Tag: Illegal Immigration

Bob McEwen’s Fight For Justice: A revolutionary war ghost and the power of Cincinnati

I suppose my political beliefs were framed within the context of three men over a four-month period long ago.  Prior to the presidential election of 1992 I was in Dallas, Texas spending time with Ross Perot and his family.  I learned a lot from these experiences.  I had always had a fascination with the Revolutionary War and Ross Perot had a style that brought that sentiment into focus.  Then just a few months later I spent a considerable amount of time with Rob Portman as he began to run for the Second Congressional seat that was coming up during a special election.  I liked Rob and my opinion leaned in his direction.  At a special on-air debate on 700 WLW hosted by Mike McConnell during a Sunday night in Mt Adams, Portman’s challengers attended and I was there to witness the whole extravaganza.  That was when I met Bob McEwen whom I initially disliked because of a House banking scandal that hovered over him like an ominous cloud.  But for three crucial hours in my life I watched McEwen and Portman have it out with skill and debate that I admired spectacularly.  Portman would go on to win, and would be the kind of prominent debater that Mitt Romney would use to prepare for his prime time debates against President Obama.   Ross Perot would go down in history as one of the founders of the current Tea Party as his Reform Party essentially began during that Dallas event mentioned—where he would lose his run for president against Billy Clinton. And Bob McEwen hit the lecture circuit being paid $10,000 per speech because of his vast knowledge of history, economics and insider politics.  Some of these speeches can be seen below and should be watched entirely.  They are real treasures—he is a very good public speaker.  In spite of the check bouncing scandal he was a staunch anti-communist, a religious supporter, and an economic scholar with a deep knowledge of history.  Out of the three mentioned men, I learned more from Bob McEwen once I forgave him for the congressional scandal and realized why he was targeted—because Washington D.C. wanted him out-of-town.  Political insiders wanted Bob McEwen out of their “beltway.”  Watch all these videos carefully—preferably many times.  And send them to a friend.

McEwen was caught up in the House banking scandal, which had been seized upon by Newt Gingrich, a like-minded conservative House Republican, as an example of the corruption of Congress; members of the House had been allowed to write checks on their accounts, which were paid despite insufficient funds and without penalty. Martin Gottlieb of the Dayton Daily News said “McEwen was collateral damage” to Gingrich’s crusade.[25] McEwen initially denied bouncing any checks. Later, he admitted he had bounced a few. Then when the full totals were released by Ethics Committee investigators, the number was revealed to have been 166 over thirty-nine months. McEwen said that he always had funds available to cover the alleged overdrafts, pointing to the policy of the House sergeant-at-arms, who ran the House bank, paying checks on an overdrawn account if it would not exceed the sum of the Representative’s next paycheck.[26] In 1991, McEwen had also been criticized for his use of the franking privilege and his frequent trips overseas at taxpayer expense, but McEwen defended the trips as part of his work on the Intelligence Committee and in building relationships with legislatures overseas.[27]

Robert D. “Bob” McEwen (born January 12, 1950) is a lobbyist and American politician of the Republican Party, who was a member of the United States House of Representatives from southern Ohio‘s Sixth District, from January 3, 1981 to January 3, 1993. Tom Deimer of Cleveland‘s Plain Dealer described him as a “textbook Republican” who is “opposed to abortion, gun control, high taxes, and costly government programs.” In the House, he criticized government incompetence and charged corruption by the Democratic majority that ran the House in the 1980s. McEwen, who had easily won three terms in the Ohio House, was elected to Congress at the age of thirty to replace a retiring representative in 1980 and easily won re-election five times.

After a bruising primary battle with another incumbent whose district was combined with his, in which McEwen faced charges of bouncing checks on the House bank, he narrowly lost the 1992 general election to Democrat Ted Strickland. Following an unsuccessful run in the adjacent Second District in 1993, McEwen was largely absent from the Ohio political scene for a decade, until in 2005 he unsuccessfully sought the Republican nomination for Congress in the Second District special election to replace Rob Portman, who beat him in 1993, and finished second to the winner in the general election, Jean Schmidt. McEwen’s 2005 platform was familiar from his past campaigns, advocating a pro-life stance, defending Second Amendment rights, and promising to limit taxes and government spending. In 2006, he unsuccessfully sought the Republican nomination in the Second District.

In Congress, McEwen, who “had a reputation as a man who thinks about politics every waking moment,” claimed Congressional Quarterly, was a staunch conservative, advocating a strong military.[2] In addition, he was a strong advocate for government works in his district — dams, roads, locks and the like much as Harsha had been — as McEwen was on the House’s Public Works and Transportation Committee.[3] The Chillicothe Gazette would salute him for his work on funding for U.S. Route 35, a limited access highway linking Chillicothe to Dayton.[4] In general, however, McEwen advocated reduced government spending.

A vehement anti-Communist, he visited Tbilisi in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia in 1991 to help tear down the hammer-and-sickle iconography of the Communist regime.[5] That year he also called for the House to establish a select committee to investigate the Vietnam War POW/MIA issue – whether any soldiers declared “missing in action” in the Vietnam War and other American wars were still alive – by sponsoring H. Res. 207.[6]

McEwen was not a man to mince words. In the heated debate in 1985 over a Congressional seat in Indiana between Republican Richard D. McIntyre, whom the Indiana Secretary of State had certified as winning a seat in the 99th Congress, and Democrat Frank McCloskey, in which the House declined to seat McIntyre, McEwen declared on the House floor, “Mr. Speaker, you know how to win votes the old-fashioned way — you steal them.”[11] When McEwen was late in 1990 to the House because of a massive traffic jam on the I-495 beltway around Washington, D.C., he said on the House floor on February 21 that the District of Columbia’s government should be replaced:

The total incompetence of the D.C. government in Washington, DC, has become an embarrassment to our entire Nation. This experiment in home rule is a disaster. All of us who serve in this Chamber, well over 95% of us, have held other positions in government. We have been mayors. We have been township trustees, State legislators, and the rest. I am convinced, Mr. Speaker, that there are well over 2,000 township trustees in my congressional district who with one arm tied behind their backs, could blindfolded do a better job of directing this city than the city council of D.C. It is high time that this experiment in home rule that has proven to be a disaster for our nation be terminated, that we return to some sort of logical government whereby the rest of us can function in this city.[12]

After McEwen was criticized for his remarks, he delivered a thirty-minute speech in the House on March 1, 1990, on “The Worst City Government in America”.[13] Because of the crime problem in the District, McEwen also attempted to pass legislation overturning the District council’s ban on mace, saying people in the District should be able to defend themselves.[14] During the Persian Gulf War in 1991, McEwen introduced legislation to end President Gerald Ford‘s ban on U.S. government employees assassinating foreign leaders (Executive Order 12333) in order to clear the way for Saddam Hussein‘s removal, McEwen objecting to the “cocoon of protection that is placed around him because he holds the position that he holds as leader of his country.”[15]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_McEwen

For people who believe that Cincinnati, Ohio is just a flyover city, they are sadly mistaken.  The region of my home town produces very interesting people, life changing ideas, and I am proud of it.  Steven Spielberg, Tom Cruise, Nick Clooney, Ted Turner, Annie Oakley, Nick Longworth who married Teddy Roosevelt’s cherished daughter Alice, William Taft, the Voice of America, the Crosely brothers, Kings Island, Rob Portman and of course Bob McEwen along with many others.  Not all of those names are good ones, but Cincinnati throughout history has been at the center of the heartbeat of the nation.  McEwen is still out there fighting for freedom as a political outsider—pushed out of the beltway by those who didn’t like his message.  And behind him is the next generation of freedom fighters.  The Cincinnati Tea Party is one of the strongest in the nation and is directly challenging current House Speaker John Boehner and the fraudulent Ohio governor John Kasich who launched and won his campaign against Ted Strickland because of the Cincinnati Tea Party.  Cincinnati is where the fight is at.  It is the modern version of Trenton, New Jersey in the new Revolution for independence.

Bob McEwen is a product of Cincinnati, a man deeply committed to undoing the kind of progressive underpinnings brought to the city at the turn of the 20th Century by Nick Longworth and his father-in-law Teddy Roosevelt along with William Howard Taft.  Before these characters, Cincinnati was where the great Simeon Kenton settled with his sheer will and a hatchet well before any “White Man” braved the wild frontier of Cincinnati.  Tecumseh and his Shawnee warriors were from Cincinnati.  Tecumseh was born where modern day Xenia is today and fought directly with Simeon Kenton for this holy ground of the Ohio River valley—particularly Cincinnati.  Kenton was in the Ohio River Valley because he was running from the “White Men” European decedents for much the same reasons that the Indians did.  Tecumseh couldn’t hold off the “White Settlers” as more and more people fled European tyranny in much the same way that Cubans risked life and limb to swim to Miami, Florida to escape communism.  The Shawnee would grudgingly flee the Cincinnati area as President Washington had a fort built in his name to defend the region.  Another fort to the north along the Great Miami River named Fort Hamilton was built in dedication to Washington’s right hand man—Alexander Hamilton, and just down the road was a town named after James Monroe.  In between those places was a township called “Liberty” which was established in direct honor of the Revolutionary War.

I grew up next to the grave of the Revolutionary War veteran John Ayers and his wife Sarah.   He fought in Elizabethtown, Van Nest Mill, Piscataway, and Monmouth.  Their graves can still be visited; they are in the back yard of the homes off the Butler County Regional Highway at the 747 exit if traveling toward the east.  As a kid I discovered this cemetery overrun by dirt and trampled by cows deep in the woods in the middle of nowhere.  I brought home Sarah’s tombstone to my mother to prove that the place existed and she was extremely furious.  I put the head stone back, and often wondered if the ghost of John Ayers plagued me with images of war, fighting for freedom, and settling an area braving the elements just to run away from European collectivism because I disturbed his wife’s grave.  In all reality, it is likely that Cincinnati itself and the region of land projecting out for 75 miles in every direction has a soul that rises up to meet oppression—and the bad guys of the world know it.  For decades the Soviet Union had nuclear missiles pointed at the GE plant in Evendale and Hitler wanted desperately to destroy the Voice of America in Mason, Ohio.  And the Washington establishment wanted to destroy the man from Cincinnati, Bob McEwen and his crusade against communism, fiscal irresponsibility, and the preservation of Christian values.

