Tag: Labor Unions

Government Schools are All About the Employees: The kids are used as a means to expand easy jobs and administrative nonsense

Everyone wants to know what’s going on with Lakota schools and why there has not been any mainstream news regarding the very serious allegation against the public school administration. Given the nature of the offense, as indicated in the official police report from the Butler County Sheriff’s Department, many were expecting at least an arrest or a leave of absence. But there has been nothing but an acknowledgment of documents, one from the police indicating that on August 8th, 2022, the complainant responded to the Butler County Sheriff’s Office to report that she had received and compiled information from a third party of potential criminal wrongdoing by the suspect regarding juveniles. Then there is a short email from the president of the Lakota School Board speaking on behalf of the entire Board, saying, ” Ms. (former candidate for Lakota school board), The Board has reviewed your email and attachments. The safety and security of the district’s students is the Board’s highest priority. As noted in your email, this issue has already been escalated to law enforcement and is now in the capable hands of the Butler County Sheriff’s Office. When the Sheriff’s Office concludes its investigation, the Board will review its findings and determine if any further action is warranted. On behalf of the Board. ”  I thought all that pretty interesting, especially after the press conference Sheriff Jones held recently stating that he was investigating wrongdoing in the direction of Ohio Representative Thomas Hall, because years ago, when he was a trustee for Madison Township, there were questions as to whether or not he recused himself on Fire Department matters since his father was the Fire Chief. As discussed before, Thomas sought legal advice on when to recuse himself and when not to, so he was clean. But, with a Sheriff talking tough like that, you would think that a Lakota school administrator with an ex-wife putting in writing some really charged content would inspire more action on behalf of the “safety” of all. But after a month of tranquil activity on the matter from the administrative perspective, there hasn’t been anything to satisfy people’s fears.

I was wondering myself, knowing all the characters involved. When I first saw the material, I could have published it and beat the rest of the media to a really salacious story. But I was more concerned about the criminal side of the story and wanted to know how much some of the people in charge cared about what was happening in the school. Unfortunately, we have our answer, and it’s one I thought we would have from the beginning. Over the years, I have witnessed too many of these stories to think anything else. But I thought it was worth a try. We trusted the system and hoped for a reasonable outcome. With a case like this, it would be expected to have at least a note from the Board to the parents, much like they have on other things in the past. I remember when someone left a threatening note in a bathroom during a levy campaign, and a lot of drama was made about it. Lakota always seems to send home notes to the parents, letting them know when something is wrong and that the administration is all over the issue so they won’t have to worry. But on this issue, they have been oddly silent. They might say that it’s purely political, the entire escapade. But then again, what hasn’t been political? The moment that new school board member Darbi Boddy was voted in as a new school board member, many board members and the administration have been trying to remove her in any technical way they could, using every excuse possible to make a media story out of her, to put pressure on her to resign. So why wouldn’t there be political opposition flowing in the opposite direction? They should expect it; they created that atmosphere. 

The truth is that all public schools, Lakota being just one of them, are all about filling the needs of the employees. They could care less about the kids involved. This is the case today, and it has been the case over the many decades that I have been involved in these public school issues. Government schools like Lakota use children as a playground for the adults, making these schools some of the largest employers in the region. Yet they expect to never get in trouble for bad behavior. If what was happening at Lakota were happening at any large corporation, there would be, at a bare minimum, paid administrative leave while everyone sorted out the matter. There would be press conferences updating the taxpayers on what was being done to investigate the matter and assuring the public that good people were doing good work. I wanted to think differently of Lakota, knowing some people the way I do. I really didn’t think they would be willing to put up with bad behavior when they saw it and knew about it. Even if it was just the remnants of a bad marriage, when a personal life starts to impact the public life of someone, that is a factor in work performance that can be very negative. But there was just a case the other night where a person was caught regionally just downloading child porn, and the police were all over them with arrests and significant news coverage. Why, with this case, did everyone suddenly want to show a benefit of the doubt toward the evidence presented, even as crazy as much of that evidence has been? 

