jurisdiction of the United States. Normally this would be a problem, but what was revealed was that American intelligence was in on the deal and were trying to rig the election in Hillary Clinton’s favor. And we wouldn’t have known much of any of that without Julian Assange and his Wikileaks.

To be at the center of the storm in London helped show how broken global politics and the media that covered it really was, that a small room in an embassy in the high-end section of London could literally bring the world to its knees so easily. There really isn’t much to things and that was exposed by Julian Assange and Donald Trump extraordinarily as 2016 closed and 2017 was being ushered in. Once all the patriotism was stripped away from wanting to defend everything in my own country it was quite obvious that the Democrats and F.B.I at the very least had conspired together to break the law to rig an election and they had control of the legal system and the media empires, except for that little room in the embassy where Assange looked at me through the window like a caged rat wishing with everything in his power that he could join me in the street and taste freedom once again.

Then to watch a few years later after the runaway Mueller investigation had attempted to destroy the life of Paul Manafort only because he had worked for a time with Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign and was trying to force him to say anything to keep from having more jail time imposed on him tried to use that leverage to pin the entire 2016 Democrat loss on that one guy in London, Julian Assange who is currently about to be kicked out of that embassy because Ecuador has had enough political pressure placed on them and they can’t take it anymore. So Assange is about to be pulled into a million pieces legally and Mueller knows it. The willingness of Mueller to destroy lives to preserve a social order is truly outrageous, and evil. I try to think of things in context like this, that Bob Mueller is someone’s dad, someone’s husband, someone’s son—that he has some value in the world. But to operate with such a lack of integrity—to put a system before good moral judgment is reprehensible and it becomes quite clear why a media outlet like Wikileaks is needed, because we certainly can’t trust the New York Times.

A lot of this mentality of a collective institutional view of value as opposed to individual judgment was quite apparent in a recent interview with James Comey as he revealed that he didn’t think that Trump’s pick for a backup attorney general was the sharpest knife in the drawer—it was an extraordinary statement of excessive condemnation especially considering the role Comey played in trying to destroy the Trump presidency right out of the gate with F.B.I. activism. Comey justifies his behavior that he was defending the institution of the presidency by attempting to bring down Trump and ultimately, he is the reason there is a Mueller investigation. It was never to seek justice, it was just to protect the institution of the presidency from individual will by the people who elected him. That same justification is what is attempting to paint a case against Julian Assange, that his Wikileaks is such a threat to institutionalism that it must be brought down any way possible. To those types of people individual lives don’t matter at all, but protecting the institutions that they are a part of is everything.

The reason for the context in London for me personally, was that the entire town is built off institutional history and in spite of all the great historic sites, individuals are quietly yearning everywhere for freedom. So it’s not that odd that Julian Assange has found some safety within the center of the city and a support base that keeps the police from storming his hideout and arresting him. The public wouldn’t stand for it so a kind of stalemate ensues and it was interesting to see up close. The frontier war for the entire world was happening right there and it really came down to a few bricks and windows between individual freedom and the tyranny of institutional protections even to the point where they break all the laws of mankind to protect themselves from the teeth of their crimes. Bob Mueller isn’t a good person, he is a tool like a knife, or a gun, used to inflict power over individuals to protect the evils of institutionalism and he will use it any way needed to enforce the will of his administrators. And that makes him the most dangerous person in the world, certainly not Julian Assange.

Rich Hoffman
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Why GM Has Failed: It’s all about restrooms

It is amazing how little people know about basic economic matters, especially in relation to the announcement that General Motors is planning to close its Lordstown plant in Ohio and laying off 15% of its salaried workforce and some production workers with a total of 14,700 jobs lost from that northern Ohio community. Even from people who are supposed to understand these complicated matters I couldn’t find many news outlets that truly understood the problem that GM is facing so I’ll sum it up very easily. It has everything to do with bathrooms. But first, lets study a very interesting Forbes article that made a lot of attempts at pinpointing the problem only to miss in every circumstance. Here are a few of the highlights with a link to the original article presented below. The link to the MSN article is even worse. It is filled with so much socialist rantings that it would be otherwise unreadable if not for the way it reflects the average opinion on the General Motors matter.

General Motors said today it is ending production next year at five of its plants including its last remaining plant in Detroit and its Lordstown plant in Ohio. The reasons: they largely make sedans, which U.S. car buyers are increasingly rejecting in favor of SUVs; and Trump-era tariffs are creating headwinds and higher costs for the automaker.

–Higher costs, due in part to the Trump administration steel tariffs, have already cost GM $1 billion, and those costs will persist and rise as long as they are in place.