I learned a little from everyone mentioned—some of those names were good, some were sinister—but all came from Cincinnati and had something for me to learn from—and I did—including the ghost of John Ayers and his family who I often felt patrolled the haunted woods outside my bedroom window where a highway and many homes now exist.  For as long as I can remember I had an affinity for the Revolutionary War and it is likely that John Ayers had something to do with it as I spent most of my time as a kid outside hunting for old cemeteries, and the bodies buried by local politics which I despised for as long as I have memory. Bob McEwen is another of these Cincinnati products, and now that you have heard some of his speeches dear reader, you might understand why I was so taken with him as he debated Rob Portman during a special election at 700 WLW on a spring like Sunday evening.  Out of Portman, Perot and McEwen, it is the later that is still as deeply committed to liberty and freedom.  The rest of them either sold out, or ran out of gas—but McEwen never really gave up.  He has been chipping away at the barriers for freedom for decades and really never let the ominous clouds of politics push him aside—which is why I admire him so much.  I am happy to report that like the ghost of John Ayers, the Revolutionary War vet that I grew up with as a ghostly friend, Bob McEwen has been a tremendous influence on how I see the world—and perhaps you will enjoy his work as well.

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

 

The Carcass of West Chester: Silverman and Company Inc., try again

In a lot of ways fighting a developer who has invested many thousands if not millions of dollars into a parcel of property which was initially turned down by residents complaining about the change of use in zoning considerations is no different from fighting a school levy.  Both involve government and utilize the standard process of beating residents into the ground until they submit to social pressure.  This has never been truer than the re-emergence of the Kroger Marketplace proposal in West Chester, Ohio.  According to the Pulse Journal, Blue Ash-based Silverman and Company Inc. recently resubmitted a request to change 35 acres zoned for residential use to Commercial Planned Unit Development to include a 133,000-square-foot grocery store at the intersection of Tylersville and Princeton Glendale.  This was the same parcel of land in contention during 2013.  CLICK HERE TO REVIEW.

The first phase of the Crossings of Beckett shopping center would include a Kroger grocery store, a bank, a pharmacy with drive-through access–a Fred Meyer Jewelers, a small medical clinic, a Kroger fuel center, an additional 15,000 square feet of retail space alongside Kroger and three additional out-parcels along Ohio 747.  Basically, it’s just another strip mall with gas stations that are already just one mile further to the south.  And there is nothing in the Silverman proposal which helps fill the massive vacancies of the old Biggs retail center just two miles to the south—which to this very day is mostly empty.  The old Biggs center is comparable in size to a Kroger Marketplace, yet Silverman and Company Inc., do not own that property—so they aren’t interested.  They’d rather build on their property of course, at a location of their choosing and if the residents pose resistance—they’ll strategically wear them down the same way school levies from public schools have.

To try to take the edge off the community battle which took place the last time this endeavor was proposed and Tom Egger led the community to resist and suppress those plans the developer made changes to the plan to eliminate the three parcels on the north side of the site.  The new plan also calls for the creation of a buffer zone for residents to the north, according to Tim Burgoyne, Silverman and Company Inc.’s director of site acquisition and development.  This tactic is common for developers so that they can give the illusion that they have compromised.  It is the same stupid thing the local public school of Lakota did when they put their last levy on the ballot.  They spent hundreds of thousands of tax payer dollars to essentially convince the community that they “listened.”  But in reality they just imposed their government backed will upon the voters wearing down resistance.  The developer in this case is performing the same task—but showing the community that they are “compromising.”  They hope to take the edge off Tom Egger’s case and earn the zoning commission’s support of their endeavor with a kind of rigged election process.  Likely the deal was cut with zoning officials before Silverman and Company Inc made their recent announcement.  These guys always dip their feet into the pool before they jump in.

As stated to the media by Burgoyne, “The residents wanted nothing along there, so after meeting with the community and staff members and getting everyone’s input, we believe that we have substantially addressed their concerns and we’re excited to move forward.”  What Burgoyne means is that they moved around the architectural drawings from the original proposal, which deliberately asked for too much knowing they would get resistance from the public—then backed off to their original design so to show that they compromised.  Of course that is speculation, but I’ve been down this road many more times than once—and if that’s not exactly how the situation played out, then I have swamp land on Mars to sell you.

http://www.todayspulse.com/news/news/developer-submits-new-plan-for-kroger-along-ohio-7/ncjpD/

This is supposed to be why we have government, and zoning should look at their vacant properties at the old Biggs Center and evaluate that if they allow this Kroger Marketplace into the empty field of the proposed location, they can forget about ever filling the much more lucrative location at the corner of Union Center and 747 where there are already stop lights, double lanes of traffic and an artery directly into Fairfield, Beckett Ridge, Tri County and I-75.  At the Silverman property all those things will have to be built, which makes developers happy, but will erode away the lives of Tom Egger and hundreds of families in the area.

This of course puts the Trustees of West Chester into a difficult position as they will have to vote upon the zoning recommendations—which will likely fall in their lap this time around.  If they vote against the proposed site they vote against a developer who wants to bring something truly good to West Chester.  The trouble is—it’s in the wrong location.  If they vote for the developer then they doom the lives of many tax payers looking for protection from government—and they will doom the Biggs location.  Prospective businesses for that location will choose the new corner of 747 and Tylersville because it will be the latest and greatest development in the West Chester area.  But 15 years from now, it will be old like the current Biggs location is today, and homeowners like Tom Egger and his family will still be looking at an older building bringing tons of traffic and unseemly elements to his back yard once the media has moved on to the next new thing.

I’m all for developers making a few bucks off their investments.  But the West Chester zoning board said no once before, and here come Silverman and Company Inc., with some market up drawings to give the illusion that they give a damn about what’s best for the West Chester community.  Surely they are counting on the local residents to scratch their heads and declare, “hey–they listened.”  But they didn’t, they just think the people of the community are suckers who will buy into a scam that is as old as time—and they expect to use government to protect their investments.  When Silverman and Company Inc purchased the plot of land in question, their investment was a risk.  There was no guarantee that they would convince West Chester zoning into allowing their proposal to come to fruition.  But with the many games that go on behind the scenes, they use government to protect their investments, even if it goes against the will of the people.  That is what this second proposal is—it’s very disrespectful, and ultimately damaging to the West Chester community.  But Silverman and Company Inc., won’t care.  They’ll make their money, and move on to the next location like vultures picking clean the carcass of road kill.  And within two decades the corner of 747 and Tylersville will look like modern-day Route 4, and replacing the homes of people like Tom Egger will be section 8 designations as government picks up those properties because nobody wants to move into an area that looks down into a Kroger parking lot.  The only people who will want to move to a place like that are future economic despots and people looking for government checks and a nice corner of that parking lot to sell drugs to other treacherous characters and scumbags.  Only the carcass won’t be road kill that time—it will be West Chester.

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

 

Dennis Van Roekel’s Epic Failure: An out of control unfunded teacher pension system

When National Education Association president Dennis van Roekel states that there “is no teacher pension crises” among his members, he is functioning from a level of denial common among left-winged nut-case progressives.  The Ohio Education Association, (an affiliate of the NEA) with net assets of negative $11.5 million, and a $1.2 million deficit in 2011-12 paid only $8.2 million in pension costs.  The reason that Roekel doesn’t believe this isn’t a crises is because he fully expects state governments to cover the gap—and to do that—taxes will have to be raised on residents.  This is expected by the unions because of their government monopoly status over the education system where they can drive up costs to any level they wish then impose on tax payers their reckless burden without fear of losing that business—because under government law they have access to virtually every child in America.  So from Roekel’s point of view—it’s not a crises—because he expects someone in government to wrestle the money away from the public for his members with manipulation or force.

Recently Roekel made a bit of a splash with the liberal progressive think tank The Center for American Progress when he proposed getting rid of the “outdated” “step-and-lane” system.  This brought about some upturned pinky golf claps among politicians and ass-sniffing, brown-nosing education professionals for its “forward” thinking.  Yet Roekel is only performing the traditional dog and pony union show where their monopoly power dictates progressive radicalism of a magnitude equivalent to domestic terrorism.  His ultimate solution for everything is higher taxes to provide a product that liberalizes American youth with a not so disguised babysitting service as parents struggle to work two jobs to pay for everything.  Read more about the ACP story at the link below:

http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/education/news/2013/10/25/77986/the-nations-largest-teachers-union-calls-for-revamp-of-teacher-pay-system/

The Education Intelligence Agency report recently looked at the unfunded liabilities of the NEA union to begin understanding the amount of trouble that is coming straight at Roekel’s government monopoly enterprise and illuminated how ridiculously foolish—and arrogant Roekel’s denial that there is no pension crises facing his members or the states that employee them really are.  Roekel has been destructively misleading.  The following is text from the Education Intelligence Agency website followed by the origin link.

14 state teachers unions have almost $700 million in unfunded liabilities

December 24, 2013

Mike Antonucci

Mike is the director of the Education Intelligence Agency and has covered the education beat since 1993.
Archive »

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The good folks at Bellwether Education Partners created a web site called TeacherPensions.org in order to focus some much-needed attention on the structure of the retirement system and its financial implications. The site features a range of opinions about teacher pensions, including that of National Education Association president Dennis Van Roekel, who says flatly: “There is no teacher pension crisis.”

Van Roekel defends the defined benefit system, and explains that a key principle of the system is “When actuarial liabilities exceed actuarial assets, the state and/or employer must make the necessary additional contributions to amortize the unfunded liability in no more than 30 years.”