A Message from Lakota Local Schools May 5, 2022

Dear Lakota Staff, Parents and Guardians, The end of the school year is a time to celebrate our students and staff and all that we have achieved since August. This year, we have even more to celebrate as we have been able to lift our COVID protocols and return to a much more normal school experience for our students. It is unfortunate that, over recent weeks, instead of this being our focus, district leaders have been forced to respond to baseless allegations and escalating threatening behavior by an elected member of our school board.As a result of a school board member’s blatant disregard for policy and procedures that are in place to help ensure the safety of our students and staff and a productive learning environment, this morning, Lakota Local Schools was forced to issue a notice of trespassing to Mrs. Darbi Boddy. As such, Mrs. Boddy will no longer be allowed on district property without prior authorization and unless invited for official Board business.Yesterday morning, Mrs. Boddy violated Board Policy and Administrative Guidelines 9150 by visiting two schools without first notifying the building principal – a requirement of all visitors to our schools. Entering through the main offices, she then proceeded to ignore staff requests to remain there until the principals met her. Instead, she left the offices and proceeded to walk the hallways, violating safety protocols and causing a disruption in learning at both Lakota East High School and Liberty Early Childhood School. While some may question why such a seemingly steep action was taken against Mrs. Boddy, let me explain. We welcome our parents into our schools; we welcome our community into our schools; and we certainly welcome our school board members into our schools – as long as they follow safety procedures and policy. These are not difficult. They involve alerting building administrators of the interest in visiting and setting up a time that is convenient for all involved. Yesterday, this did not happen. This is also not the first time that Mrs. Boddy has ignored board policy, nor is it the first time she has disrupted learning in our schools. Our decision was not made lightly and was done in consultation with law enforcement. It is my hope that by sharing this information with you, I am able to stop rumors from circulating and reassure you of our commitment to safety. The safety of our students and staff is always my first priority and a responsibility I take very seriously. I will do everything I can to ensure that our students and staff feel safe, welcome and included when they walk through our doors.

Sincerely,

Matthew J. Miller
​​​​​​​Superintendent

Of course, we all know the answer, which is the painful part. Many people knew the answer from the beginning but didn’t want to believe it. I was very skeptical about everything. As things have transpired over the last month, it became an apparent human resource problem without consistent standards, which is a tremendous management problem. I didn’t care much about Lakota at the start of this process. My hope was that by electing better school board members, the proper management of the district’s largest government school might improve. I have seen complaints about her since Darbi Boddy was elected and sworn in because she’s a conservative. It has become grossly apparent that the only thing the teachers and administrators care about at Lakota is not the kids but their easy jobs with high pay rates. As bad as the accusations are in the police report, I know that there is far worse going on behind the scenes that nobody is even talking about because they are either scared or don’t trust anybody to say anything. Not even the police. With the kind of threats that have been tossed at this whistleblower occurs, the message is clear, don’t mess with the breadbasket and playground of the adults who work at the school. The community and the children of the community are there to serve them and them only. That’s not what they say, of course. But that’s the message they convey. To say I’m disappointed would be a misplaced description. I had optimistic hope that I might be wrong. Government schools are all about politics, liberal politics at that, and they waste money on a garbage product while they treat the place like their personal Tinder app. And the way the public employees behave is reprehensible. But why wouldn’t they be when management allows them to behave that way? 

Rich Hoffman

Elon Musk Voting for Republicans: There is no way an intelligent person can support Democrats for anything

The sudden shock of Elon Musk saying that he is now a Republican or that he’ll vote Republican in the upcoming midterms is not a surprise. Actually, as a guy now in his 50s, he’s right on course for where many people arrive during their lives if they have reasonable intelligence. You really can’t be an intelligent person and be a Democrat. It’s impossible to reconcile intelligence with liberalism. Liberalism is a feeling not founded in logic, so anybody who has some level of intelligence will eventually figure out that liberal ideas are ridiculously stupid. Elon Musk has tried to make liberal ideas work. He was successful young and enjoyed the company of idealistic young people. He even smoked pot on the Joe Rogan podcast. But he has never been good with the Biden administration. Biden wants electric cars with massive government infrastructure. Musk has built several companies that are very independent of government influence, even if he did take government subsidies to start those companies. Ultimately, Musk has learned a hard lesson in life that the government wants to run private industry and their means to do that is always through labor unions under the protection of the Department of Labor. So the Biden administration has targeted Tesla with its wrath to protect their own investment into Ford and General Motors, hoping to use high gas prices to drive consumers to buy those dumb electric cars, the fancy golf carts. Tesla was the first, but the government wants them and Elon Musk out of the way because Musk won’t allow unions to run his shops, and a hard lesson has been learned that has caused the billionaire to look to Republicans for sanity.

This path that Musk is on, a gradual conversion over to Republican thought, isn’t new. Ronald Reagan went on a similar track. So did Donald Trump. There are lots of people who used to be Democrats who get to their 40s and 50s and life and realize that Democrats are takers, looters, and every kind of parasite that you can imagine. And they grow up and away from liberalism and become more conservative as they get older. Musk has been saying that he has stayed the same but that the political spectrum has moved radically to the left, which is true to a certain extent. The political left we see today is what I have been saying for decades was always beneath the surface.