Of the plants targeted for an end of production, the Lordstown plant has the best chance to possibly stay open. GM will soon kick off negotiations with the UAW, and the union will likely lobby hard for a crossover vehicle to be located at the plant located east of Toledo on the Ohio turnpike. “General Motors’ decision today… will not go unchallenged by the UAW,” said Terry Dittes, the union’s vice president in charge of negotiations with GM.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidkiley5/2018/11/26/gm-cuts-jobs-and-plants-to-deal-with-changing-tastes-and-trump-tariffs/#654e378e6057
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/gm-layoffs-signal-its-going-to-get-worse-for-the-american-worker/ar-BBQ84Ne?ocid=spartanntp

Here is the basic problem, and I understand why Trump, Mike DeWine, Rob Portman and even the economic buffoon Sherrod Brown want to twist GM’s arm to keep the Lordstown plant open. After all, General Motors took money for a bailout and the government feels it has a right to help manage the affairs of the company. But that is more of an exasperation of the problem than a fix. General Motors is failing and continues to fail because they just don’t have good leadership and unlike the days of the Sloan Management system, do not have people in their organization that can step up and take over at the top CEO job. Everything has become politicized at General Motors and they have grown to feel they are entitled to exist rather than needing to compete in a harsh automotive maker’s market. General Motors main problem is they have weak management largely because their labor unions feel they have shared control of the company which means that the good managers that are out there want nothing to do with General Motors leaving behind a bunch of slack-jawed losers to run the company, because only a fool would want to work with a bunch of lazy, slow, and contemptuous union leaders who think they share the burden of running a company. Because of that General Motors top management have turned to politics for help and that has only made them worse. To hear their current CEO think that by directing the company’s resources toward electric cars and autonomous vehicles is the wave of the future, they have not done their value stream maps correctly. Americans don’t want vehicles that they can’t drive. They love the independence of driving themselves and they want bigger cars that use more gas. Tesla has carved out a notch for themselves, but not to the extent that a company the size of General Motors should follow. The fact that they don’t know how to think for themselves says everything.

The real problem is that the labor union has destroyed the American automaker market. The pensions are too expensive for a declining company. If auto sales from America were still dominating the global market, it wouldn’t be a problem. But when you lose market share, which all American auto companies have, there simply is not a way to pay for an expensive work force that can’t keep the company at the top of their game. The American worker has taken their jobs for granted, especially in relation to auto jobs and they are losing to much more competitive foreign markets. When you travel around the world and the only cars you see are Toyotas, Nissans, Hondas and the like, there is no way that General Motors can afford to compete with top-heavy labor costs and pension commitments that are projected to cripple them for the next 50 years. The socialist fantasy of the big labor unions running the auto companies with shared input has long been over. The government contributions have only prolonged the bleeding, the problem started when America no longer built the kind of cars the world wanted by people who really weren’t passionate about their work.

If you go right now to a typical Japanese factory, whether they are making cars, boats, copy machines, whatever you can think of and a worker on the line would want to use the restroom, they’d indicate they needed relief, a supervisor or co-worker would fill their spot while the worker would lightly jog to the restroom and back again as fast as they could safely. Urgency and passion are part of the Japanese culture in everything they do including simple transactions at fast food restaurants. When they ask to use the restroom, they get to it and return to their work promptly and without excuse as they fully invest themselves into their endeavor. Go to the typical General Motors Cruz manufacturing line and a worker needs to use the restroom, typically a person grossly overweight and dressed like they just rolled out of a trash can indicates they need to relieve themselves. Once their relief shows up to cover their spot, they don’t return for another 20 minutes. If you walk behind the fat slob you’ll find they take an extra five minutes walking to the bathroom, they spend at least 5 to 10 minutes going to the rest room playing on their phone and reading graffiti on the stall wall, then they spend at least 5 minutes walking back talking to anybody who they can manage to engage in a conversation stalling as long as possible before they get back to the imprisonment of their work detail. They don’t love their work and because of the mentality of their labor union they are always seeking to do the least amount of it because they think the vile management system is always trying to steal something from them, so they in turn are always looking to steal time from the company. Usually its obvious in their restroom habits, but if you track the employee throughout their work day you can see it everywhere in everything they do.

Management in these American companies don’t have any form of control of their operations so only the bad ones stick around. The false premise that all socialists have is that everyone is equal, the worker and the manager and that everyone through consensus determines the direction of the group is completely wrong. Nothing could be said worse—such a condition never exists anywhere. Leadership is not a collective endeavor, it’s a very lonely one. Getting buy-in to leadership decisions is a collective enterprise, but the role of management is not. The workers are not in a position to determine strategic relationships between the manufacturing process and the tactical need to implement them. It takes people good at that kind of thing and when unions take over shop management only the fools stick around. And when fools run a manufacturing facility through communist dreams of unity, people take 20 minutes to use the restroom and they build bad cars that the world doesn’t want that are too expensive. It has nothing to do with tariff wars or even changing gas prices, it’s all about bad management which GM even with lots of bail outs and help by the tax payer have shown they are lacking. The future of automobiles are not automated cars and electric-powered ones at that, it’s in independence on the open road of America’s vast expanses of land, and a foreign market that would like to pretend that they live in America. The failure of GM management to see that for themselves says everything that needs to be said about why General Motors is struggling and jobs are being lost. And no politician or any amount of money in the world can fix their lack of vision and leadership.

And if you have any doubts about what I’ve said, just watch the videos on this article.  The proof is quite obvious, especially the last one.

Rich Hoffman

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