That seems like a pretty simple solution, but if it were, perhaps Van Roekel’s own organization and its affiliates would not be experiencing their own mammoth shortfalls, due mostly to the pensions and retiree health care benefits they granted their own employees.

An Education Intelligence Agency analysis of 2011-12 Internal Revenue Service filings reveals 14 NEA state affiliates do not have the financial assets to match their liabilities and total almost $700 million in combined debt.

The ability of these affiliates to address their long-term debt by increasing pension contributions, as Van Roekel suggests, is compromised by their short-term debt. Nine of the 14 affiliates had deficits in 2011-12. In fact, the combined spending of all of NEA’s state affiliates exceeded their combined income by almost $24 million.

Even at the national level, NEA’s pension plan for its 2,600 employees and retirees was only 87.9 percent funded in 2012, down from 94.2 percent in 2010.

EIA has constructed a table that lists each of NEA’s state affiliates, its budget deficit or surplus for 2011-12 and its net assets, positive or negative, as of the end of the 2011-12 school year. For purposes of comparison, the table also lists the number of days each affiliate could operate solely on reserves based on its 2011-12 expenditures and net assets.

The 14 state affiliates with a negative net worth are:

* New York State United Teachers, with net assets of negative $302.8 million and a $24 million deficit in 2011-12. NYSUT contributed almost $30.8 million to its employee pension plan that year.

* Michigan Education Association, with net assets of negative $160.5 million, and a $4.8 million deficit in 2011-12. MEA contributed $14.1 million to its employee pension plan, and instituted a three-year, $50 annual assessment on its members for the express purpose of funding the staff pension.

* New Jersey Education Association, with net assets of negative $77.5 million. NJEA had a $13.2 million surplus in 2011-12, even after contributing $17.1 million to pension costs.

* Washington Education Association, with net assets of negative $35.1 million, and a $3.7 million deficit in 2011-12. WEA contributed $8.1 million to its employee pension plan.

* Massachusetts Teachers Association, with net assets of negative $26.7 million. MTA had a $7.8 million surplus in 2011-12 after contributing $4.1 million to its employee pension plan.

* Illinois Education Association, with net assets of negative $17.7 million, and a $17.9 million deficit in 2011-12. IEA paid $26.3 million to its employee pension plan. Despite its own mess, IEA is adamantly opposedto the Illinois state government’s efforts to address public employee pension debt.

* Indiana State Teachers Association, with net assets of negative $16.4 million, and a $4.5 million deficit in 2011-12. ISTA paid $4.1 million toward employee pensions.

* Iowa State Education Association, with net assets of negative $12.7 million, and a $4.3 million deficit in 2011-12. ISEA paid $2.2 million into its employee pension plan.

* Ohio Education Association, with net assets of negative $11.5 million, and a $1.2 million deficit in 2011-12. OEA paid $8.2 million in pension costs.

* Texas State Teachers Association, with net assets of negative $11.3 million, and a $243,000 deficit in 2011-12. TSTA contributed $1.4 million to its pension plan, and holds a $1.6 million quasi-endowment “to sustain the association for the long-term.”

* Pennsylvania State Education Association, with net assets of negative $8.3 million, though it did have a $9.2 million surplus in 2011-12, suggesting another similar year would put it in the black. It spent $7.3 million on pensions.

* Virginia Education Association, with net assets of negative $5.1 million, and a budget surplus of $1 million. VEA contributed almost $2.2 million to its employee pension plan.

* West Virginia Education Association, with net assets of negative $2.2 million, and a budget surplus of $132,000. It is unclear how much WVEA contributed to its employee pension plan in 2011-12, but its pension liabilities totaled $3.7 million.

* Georgia Association of Educators, with net assets of negative $1.8 million, and a $476,000 deficit in 2011-12. GAE paid $746,000 to its employee pension plan.

NEA’s largest affiliates are overrepresented on this list. This is problematic because the health of the large affiliates, particularly in collective bargaining states with agency fee provisions, enables NEA national to funnel crucial subsidies to its small affiliates. Many small affiliates could not sustain themselves at current levels without those funds.

As a union, NEA believes state governments should extract more revenues from taxpayers to sustain the defined benefit system of public employees. As an employer, NEA is aware of the pitfalls of extracting more dues money from members to sustain the much more generous defined benefit system of union employees.

It’s a race against time for NEA as it attempts to stave off public pension reform before it is swamped by its own private pension costs.

http://www.eiaonline.com/2013/12/23/pension-predicament-14-nea-affiliates-have-almost-700-million-in-unfunded-liabilities/

The good thing about these unfunded liabilities is that currently the NEA is trying to cover those costs with their union dues which means that they will have to increase those dues among their members.  That probably won’t be very popular.  This is also leaving little money for PAC funding which means less money for donations into progressive candidates.  As a former math teacher it would be assumed that Roekel would know this—but he doesn’t.  He’s preaching the same tired garbage which has made public education completely irrelevant over the last thirty years—really since the creation of the Department of Education in 1979 when education became centrally planned by the federal government.  The only benefactors have been the unions—certainly not the students.  Roekel’s concerns are primarily teacher recruitment and licensing of teachers as if this would stop the onslaught of his members who are trying to get into the pants of their students on an epic scale.  Roekel is ignoring that psychological and specifically “progressive” problem as vigorously as he’s ignoring the pension system issues.  But what would anybody expect from a former teacher who is now president of the largest labor union in America.

The bottom line is that Roekel’s perspective is shaped by the security that he has the power of the IRS at his back—as wind in his sails.  He knows that his union can recklessly spend over budget—as they have for years because the mandate for states and their tax payers is to just cover the tab without thought or question because the lives of their children are held as extortion pieces for ransom.  The NEA unfunded liabilities are just one aspect of a terrible web of failure coming from public education which is completely controlled by progressive labor unions. And that aspect alone should dictate why such organizations should be eradicated from the earth—forever.

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

 

Kasich’s Medicaid Expansion in Ohio: Eating Sausage McMuffins with Egg and reading USA Today

A ritual I have which I have done for years is have breakfast at McDonald’s and read the USA Today over a Sausage McMuffin with Egg sandwich, a large Coke, and a hash brown.  I don’t do it every day, but often enough to call such an activity a ritual and way to touch base with a newspaper I have read since I was 15-years-old.  An article about Medicaid expansion roused my attention particularly since Ohio’s governor John Kasich bypassed the Republican legislature to expand the program under Obamacare’s Supreme Court ruling calling it a tax.  Kasich’s premise is that the money is there for Medicaid, and can be brought into the state for his benefit.  He thinks he’s doing a financially prudent thing, but he’s simply taking the cheese of the federal mousetrap set by Obama and his cronies.  For a governor who ran as a Tea Party candidate—Kasich was one of the first “traditional Republicans” exposed as a RINO after the 2010 elections—when the Tea Party put him into office—but lacked the courage to stick with the program.  The topic of Medicaid expansion in many states like Ohio and Michigan reminded me of a recent broadcast done by Matt Clark at WAAM radio in Ann Arbor.  He covered the lack of accountability recently in Washington and how the rules are often made up as they go—and the Medicaid issue is a perfect example of the shell game that often goes on in politics.  Kasich wants to make a run for President in 2016 and needs to distance himself from the Senate Bill 5 debate of 2011 where he took a hit with the public unions.  So he is targeting the poor to take away Democratic votes from any challengers in 2014 so he can get re-elected.  He is justifying the process by saying that he’s being fiscally smart—the money will be spent anyway—but he ignores that the money the government is dangling is part of the same $17 trillion that is already in deficit with the federal government and at the core of the whole problem.  Kasich by-passed his legislature to gain access to money the federal government doesn’t have so that he can run for president breaking every rule of checks and balances there is—the ends justify the means.  And he sells it as a benefit to taxpayers when the whole escapade is a validation of Obamacare which was shoved down America’s throats on a Christmas holiday way back in 2009—illicitly.  Later the Supreme Court said the maneuvers were valid as a tax increase, but that was not how the government sold Obamacare—and was deceitful—which is typical among all parties involved in the Medicaid exchange expansion at every level.  Have a listen to Matt Clark then check out the USA Today article.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/12/05/rejecting-medicaid-costs-states-more/3871811/

The way that USA Today article reads, states not accepting Medicaid expansion are “losing money” which is deceitful, because the federal government is borrowing the money anyway—there isn’t any money they are giving away generated from some legitimate source.  What the government is doing with Medicaid expansion in order to promote their Obamacare legislation is basically take participating states out to dinner and paying for it with a credit card that is way over their ability to pay the bill.  It’s easy to be generous with a $1000 meal when the borrower has no intention to pay off the food—ever.  The federal government has no incentive—or desire to pay back the money it is borrowing to expand Medicaid—and is only doing it to pull governors like Kasich away from his Republican base to throw money at a voting platform that typically wouldn’t vote for him.  Kasich is looking for voter replacements that he won’t have in cops, firefighters and Tea Party supporters in the poor—which the federal government also created, just as they control the public sector unions.

USA Today is a Gannett Company, the same outfit that runs the Cincinnati Enquirer—so they tend to lean toward progressive causes.  I have read that paper for many years so I can understand how the other side thinks about things and see how such scams are promoted within the ranks of big government supporters.  But I don’t trust blindly anything they say.  They almost always have a big government position on issues like Medicaid expansion and have for over the thirty years that I have read the paper at McDonald’s.  What they always fail to cover is where the money ultimately comes from in such schemes.  They sell the story like government makes the money that is given to Ohio—and never take the story to the next level of “why.”  That is where they and politicians looking to take advantage of the general public ignorance like Kasich are disingenuous to their readers and constituents.