But additionally, there comes a time when you realize that doing business with Democrats is impossible unless you give over everything you own to their view of collectivism. With Musk doing so well with Tesla and SpaceX, it’s clear that he will not be able to control those companies and still continue to vote as a Democrat. The illusion that Democrats are anything but professional looters in the world comes to anybody who lives long enough to reconcile reality. You hear a lot of Democrats who become Republicans. But you don’t see a lot of Republicans turning into Democrats. When you look at an electoral map of America, there aren’t many Democrat blue areas. There are massive groups of dependents made that way due to Democrat socialism, but people generally don’t choose to penalize themselves with liberal ideas. That is another reason why Democrats are always looking for young people and illegal immigrants to keep their political base intact. Democrats need people without much life experience or understanding of the American way of life to buy into their collectivist political philosophies because they lose many of their members to Republicans, especially later in life. For Democrats, the political game is just smoke and mirrors. 

Musk’s journey was inevitable. Traditional conservatives may not want to let Musk have a seat at the table due to his beliefs in transhumanism and non-Biblical thoughts. But in the world of ideas, all conservatives have some basic concepts in common, the understanding that government doesn’t make jobs. It simply loots off what others do create. For Musk, there is no way to go to Mars and have a human race that moves into space to live. No socialist community on Mars will be successful, so when you look at things like that, the only way to fulfill Elon Musk’s dreams of going to space and living on Mars is to embrace capitalism aggressively because there is no other way to start a prosperous society or to maintain it without capitalism. All the variations of Karl Marx’s philosophy were always rooted in failure, which is to say all of the modern Democrat party and anybody in the world who calls themselves a progressive. Many people go to college and learn a liberal education. They do all the dumb liberal stuff like party too much and listen to all the wrong kinds of music. They try to dedicate their lives to altruism. But once those people start having families and those families grow up, it becomes quite apparent to most intelligent people that Democrats are the wrong way to go, and they gradually turn into Republicans. I would go so far as to say that you cannot call yourself smart and not be a Republican. It’s not a matter of team politics; it’s simple logic. A person’s journey along a political spectrum is driven by what works in the world and what doesn’t. 

The contrasts between a Trump presidency and now the Biden mess will produce many more Elon Musk types who used to walk the fence between liberals and conservatives. I never liked the murky middle because it allows the looters of the world to hide among the good and hard working. Liberals are like the water boy on a football team that wins the Super Bowl. They get to be part of a winning team without doing much work at actually producing a win. Liberals suck the life out of everything they do, and when you build great companies like Elon Musk has, who are doing great things in the world, the problem moves from cosmetic lip service to liberalism to downright hatred.   Especially when you are the first to actually make electric cars to make all the environmental climate change fanatics happy, only to be shoved out of the market because the local labor union isn’t running the management of your company, once you realize how the game is played and what Democrats actually stand for, there is no way a reasonable person could call themselves one. I watched Donald Trump go through the same basic trajectory in his life. When he was doing The Apprentice for NBC, he was much like Musk, playing on the liberal side of things. But Trump married a conservative woman who pulled him in the right direction, and over time, during his marriage, he had no choice but to move toward the Republican Party. Many people were like Trump and Musk; they might be fiscally conservative but socially liberal. However, life has a way of demanding that fiscal and social policy must be aligned; there is no way to cheat the system. You can’t behave like a liberal at a dinner party and still run great companies, or a great country, or even raise a good family. You have to be conservative to do things well in life, which means that those who want to do well must become Republicans. Elon Musk is a smart guy and, late in life, has figured out the obvious. So it’s no miracle that he’s planning to vote Republican. And behind him are a whole lot of other people too, who have come to the same conclusions. They always do.   