Kasich these days is listening to his progressive, RINO friends—all big government people who are left over fossils from the 60s.  They believe that the exploitation of the poor can be beneficial since the money is being tossed out of the federal government through Obamacare anyway, so why not take some of it.  I have heard similar comments come from 700 WLW’s Bill Cunningham demanding that John Boehner bring home some federal money to build a new bridge on I-75 in Cincinnati.  The same type of people tend to be pro-casino hoping that gambling establishments can generate more taxable income on fools stupid enough to throw their money away on chance.  All their personal philosophies are built on foolish fiscal manipulations and deceit.  Behind Kasich’s efforts of Medicaid expansion his actions are ominous in his circumcision of the state legislature and serve the end result of validating Obamacare—allowing its tentacles of power to seep even deeper into American society—which was the plan behind the federal money to begin with.

The money coming from the Medicaid exchange in Ohio, Michigan and all states that set up such fiascos is stolen money from the future of America.  It doesn’t even exist since it was created under deficit conditions.  So it isn’t fiscally responsible to take it—nobody has lost anything except the future tax payers who must fund the deficit spending that allows Kasich to win votes from the poor in Ohio for his re-election.  For a guy who ran as a Tea Party candidate—Kasich has turned out to be a terrible statist—no different than Obama in legislative policy—by-passing his legislature and ruling from the governor’s seat like an emperor.  And the federal money he is taking to win his next election is stolen from the future with a government credit card that nobody has any intention of paying off—ever!  Yet USA Today isn’t worried about any of that so long as they get more Americans addicted to Obamacare until it is too big to repeal from some future legislative body.  USA Today is supposed to be the media which creates accountability—but since they are in bed with the Obama administration and applaud the actions of statists like John Kasich—the conditions Matt Clark brought up on his radio broadcast will continue.  Government is not accountable because the media is filled with activists for statism and is intent to create a society of second handers through their published work.

Well, the news as usual was bad in USA Today—but that’s nothing new.  However, for me the good news came from my Sausage McMuffin with Egg—now that is a damn good sandwich—I never tire of them.  I could eat them like candy—and in American culture it is a great privilege to be able to purchase such a breakfast with a USA Today and read news around the world for a short half hour ritual before a new day.  The sad thing is that the news is not as good as the food—it never is.  As fattening, and unhealthy as many will claim the Sausage McMuffin with Egg to be—it is a whole lot healthier than expanding Medicaid in Ohio, or the borrowing of looted federal money with the sole intention of spreading Obamacare deep into American society where a few power-hungry idiots willing to save their political futures take the bait like headless mice from a trap set by progressives intent to end American culture.  The Sausage McMuffin with Egg is a whole lot better for America than politicians like Obama and Kasich—and their power grabs at the exploitation of the poor, and children, and women that they are so intent to utilize to advance their fun house distortions of fiscal reality with smoke and distorted mirrors that can only hide reality for so long.  USA Today is not interested in that reality—only in the ends which justify the means—and to understand that, one must know what the organization of Socialist International is all about—which the Gannett Company is fully on board with.  CLICK HERE TO REVIEW.

Those Loaded With Guns and Those Who Dig: Naming the second-handers

Since I was about 19 I have kept volumes and volumes of notes about my observations regarding life as it truly is.  I have done that for over 25 years now and the process has migrated from little notebooks that family members would buy my for Christmas and birthdays, to loose-leaf notebook paper in binders written upon front and back and down across the margins haphazardly in some situations to complete a thought without having to turn the paper over.  That process has evolved of course into what I share daily here at Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom.  Of course to outsiders—people who do not know me, they continue to be baffled as to why I do all this.  After the Lakota election many of the unionized workers happy to have been given a tax increase by the community sent me a barrage of comments letting me know that all my work over the last three years has been fruitless—since they won the money anyway. This is because of their small mindedness that they think this way, and points to a resolution which will be concluded at the climax of this article.  A written body of work such as what I publish here may only have a 1% chance of changing an election.  That falls within the margin of victory for a candidate like Mark Welsh and Cathy Stoker in West Chester, or the Lakota levy which was a few hundred votes short out of thousands going up against an energized group of levy addicts.  The number goes up to perhaps 5% if the media type is popular and well-received such as The National Enquirer, People Magazine, or some other populous enterprise.  On the night of the election, Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom saw 2000 hits that evening above the daily normal of 400 to 500.  The spike was because the normally placid intellectual thinkers wanted somebody to tell them how to vote—so they looked to my blog to help them make a decision.  In an election that had about 26,000 votes cast, my blog probably changed the vote of about 300 people, most of the rest of that 2000 were from the other side nervous about their results and wondering what I was saying.

My entire adult life I have yearned to observe, think, and to write these things down in the solitude of my own mind.  Most of the notes I made over the years repeat themselves over and over again—or they lack proper conclusions.  This is because I was working things out.  By the time I started this blog, I had most of the answers to everything in life—because I had spent a quarter century getting those answers.  My personal education could not come from orthodox sources but came from a mind on fire not looking for a way to douse the flames, but to throw more logs on to make it roar.  During my orthodox education, which was as extensive as anyone’s, I noticed and wrote about as a young twenty year old, that education institutions seemed more intent to put out the fire of my mind, than to feed it, so I rebelled against that notion with a fury.  Even back then while most people my age were focused on getting drunk and “partying” I was sitting late at night at Waffle Houses and Perkins restaurants with my notebooks open writing till four and five in the morning.

My Cliffhanger character from my novel The Symposium of Justice was autobiographical, just for the record.  The character I created for Tail of the Dragon was a version of that which had accepted a degree of submission in his life until he reached a breaking point.  Cliffhanger never reached a point like that—which many publishers and book review professionals have told me is “unrelateable” to the general public.  Cliffhanger is intellectually unreachable for most people, and I know that—I know why, how, and for how long and I’m OK with it—because it’s autobiographical.  I wrote Tail of the Dragon to show that I could come off my personal mountain and speak the language of everyone else, but even then, Fletcher Finnegan was beyond the reach of most.  Not because he wasn’t a compelling character full of motivation, but it’s what drives that motivation that begins the difficulty.

If over the last year you invited me for a drink and I went, I must really, really like you—and for the record one person asked me about 6 times and I did go twice—and they know who they are.   I struggle to find time to be with all the people who want some of my attention.  I simply can’t do it—I don’t have the time.  I reflected at my mother’s Thanksgiving Day meal that they only live about 2 miles from my home, yet I only saw them 3 times the entire duration of 2013.  The reason is not that I don’t care about them, but they are on a different set of tracks that don’t intersect with mine very often.  Typically, I read, write, and think for 19-20 hours per day, every day.  Thinking is my hobby, and is as important to me as breathing.  Climates where people are busy trying to forget are not conducive to the thinking I enjoy doing, so I turn down social invitations nearly 95% of the time.  Out of all the invites, I give in one or two times a year just to show people who I respect their friendships—but at home are my stacks and stacks of books, notes and a view of the woods that is the focus of much contemplation—and there’s no place else that I’d rather be.

One of my favorite all time movies is The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, and in that film Clint Eastwood says, “In this world there are two kinds of people my friend, those with loaded guns, and those who dig—you dig.”  There is a truth to that statement that extends to a logic bedded deep in our human hearts and minds—it permeates time and space through many cultural manifestations and made that movie not just a good one—but a great one.  But why, and how—it was a question that started me on this quest beginning at age 19.  Instead of learning to shoot like Clint Eastwood did in that film, the quest became an intellectual one leading to hours and hours of solitary confinement—hours of practicing bullwhips in my back yard putting out candles with a crack, and thinking about why some men have guns while others are always carrying shovels.  In that answer was the solution as to why communism will never work, why economies rise and fall, and why some people are smart while others are stupid.

My purpose for writing this blog is not for those who carry shovels and dig—the media types who do what their editors tell them to, or to the public education employees who have had their intellectual curiosity extinguished in exchange for a stolen pay check paid for by tax payers.  I don’t write it for the typical Entertainment Tonight viewer who is only concerned about gossip and nonsense.  I don’t even write it to win elections—although I often have my hopes and endorse candidates and ideals occasionally.  I share my notes with the general public now instead of scattered notes written down everywhere just to capture thoughts as I think them—because I am intellectually reloading the guns of those who have them—metaphorically speaking.  I know who reads here, and most of them are leaders in powerful places who shape policy.  Some of them are Supreme Court members—you know who you are, they are powerful national politicians, they are local politicians they are leaders of political activism, they run business, they run media and all of them are shackled by their social roles to express the things I do, which they also feel.  What they all share in common is that they tend to be leaders—not followers—they carry guns, not shovels.

Clint Eastwood’s line in that famous movie is another way of articulating Pirsig’s train theory—there are some people who are on the cutting edge, and some who are content to remain in the caboose.  CLICK HERE TO REVIEW.  But to say things another way—a more appropriate way is to say that some people are meant to be leaders and are others second-handers leading democracies to always fail as a stable form of government always slipping into an abyss of collectivism if allowed to evolve on their own.  My character of Cliffhanger from The Symposium of Justice is named as such because he is always on the cutting edge, he is at the front of Pirsig’s train.  He pulls society along—they feed off him and his strength.  The conflict occurs when they (society) wish to believe that they guide the train, which they do not.  They are only passengers—or otherwise “second-handers” the way Ayn Rand defined them in her 1943 novel The Fountainhead.  “Whether explicitly or otherwise, the independent man grasps the distinction between the metaphysical and the man-made.  Conformity to the metaphysically given, he understands, is essential to successful action; the man-made may be accepted only if and when it achieves or flows from such conformity.  This kind of individual fulfills the basic requirement of human survival: he knows how–by reference to what absolute—to form his ideas and choose his actions. 

“To the second-hander, by contrast, the man-made—whether rational or irrational, true or false, good or evil—becomes the equivalent of realty.  This kind of individual, having detached himself from the realm of existence, has no standard by which to judge others; he has no way to know whose ideas to follow, whose behavior to copy, whose favor to curry.  Such a person reduces himself to helplessness, the fundamental helplessness of having left his life to the mercy of blind chance.  The result is most people’s desperate need for an authority, religious or secular, who will take over their lives, make their value-judgments, and tell them what to do.  The independent man will refuse any such role, but the worst second-hander of all, the power luster is eager to accept it.  Thereafter, he destroys everyone, including himself.  In other words, people at the back of Pirsig’s train are second-handers and unfit to make leadership decisions because the point of decision-making is at the front of the train where the leaders reside.  And society does not have an abundance of leaders at the front to make decisions.  We do not produce enough of them—and this is a major problem.  The second-hander is the person who spends their lives digging under the threat of those with metaphorical guns.

Barack Obama is a second-hander because he is clearly in the back of the decision-making train and always has been.  His power comes second-hand, through lies, manipulation, coercion and political help.  By the time the train passes a spot of decision-making, it has passed a point where Obama could ever make a correct decision.  Lakota schools and the employees of the last tax increase are second-handers in that they believe that what they instruct in the back of the train can influence the direction of society.  But it is impossible because they are at the back well behind the point of decision-making and can only react to the fate of the train on the track wherever it may go.  Most of the media are second-handers because they build their lives around people like Barack Obama, or public schools like Lakota—so they lack any real authority to report how decisions should be made, they can only report what they observe as the train moves down the tracks unable to lead society in any proper direction.  No amount of study can change this nature—no doctorate degree, no level of government sanctioned authority can change these metaphysical laws, they are what they are.  When society holds elections in a democracy, the ballots are cast at the back of the train, not the front—the perception of the elections are shaped entirely by second-handers.  Leaders are not miraculously produced as a result—which is why people are nearly always disappointed by-election results, even if their candidate wins.

What I write here and share as my personal notes in blog form are intended for the type of people who wish to be at the front of the train, and that is typically who reads most often and diligently.  Decisions are made at this point, not in the democracy at the back where those with shovels “dig.”  Those with guns and not afraid to use them have to know where to shoot, and at what—so they must be at the front of the train where they can see.  Everyone else digs in the back letting others make decisions for their lives because they fear the responsibility to do it on their own.

I have never had any desire to be at the back of the train—never one day in my entire life.  I’ve went back there a few times just to see what all the fuss is about only to return to the front out of sheer disgust.  When people provide invites to socialize—those events are always in the back of the train and while there, I cannot see what’s coming down the tracks—and I don’t enjoy that position.  I like to be not just on the front of the train, but hanging over the edge of the front watching the moving tracks rolling by underneath.  I like to be at the furthest point forward that is humanly possible and it doesn’t come from conversations with second-handers.  I do not write these millions upon millions of words to get rich off of appealing to the masses—the second-handers.  The intent is to share my notes with the leaders-the people inclined to sit at the front and make decisions well before anyone else is aware that a decision needs to be made.  Like Clint Eastwood said about guns and digging—the proper way to explain the same metaphor is to state that there are two kinds of people, those who sit at the front of the train and are leaders, and those who simply ride that train, the second-handers.  In a society it takes both to make things work, but it is important to understand that democracy does not work—a society cannot survive if it is run by second-handers.  It must be run by leaders—and this is the point of my many words, notes and future articles.  Second-handers will call these words rants, they will call them “attention grabbers,” they will call them “politically threatening” but they will all be wrong.  They are simply revealing their motives for doing things second-handed, and cannot understand life at the front of the train.  Their opinions do not matter because by the time they make a decision the ability to change directions has already passed—so all their statements constitute noise and nothing more.  I am not concerned about their noise.  I am concerned with what’s coming down the tracks and conversing with those who crave the front of the train away from the second-handers at the back.

With that in mind, I think it is time to start talking more about what’s coming down the tracks instead of all the stupid decisions that weren’t made at important junctures because second-handers through democratic authority gained the ability to lead—to their own peril and many others.  In the future, this will be the direction taken at Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom.  We know now how we arrived at where we are.  We know who made the dumb decisions and why.  Now we have to distinguish ourselves from them and divide the train up properly into who has the guns and who has the shovels—or more philosophically proper—who has leadership and who are the second-handers.  It is time to let the second-handers know what they are and to shove them out-of-the-way so that we can right our train back on the correct track and get moving in the proper direction.  And that job requires an understanding of what’s coming—which is the summation of my twenty-five years of notes which has given me a map of where we need to go.  So it’s time to use it.  I do not care about the squawks of the second-handers, their protests, their opinions, their cries for help, or their desire for comfort.  Nothing they say will help—it’s just noise in the background as the train barrels down the tracks.  I don’t even care to sell them souvenirs on the journey because that requires interaction with them, and I can’t stand these days to do even that.  Leadership is all that matters and seeing what’s coming before we get to a point of being beyond where decisions no longer matter.   That is where all the notes, the reading, and writing are intended to go, and where my focus will reside.  If it makes the second-handers angry, so be it.  Instead of calling them all the names which is the result of their social position, like Marxists, socialists, progressives, communists, school teachers—etc, I think it’s time to let them know their true place on the train—and the proper name of their kind.  As Clint Eastwood said, there are those with guns and those who dig.  Rich Hoffman says, “there are those who are “cliffhanger’s” hanging over the front of the train on its perilous journey, and those who are second-handers who sit in the back and are victims to wherever the train goes.”  My effort goes to those at the front of the train—as those in the back are only capable of observing the world as it goes by.

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

 

Lakota Employees Seeking A $117.50 Per Month Pay Raise: The hidden intention of the 2013 Levy

Even some of my most bizarre claims written about here at Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom will prove over time and lack of emotional investment to be correct.  Truth is often stranger than any fiction, and the blackness of the hearts behind politics are more sinister than a conscious mind can often allow itself to comprehend.  And this has never been more true than the Lakota levy of 2013 where the claim of necessity has been the safety of students from unforeseen dangers, assistance to the parents by returning some busing privileges, and a maintenance of real estate values to the Lakota community.  The reality is much, much grimmer than that, and once it is understood and accepted reveals the true intention of the proposed tax increase, which can be seen in the following chart.  Lakota employees stand to make after the acceptance of the tax increase at least $117.50 more per month with the proposed raises lined up for a 2014 teacher’s contract with the LEA.  As wages in the private sector have hovered around stagnation, and the economy through government tampering has flat lined, government workers here in the form of Lakota teachers and administrators seek to defy market value with forced tax increases to do nothing but pad their own pockets with looted money—stolen through coercion and deceits.Slide 4

The coercion and deceits are the emotional pleas and out-right lies about the status of the Lakota finances and the cause of educational failure.  Lakota uses children as emotional hostages to move voters into seeing their point of view.  As government workers they are using the same strategy that was so evident during the government shutdown where even the Great Smoky Mountains was shut down to inconvenience visitors into voting for politicians who will continue throwing money into a bottomless pit of inefficiency, and unregulated spending.  Even when Blount County police offered to keep the park open by doing the job of the park rangers, it was rejected for the same reason that Lakota would never allow a person like me to step in and run Lakota from the teaching side, or the finance side the way it should be properly.  The goal is never to solve the problem in government, but only to create more if the terms are not meant.  In Lakota’s situation, they propose less pain to the community if they get a tax increase, but the only thing that will change is that the employees will get a raise when their current wages are already too high and most of their positions are completely unneeded.  Most of the assistant positions at Lakota could be eliminated completely without having any impact on education.  Many jobs at the administrative level were created by government for the benefit of government.  Most of the employees at Lakota outside of direct supervision spend most of their day gossiping to one another and playing on the internet.  They don’t do much, yet they expect to get a raise in pay when they already average over 30% more in compensation than the average Lakota tax payer.

The Lakota levy is about nothing but money and they are more than willing to use the children of the community as strategic bargaining chips of pure extortion to protect themselves from more economic bad times ahead.  2014 will also bring additional costs to the average tax payer of Lakota through the Obamacare impact that will drive up insurance premiums from one of the largest socialist programs ever attempted against the American people with the most intrusive wealth redistribution scam ever conducted.  The exact cost of that intrusion will not be known until insurance companies figure out how much they are allowed to drive up their costs now that they are even more of an oligopoly than they were before, as the federal government has just guaranteed their existence and profitability.  Just for being born, every living, breathing citizen is now required to purchase the product of health insurance as choice has been removed.  (No wonder insurance companies supported Obama on this matter)  It is an arrangement by the federal government for the good of itself.  Similarly, Lakota is doing the same thing.  Every human being born is required by the federal government to get an education approved by the state.  For most children that means the public school that dominates the politics of their local community.  No matter how good the school is, or bad, there isn’t any choice in the matter.  If school is not attended, and taxes paid to it, coercion will be used to either jail the perpetrators, or seize the property for lack of payment.  The threat of coercion keeps everyone paying money through taxes even when they know it’s fundamentally wrong.  Lakota knows this, so they can get by with their exploitation of their students and the parents because government has given them a monopoly over the education process, so performance is never the issue.  Lakota is free to hire unneeded staff to “create jobs, or go on strike through their education union to drive up their wage rates.  But make no mistake about it, the Lakota levy is about nothing other than giving the employees at Lakota an average pay raise of $117.50 per month.

Most every tax payer in Lakota during 2014 will pay a lot more in either taxes or health insurance premiums—likely both.  Most families could easily be paying more than $150 per month in 2014 for the same level of insurance as they had in 2013 just because of the wealth redistribution plan enacted by the government against them and on top of that, Social Security is set to increase as well.  Then there is the Lakota levy where yet another inefficient government blob of incestuous public employees wish to raise taxes on the same tax base that is already hurting—and the only reason they are doing it is because the employees at Lakota want a pay raise, when most of the tax payers contributing to the school have no prospect of any kind of raise in the foreseeable future.  Some of them will likely lose their jobs once Obamacare kicks in.   Employers will not be able to afford carrying them any longer due to the cost increases.  But Lakota doesn’t care because whenever they get into trouble they can afford to carry all their employees even when declining enrollment states they should have a massive layoff.  Lakota can do this because the federal government has given them coercive power over property owners due to a monopoly status.  When Lakota needs more money they just propose a tax increase and promise that the children of the tax payers will not be harmed if the money is paid.

Meanwhile the umbrella of the federal government through now health care, through Social Security, and especially education hits the same tax payers year after year with cost increases where they nickel and dime every productive citizen until there isn’t anything left—and they don’t care whether or not the system is sustainable or not.  They are government, and they only want what they want and don’t care about the expense.  Lakota is a government entity—nothing more or less.  And they want their minimum pay raises of $117.50 per month and they could care less what it does to the rest of their community.  For that reason alone, every person of right mind should VOTE NO on the Lakota levy, and they should not feel ashamed in any way.  Saying NO is the only measure of fiscal restraint that there is against such a system that is parasitic in nature, and destructive in every way conceivable extending well beyond the wildest conspiracy theory.  Saying NO is a responsibility dedicated to good judgment in the face of an encroaching evil known as the federal government which looks to feed off the innocent for the benefit of its own growth and social imposition.

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

Give yourself the gift of ADVENTURE.  CLICK HERE!  

The 45 Planks Of Communism: Understanding 8 – 14, supporting the United Nations

To understand the forces that have shaped our modern world, and taken America to the precipice of indecision with the recent “government shutdown” I am doing a series here at Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom that outlines the 45 Planks of Communism that were strategically established in the 1958 book, The Naked Communist.  CLICK HERE TO SEE ALL 45 PLANKS. CLICK HERE TO PICK UP AT THE END OF THE LAST ARTICLE.  Before getting into the heart of the communist strategy that was then, as it is today, to take over the world by enticing the mobs of mankind to move collectively into watered down common goals instead of the relative chaos of individual liberty, we will study Planks 8 – 14 because they all deal with the same thing—Soviet Russia’s deep concern of being able to advance their communist cause globally.

For many readers here, they vaguely remember how things were during the Cold War.  Young people born at the start of the 1990’s have no memory of the Cold War and have since had the event washed away from the collective conscience of America through the public education system, which will be covered extensively during a later article.   But the U.S.S.R was fully intent to take over the world replacing all political ideologies with communism.  It was, and still is their undisputed goal.  Global communists in Planks 8 – 14 sought to infiltrate the American created United Nations as a way to put the world at their feet with counter intelligence activity that would enable them to accomplish their global goals.  Read those intentions for yourself below.

8. Set up East and West Germany as separate states in spite of Khrushchev’s promise in 1955 to settle the German question by free elections under supervision of the U.N.

9. Prolong the conferences to ban atomic tests because the United States has agreed to suspend tests as long as negotiations are in progress.

10. Allow all Soviet satellites individual representation in the U.N.

11. Promote the U.N. as the only hope for mankind. If its charter is rewritten, demand that it be set up as a one-world government with its own independent armed forces. (Some Communist leaders believe the world can be taken over as easily by the U.N. as by Moscow. Sometimes these two centers compete with each other as they are now doing in the Congo.)

12. Resist any attempt to outlaw the Communist Party.

13. Do away with all loyalty oaths.

14. Continue giving Russia access to the U.S. Patent Office.

Obviously today, the intentions are more of a reality.  The United Nations is on the door step to the entire world and in America through Agenda 21 is infiltrating the culture of The United States with a communist philosophy that has virtually taken over every zoning board in every American city so quietly that many of the participants don’t even know why or how they came to think the way they do about things.  If you need a review of what Agenda 21 is, CLICK HERE.  Communists were aware that they were a threat to individual freedom throughout the world and they needed a way to stay relevant.  They had to find a way to keep from becoming outlawed in free countries, while still growing as a world-wide influence—so they penetrated the United Nations so to infect the world with their social, and economic philosophies.  The result has been the world we currently are living in; economies stagnant—living off the past that are slowly dying.  In Russia individual motivation had already died, which is why they needed access to the U.S. Patent office.     The people of Russia had given up on any kind of personal ambition and weren’t inventing anything.  The gross incompetence of any communist system is terribly evident comparing the time of 1917 where communism saturated Russia with a crippling political mentality while radio, film, manufacturing, television broadcasting, and sky scraper industries popped up in America within just a few years under capitalism.  Communism had to stop the power of capitalism and to do so they had to loot off the ideas created in America so their country could keep up economically in some fashion while they chipped away from within the United Nations the sovereignty of America.

The 45 Planks of Communism was a military maneuver not made so much by nations against each other as is typically the case during modern warfare, but philosophies.  In this case communism started by Karl Marx 60 years prior to the 1917 Russian Revolution slowly penetrated Russian culture over many years until enough people were ready to overthrow the bourgeoisie class.  The same period of time evolved from the Russian Revolution to the fall of the Berlin Wall where the economic system of communism failed, and that wall dividing West and East Berlin was finally torn down.  As the world celebrated the fall of communism, and the break-up of the Soviet Empire communism had penetrated The United Nations and spread violently under the changed name of “progressivism.”

The attack in America was underway.  Fiscal collapse has always been the goal of communists using The United Nations to force America to spread itself too thin all over the world while halting American business with excessive regulations.  The so-called Lean Manufacturing methods that were made so popular in the Asian theater were popularized by The United Nations as a way to incorporate the entire world into a shared system that broke down the resistance to communism.  Micro management disguised as Lean Manufacturing was the way that communism has halted the growth of American business using so-called efficiency studies to introduce bureaucratic red tape that would halt innovation in corporations focusing all work places into embracing communist views of shared input.  Even America’s largest companies have found and accepted that government regulation, and business compliance into lean manufacturing methods promoted by the United Nations has crippled their internal innovations and efficiency of their work forces.  Mostly today, America lives off its past innovations as new concepts are not introduced as individual motivation has been removed in service to the concept of a collective whole—the overall health of the organization.  This concept of shared sacrifice in American business is a spill-over from communist propaganda manipulated through The United Nations to stop capitalism.  CLICK HERE FOR A SAMPLE.

Lean Manufacturing for American companies was the only way they could counter the terrorist tendencies of communist labor unions with a legitimate proposal of focusing on efficiency instead of the individuals that made up the unions.  However, the tactic was employed on both ends by communists who infiltrated The United Nations and advanced both proposals—which forced collectivism onto entrepreneurial activities.  Without the United Nations, it is highly likely that unions would have fizzled out in America well before the 1980’s and that business innovation would still be the standard instead of the exception.

The strategies employed by communists aimed to bring mass societies into the understanding of collectivism by destroying individual effort and focusing on collective causes.  Everywhere this is done, the strategy began in these 45 planks of communism, and was embarked on a scale much larger than anyone realized at the time, and cannot simply be comprehended otherwise.  But when it is understood that communism is behind the push for a stronger United Nations, and behind even Lean Manufacturing introduced to America through United Nations “globalism” outreach then the strategies of communism are easy to see.  The devious depths of their efforts where nothing but the complete destruction of individual effort in favor of collective causes, and since that mentality could not compete directly with capitalism, communists needed the American funded United Nations to attack capitalism in an indirect way, instead of a full-fledged frontal assault.

To read much more on this issue and how Lean Manufacturing was driven into popularity through post World War II global concerns READ THIS.  See how it works………………….

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

Give yourself the gift of ADVENTURE.  CLICK HERE!  

The HWK-290: Preparing for war, gaming way into the night, and the start of revolutions

I have a running fantasy that someday the government will show up on my doorstep with tyrannical intentions and shred off the pretext of decency for open warfare.  At that time I will be free to do what I do best and have loved since my feet could carry me upward, and that is to fight—fight for independence, fight for respect, fight for the human race—fight for anything—but fight.  Now when I say fight, I don’t mean “serving” for some greater cause made up by a statist government.  I mean fighting where my strategy and effort destroy an opponent no matter how great the numbers or odds of victory, the worse, the more attractive.  So the fantasy of a large statist government having the audacity to believe that they will win my submission with force is an attractive one to me.

I do not make a good soldier material, or a sports player who simply does what somebody else dictates.  That is not the kind of fighting that I’m good at.  In sports I never wanted to be a player, only the coach or the owner of a franchise, never some meat head player who was simply a field soldier.  In the military, I never wanted to be a soldier, only a commander.  But the way the human race is set up, they expect people to run through some kind of social initiation period where they start on the bottom and work their way up.  However, by the time that such people find themselves in charge, they have been beaten down into submission and lose the ability to “think” uniquely.  So I avoid all structured war games like the plague, and always have.  When I play at war whether it is politics, business, or physical submission of one group over another, I require being in charge otherwise I’m just not interested.  If people shut up and listen, they find that they benefit greatly by doing what I tell them.  I don’t get out of such arrangements anything from the participates—any level of camaraderie, any back slapping from social respect—any feeling of “fitting in” to the structure of human existence.  I simply enjoy winning in games of conflict.

One of the greatest aspects of being human is that we are thinking creatures and find many ways to entertain ourselves.  Of the many things invented to entertain the human race, war games for me have always been the thing that I most enjoy.  When I was a kid I ran into tabletop war gaming from a military history class I took where famous Revolutionary War battles could be re-enacted.  As an adult my wife introduced me to similar games such as the Star Wars: Assault on Hoth which we played nearly every night during the first couple years of our marriage.  When I started having kids I played a lot of video games with them—all of which were about war, fighting, and combat.  I never approached the games as an escape from reality, but as the only way I could do the types of things I enjoyed doing without destroying the fabric of the world around me.  Then of course there was the Wiz Kids Pirate Constructible Strategy Game that I have discussed in great detail here before, which my family spent a good five solid years playing together.

As fate would have it, one of my son-in-laws is a serious table top gamer.  He plays games I never had the patience for like Magic the Gathering relentlessly and will play any board game that has ever been invented.  He simply loves games.  He along with my nephews over the past summer introduced me to the Dungeons and Dragons like game, Hero Quest which I enjoyed greatly.   But I have since discovered something much, much cooler—Star Wars X-Wing Miniatures by Fantasy Flight Games.   This game has all the things I enjoy and have only found possible since LucasArts produced the old video game X-Wing, which was a combat flight simulator that I often spent entire nights playing.  As video games became better and moved online, Star Wars: Galaxies had Jump to Hyperspace, which was the latest evolution of the old X-Wing game, but it has since left the scene since Star Wars: The Old Republic arrived.  There was a void in my heart that was there in the years between the exit of Jump to Hyperspace and the creation of Star Wars: X-Wing Miniatures that wasn’t filled by anything else.  Now that I have discovered X-Wing Miniatures, it has been like revisiting my favorite games of the past with new updated spins which should be expected with evolution, and I have been soaking up.  I have enjoyed myself more since the discovery of X-Wing Miniatures than I can remember consistently in decades.  I have been buying up ships for the game like crazy and getting very serious about it.

Both of my son-in-laws have also been getting into the game, so over the weekend we went to Yattaquest in Mt. Healthy to purchase a mat for our X-Wing Miniatures game as the playing surface is supposed to be a 3’X3’ area and we wanted something nice.  So we went to Yattaquest and saw that the place was absolutely rocking with activity as they had a game night where the back room was filled with players.  I was stunned how many other people were playing these games for the same reasons that I do, and I was shocked by how many different games were on the shelf at Yattaquest.  There was an entire section for Warhammer—it was simply amazing.

  I picked up my game mat and the last two ships they had for X-Wing Miniatures, a couple of A-Wings.

http://www.yottaquest.com/

Then all my kids along with my wife went to Sci-Fi Cincinnati over in Northgate Mall and found two Y-Wing Fighters and a Tie Fighter Advanced, which are both extremely rare.  I bought them up knowing that they were selling for over $50 dollars a piece on the internet because of their rarity.  I felt I had just uncovered a gold nugget—a rare treasure and it made my entire weekend.

http://www.sci-fi-city.com/cincinnati.htm

We arrived home late after the mall had closed and began playing X-Wing as a family with the game ending at around 3 AM.  We then played most of the next day and I can report that it is some of the most fun I have had in years.  It has many of the elements that I personally enjoy more than anything, it’s about miniature detail models, strategy, technology, large concepts, and it has a creativity level that is limited only by the player—which is very attractive to me. After our very successful weekend of playing X-Wing Miniatures, I treated myself to a rare privilege; I pre-ordered a ship that I am hungry to get as a compliment to my Millennium Falcon builds, the new HWK-290.   In a 100-point game, the HWK-290 will provide for me the perfect support for my aggressive style of game play and I am very happy to see it come available as it does not technically ship to the general public until September 11th.  Fantasy Flight Games pre-released HWK-290s during Gen Con in Indianapolis, but until then and since nobody has put their hands on them.

The ship is a sentimental favorite for me; it’s from the video game called Dark Forces which my daughters used to play with me.  So it meant more than just a game piece for X-Wing Miniatures to make the purchase, I am just ecstatic that it will be coming to me.  It is a unique item that I can’t wait to put my hands on, and it feels good to have something which drums up so much happiness.  Yes, there are a lot of very bad things going on in the world, and I have written about many of them here at Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom.  But the new game X-Wing Miniatures has given me new juice where few things prior provided.  I simply love the game for what it does.  But more than anything it is allowing me to build a squad that has the Millennium Falcon as a tactical option with the HWK-290.

I don’t socialize much, but it was nice to see so many people with similar interests at Yattaquest.  The place was huge and very busy as business was good.  I’m obviously not alone in my love of combat because most of those games were themed around conflict resolution.  As I stood in the center of Yattaquest I had the sense that if the first American Revolution started in pubs around New England, then the second and third will be in places like Yattaquest.  The game players were simply enjoying some escapist fun while not compromising their minds in the process.  Those people are not compliant statists of the type who built the trouble of LBJ’s Great Society.  They are rebels, commanders, and tacticians that nobody else takes serious as they have fallen through the cracks of the establishment only to become the next sleeping giants awakened during the next great crises.  But never before that I can recall did so many people flock to games like Warhammer, Magic the Gathering, and X-Wing Miniatures as they do now.  I attempted with all my resources to find Y-Wing fighters but could not, because they were sold out everywhere I looked, even on Ebay and other online outlets.  I found them by chance at Sci-Fi Cincinnati and quickly bought them up.  They weren’t sold out because the company didn’t make enough of them—quite the contrary—they were sold out because the demand is that high.  I find that extremely encouraging.

I might have to wait for my fantasy of a statist government gone mad showing up on my door step to declare war against me and my family.  Obama can’t even make a decision against Syria, so I’m not worried about progressives making a visible move against the American people who would cost them terribly—because such things at least require courage, which they lack.  But until then, I love that there are games like X-Wing Miniatures that I can play with my family late into the night and all the next day.  War gaming is a good substitute for the real thing and I love being a member of the human race because it invents such things.  But one thing that is a running theme among these gamers is that submission is not an option.  They enjoy war gaming because players contemplate resistance and wish to play out scenarios that bring about such results.  The exchange is peaceful so long as participants have an outlet.  But heaven forbid that places like Yattaquest didn’t exist.  These are not the games of our grandparents, these are the direct response to large-scale statism, and the minds drawn to them are not compliant.

I’ve bought cars, homes, taken exotic vacations and raised families.  I’ve been successful, won many real battles and have enjoyed my life immensely in many capacities.  But let me just state that when I purchased the HWK-290 for $14.95 a chill of delight went up my spine that I can’t get from anything else in this world…………….and the reason is beyond the comprehension of the average statist politician.  Only people who play such games understand.

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

Give yourself the gift of ADVENTURE.  CLICK HERE!  

“We Are Lakota” Campaign Exploits Children: Parents demand tax increases to shrug their responsiblity

Taylor Mirfendereski from Channel 9 in Cincinnati did a nice article about the upcoming Lakota Levy of 2013 as the new campaign launched.  She interviewed members of both sides of the tax increase argument which is highlighted below.  Lakota’s new campaign this time is the marketing slogan “We are Lakota” and the angle they are playing is obvious, the inclusion of “community” spirit to encourage voters to feel they are part of the team by voting for the levy.  Again the common mistake the pro levy crowd makes is they only react to the causes of tax increases.  They never ask why conditions are the way they are, they simply respond with a desire to raise taxes.  One of the carrots Lakota has dangled out in front of parents is the promise of more busing to earn votes back from people like the women mention below.

Kim Reber is a mother of three daughters and is a levy supporter. Reber lives within two miles of the school district and has to transport her children to school each day.

She said the success of the levy is critical for convenience reasons and for the success of her children’s education.

“A lot of things that kids need to develop and to grow are being taken away gradually and kind of falling apart. Lakota is known for being excellent and without funding, they cannot maintain that excellence,” Reber said.

She said the stakes are so high for her family, she’s even considered moving if the levy doesn’t pass.

“When I came here, I came here because of the schools. I’m not seeing that the schools can maintain their excellence given the lack of support from the residents,” said Reber.

Some residents say they will never support a Lakota school tax hike because they don’t think enough money is going directly to the students.

Graeme George, an 80-year-old Liberty Township resident, is a staunch opponent of school tax levies.

“We can’t influence the cost and benefits and make improvements because the unions are too much in control. We can’t work with the teachers and the school board and the public because the unions come in,” he said.

George is a member of the anti-levy group, No Lakota, which says it has plans to actively campaign for the levy’s failure once more.

Bob Hutsenpillar, a Lakota district resident and No Lakota member, said he will also vote against the levy because of  “wasteful spending” towards teacher salaries.

“What they are asking for to give to students is a very small percentage of the levy,” Hutsenpillar said.

But Willms said taxpayer contributions to teaching salaries are essential for the successful operation of any school.

“We have 900-plus teachers. You have to understand what schools do. They have teachers who teach kids. It’s a service industry, so of course a bulk of your budget would have to go towards your employee,” she said.

The actual article from Taylor Mirfendereski can be seen at the link below complete with pictures:

http://www.wcpo.com/news/education/lakota-school-district-pushes-for-levy-after-three-time-failure

What Willms misses in her statement from above is the salary level amount, not just the wages.  Most teachers are not worth $60,000 a year.  They may be worth $45K per year, or even $50K, but they are not worth an average salary north of $63K per year, which is what the teachers at Lakota average through their collective bargaining agreement.  When 900-plus teachers make over 60K per year it wrecks the budget at Lakota, from a tax rate that is already 33 mills.

People like Kim Reber moved to a nice community like Lakota for the schools, but that is not all the community has to offer.  Reber doesn’t ask the question “why are the teachers making over $60K per year, she simply wants a free education for her children and assumes that the cost of her home was all the payment she had to contribute to the task.  Parents like her assume that “WE” means everyone, that I, Graeme George, Bob Hutsenpillar and other NO voters are responsible for raising Kim’s children.  This is the same mindset of Hillary Clinton’s ridiculous notion of “it takes a village” mentality.  No, it doesn’t.  It takes a mom and a dad caring for their own family, and not asking a community to cover higher taxes just to throw money at a teacher’s union that is already over paid. 

The Lakota Levy is supported by the kind of people who do not want to take responsibility for their own children—but rather want Hillary Clinton’s “We Are Lakota” type of message insinuating that we are all in this together—the raising of children.  The presumption that children are the only aspect of a community is dangerous, and will lead to short lived prosperity when those children grow up and move away never to return because taxes prevent them from moving back to Lakota to raise their own families.  The levy supporters at Lakota are again short-sighted, selfish, and lack fiscal understanding.  They are happy to parade around with signs on a Saturday afternoon pulling on people’s heart strings hoping to win votes by exploiting their own children so to take the responsibility away from their own parenting, instead of asking the hard question of……………why.

The teachers at Lakota make too much money for doing too little, and that is the reason for a levy request, and the reason behind the extorted children. Parents looking for freebies, and radicalism exhibited by a school that wishes to make itself the center of a community that has a lot more going for it than just football games on Friday night are the type of people supporting higher taxes through a levy vote.  The Lakota Levy of 2013 is all about selfishness on the part of the school and its employees, and the amount of deceit and scandal they are willing to exploit in order to get their way. 

The lowest part of the whole ordeal is seeing parents stick their children out in public carrying signs such as can be seen in Mirfendereski’s article.  The parents should be ashamed of themselves.  I can’t imagine telling a child they are required to stand with a pro tax sign to cover for the lack of effort by the parents who are hoping to save the cost of transporting their children to school, or even the extra cost of private instruction, with a collective tax increase.  If parents really want their children to have a good education, why aren’t they willing to pay for it?  Why do they expect the other property owners of Lakota to care for their children?  We are not Lakota.  They are, and they simply want a hand out for something that is their unmanaged problem to cover an effort they are too lazy, or cheap to handle themselves.

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

Give yourself the gift of ADVENTURE.  CLICK HERE!  

Fast Food Workers Are Not Worth Top Wages: When I eliminated four line positions by myself

A few years ago I had to work a second job because of a tax bill that came in the mail from the IRS.  The reason the IRS is such a terrifying organization is that if you get in the cross-hairs of them it will cost either in defense or compliance.  In my case it was compliance.  I had worked hard the previous year and some of the work wasn’t easily calculated and the IRS disputed that I owed them more.  Defending my amount would have cost more to take to court so I had to pay, and they knew that was my only real option.  So I elected to work a second job to pay my bill rather than rob the money from our family’s normal income.  Every morning at 4 AM I got up and rode a bicycle from Mason to Lebanon to report for work at 5 AM at my primary employer.  At 3 PM I got off that job and rushed up the road to the Kings Island exit to work at a popular fast food establishment there by 4 PM.  My job was to work as the grill cook, and within a few short months I became known as the fastest grill man from Michigan to Florida and my exploits drew the attention of corporate headquarters.  Fast food executives paid personal visits to me to figure out how I was able to work so fast.  I worked every night the dinner rush and left at 8 PM to ride my bicycle home arriving around 9 PM.  Finally after a long hard day I’d go to bed to begin the day again the next morning.  In addition to that schedule I worked at the fast-food restaurant on Saturday nights as well covering the lunch and dinner rush from 10 AM to 7 PM as Kings Island provided a lot of business.

It took me two years to pay off my tax debt in this fashion but I eventually did without it sucking the money from our primary income.  My wife did not work and I did not want her to.  She was homeschooling our children for a bit of time during this period and she needed to be free to care for them.  Even when they did attend Mason public schools, my wife drove them every day so that they wouldn’t have to ride the school bus with all the vile filth that goes on during bus rides.  So my wife working simply wasn’t an option.  During the day she also was a teacher’s assistant in my daughters classrooms until the relationship with the school went south when we would not allow our 4th grade children to attend a sex education class that consisted of teaching them how to put condoms on a fake penis.  We declined and from that point the administrators put an “X” on my wife’s back, so we pulled our children out of the school for their own protection, and proper instruction.  Meanwhile, I rode my bike to my jobs and kept the money coming in.  My exploits during this period of time were described in my novel, The Symposium of Justice.

I was so good as a grill cook that the restaurant management agreed to some of my unusual working mandates.  I did not participate in any customer interaction; I did not take orders from the front register or talk to anybody on the drive thru.  I could make such demands because I was the best at my job that there was.  Nobody came close to my speed.  (REVIEW MY BULLWHIP FAST DRAW).  I personally eliminated four line positions at this restaurant.  Normally there would be a grill worker for the front grill, a grill worker for the drive thru grill, a fry person and a chicken runner for the deep fryer in the back.  The restaurant I worked at was busier than most because of the Kings Island traffic, so corporate was very perplexed as to how I managed to be so quick and efficient all by myself.  I of course saved this restaurant a lot of money in labor hours.

I explained to them that I could read what a person would order by way of food by the look on their faces when they stepped into the dining room.  I had their food already cooking before they stepped up to place their order.  And on the drive thru I would watch the cars pull into the lot headed for the speaker and determine what they were going to order based on the way the driver looked, how many people were in the car, the condition of the car, and various other factors.  By the time the sandwich maker called the order I had the meat prepared and perfectly cooked ready to hit their prep.  The ability was physical of course.  I have always been very fast at everything I do.  But in this case it was more psychological than physical.  This left the corporate executives baffled as to how they could train other stores to have grill cooks who did the same thing.

They offered me a .50 cent raise for my efforts which I gladly accepted bring my total to $7.50 in 1997 money.  It wasn’t much then and it isn’t much now, but it was I thought a fair wage for the work I was doing.  My rule against the customers was that I knew that some government workers came to Kings Island often and I didn’t want to speak to them.  They had put me in the position of having to work a second job and be away from my family, so I didn’t want to be nice to them, or even acknowledge their existence.  I could always tell those types upon site, so I worked it out so that all I’d have to do was prepare the food, I would not have to give the people who put me in that situation the privilege of serving them directly.

I of course became the restaurant psychologist and the young people often confided in me their problems seeking my help, which I gave them.  The managers often had wrecked lives due to all the crazy hours they worked so I helped them too; by solving many of their personal problems.  But my rule about dealing with the customers was firm.  On one such occasion a pretentious Mason school teacher who weighed in at least three hundred pounds came to the front register while the 16-year-old girl manning that station was using the restroom.  The teacher demanded service and I was the closest one to her.  I instructed her to sit tight until someone came to take her order but she ignored me and continued anyway.  Needless to say her order fell on deaf ears.  I continued doing my work ignoring her.  When the girl came back, the Mason teacher was standing their refusing to repeat herself expecting me to tell the girl what the order was, which of course I didn’t provide.  Rather than repeat her order to the cashier the teacher complained about me to corporate headquarters thinking she would get me fired for disrespecting her.  She called from the dining room making a huge fuss in front of the other customers and demanding our own management to remove me from the line.  The lead manager told her that we were in the middle of lunch rush and that they couldn’t afford to remove me from the line.    The teacher proclaimed that nobody was “irreplaceable!”  Corporate took my side on the issue and the frustrated teacher took her business elsewhere.  She was back a week later, but this time didn’t look at me.  She simply placed her order and I had her meat ready for her.  I knew exactly what she was going to order, and it was a lot of food.

With all that said, the recent union attempt to inject themselves into the fast food restaurant business is a vile attempt at communism.  Fast food workers are not worth $15 an hour.  I was the best of my kind, and I wouldn’t have thought of asking such a fee for a job that was worth more to me for its flexibility than the wage I earned.  I enjoyed being able to come in and dominate a position so that I could dictate my terms based purely on performance.  While it’s true I could have made more money quicker if I were willing to “compromise” the fact was that I wasn’t, and fast food gave me the opportunity to work such a job, get the government off my back, while not having to lower myself to people like that 300 pound Mason teacher.  People who knew me then felt sorry for me, because I rode my bicycle to work every day, worked long hard hours, and had to wear a fast food uniform well into adulthood even though I was making good money and showing great talent at my regular job.  My wife and I could have just used the public school like a baby sitting service like everyone else did, she could have worked, we could have had two cars and life could have been easier if we just played along.  But we chose to do only what we had to in order to appease our government obligations.  Making a lot of extra money would have just been consumed in further taxes and was not a smart strategic choice.  Fast food gave me the perfect opportunity to dig out of that tax liability without making it worse, and without lowering myself to making plea deals with the IRS, or using expensive lawyers to just feed the monster even more.  And it also allowed me to take care of the problem so that my wife was always around my little girls, shielding them from the evils of the world that were being placed upon them by a statist government gone mad wanting to teach them to put on a condom in the fourth grade.  Little girls who had both parents working late staying in an empty house from the time they get home from school till their parents arrive between 5 and 6 PM have lots of opportunities to get into trouble with boys in their neighborhoods, but since my wife was always home, my girls didn’t have that problem. They didn’t need to learn how to put on a condom when that was furthest thing on their minds than anything at the time.

The protests from restaurant workers demanding a “living wage” for their work in fast food are not worth more than $7 to $8 dollars an hour, I don’t care who they are.  Fast food work is entry-level work designed to fill the social needs for cheap food on the go.  Nobody should work in fast food as a career choice unless they want to go into management.  There is no such thing as a “living wage.”  But there is such a thing as “value,” and restaurant workers are only worth so much.  The fast food restaurants of America have one obligation, to provide a good quality product cheaply.  If I could have taught corporate headquarters my skills at working a grill, I would have.  Unfortunately for them, I cannot be duplicated, and no machine can do what I could do—not even the perverted imbeciles who work at the NSA and supposedly have supercomputers that cross-reference everything we do in our lives.  They can’t calculate human behavior as well as I can.  Even so, the work I did was not worth more than $8 dollars an hour and I would never have considered asking for more.  I used the job to clear my tax debt and a little bit more, and then saved up money to move out of Mason and back to my childhood home of Liberty Twp.  I stayed on at the fast-food restaurant working to make extra money for some time after so to get out in front of our financial condition.  $8 dollars an hour becomes quite a lot of money when you don’t drive a car and your wife is at home teaching your children.  The household expenses go down rapidly when you are not part of the system.  And a good bit of savings can be generated while working fast food.

A “living wage” as the communist labor unions advocate is attempting to do the same thing they’ve done to the teaching profession and virtually every endeavor that they are a part of.  They set artificially high values for their labor that is built purely on monopoly power.  In fast-food, they know they cannot obtain that monopoly unless they get all the workers in that industry to buy in to their scheme.  Fortunately for America, that plan will fail.  If twenty fast food workers decide to strike from a local McDonald’s, there are always people like me who will step in and take the money that is left in the void, and can do four jobs all by myself.  It would make me happy to do it just to keep prices low on the hamburgers we buy.  There is no shame in it, but only advantage, for what I’m talking about are the benefits of capitalism—a concept that labor unions do not understand, and despise with every cell in their bodies.

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

Give yourself the gift of ADVENTURE.  CLICK HERE!