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Lakota Gets a New ‘Conservative’ School Board: Isaac Adi, Darbi Boddy, and Todd Minniear win despite all odds

Great Election Results in 2021

After the election results within West Chester, Ohio, and Liberty Township for the 2021 school board races, the first thing my daughter said to me was, “well, that’s nice, but all public schools are still a dumpster fire.  Thanks, but no thanks.” That’s not just because she’s my daughter, but she represents a significant number of moms who are in their thirties and have watched the lunacy of our government over the last decade where they have decided that they want nothing to do with it.  Both she and my other daughter are homeschooling their kids.  My other daughter pulled her other child out of Monroe schools to homeschool just a few days ago because of the mask mandates and threat of vaccine rules.  Kids don’t need all that politics in their life, and my kids want nothing to do with any of it.  They want their kids to be educated, do the math, read, and adjust to critical thinking.  However, for me, to see Darbi Boddy and Isaac Adi win school board seats at the Lakota public schools was a fascinating thing to witness.  Bad, liberal management of Lakota, in general, has been a problem for decades. Finally, some reasonable people could manage the district in the way many of the Republicans in the county of Butler have needed by representation.  Adding these new names to the board with Lynda O’Conner is an excellent opportunity for sanity to come to Lakota for the first time in my lifetime, which at this point, is a long time.

Nobody can take anything away from Isaac and Darbi.  They worked very hard and were completely sincere in their efforts.  At no time in the process were they phony politicians.  Even when it came to fundraising, shaking hands, and going to political events, they were completely authentic and invested in running for school board and doing good things when they arrived there.  I will have to add a little name that many won’t know; Kristi Ertel worked behind the scenes very effectively and professionally to help make all this happen, as did other people who supported these candidates in unique ways.  This election was very much a team effort extending into the Republican party of Butler County in very positive ways.  None of us just woke up a few months ago and put our efforts into this achievement without a lot of work.  It started many months ago, well before the presidential election of 2020, as a way to figure out how to turn off the insane spending at Lakota, which was going to demand a levy increase by 2022.  It was names like Darbi and Isaac who stepped forward to become part of the solution.  Others helped in other ways.  And some of that group ran but wanted to be independent of a party nomination.

Looking at the results of this 2021 election, Vanessa Wells was one of the originals in these meetings.  I was rooting for her, but I understood well everyone’s problem with her in the race.  The LEA union had three candidates, and two of them were incumbents.  The other represented an incumbent, so it would be hard to beat them  on a good day.  Starting this process, I reminded everyone that the union candidates would get at least 5000 votes if the turnout were around 20%.  So there wouldn’t be much extra to divide among all the other candidates, Vanessa being one of them.  With the union endorsing the school board, which they always do informally, it would take the Republican Party endorsement to compete.  As it turned out, both Darbi and Isaac broke 8000 votes each which put them in first and second place comfortably over the other candidates.  By the way, things looked to me, there were thousands of hits on my blog site in favor of all the conservative candidates, so I felt it was safe to support Vanessa Wells even though she had selected to run as an independent.  I respect that kind of decision, so as it turned out, she gained a respectable 5000 votes all on her own, which is the magic number I pointed out at the start of the process.  While it’s true, those 5000 votes took away from Darbi and Isaac among a conservative base, knowing the minds of Butler County, I wasn’t worried that it would keep them from winning.  Of course, some races are coming, and Vanessa is an excellent talent to apply if she wants.  The same with Karine Chausse, who is a wildly independent person whom I like quite a lot.  She gained 1,400 votes with almost no resources to apply, which I thought was particularly strong.  I wanted to see how they’d do, and I was impressed. 

But it was scary for many people leading up to the election.  They couldn’t see what I did, the analytics from my blog site showing an enormous interest in the conservative school board candidates.  What I didn’t know was how would all that enthusiasm equate on election day.  As it turned out, everything came out exactly as we had war-gamed the election 18 months earlier in one of our earliest meetings.  Fear of the unknown taken into account, the people of Liberty Township and West Chester, won on election night.  Our job was to give them options, and they showed up and voted for them.  And it came out exactly like we thought it would.  Not a blowout margin, but voters would do the rest of the work with the suitable candidates, Isaac and Darbi, good sincere people who were in the race for all the right reasons.  The union always gets their base who want easy union contracts to negotiate against.  But their base runs out quickly.  When Isaac and Darbi went over the 7000 voter mark, I knew they were going to win.  Especially in an off-year election.  They exceeded that number more than that, which is a stunning blow to the previous status quo. 

Overall, all my endorsed candidates for the various races came out on top, which shouldn’t be a surprise.  The media does not give coverage to conservative options the way they should, so the blog site at least lets voters know who the good guys are.  It certainly helped in the school board race.  But it also helped in several trustee races. Mark Welch, of course, held his seat in West Chester, but Todd Minniear won as the top vote-getter in Liberty Township.  He was surprised to learn how quickly links to my site died on Facebook.  I explained to him that I was heavily shadowbanned on all internet providers and platforms.  So viral marketing is not possible when it comes to my site.  But, specific searches do work, so my blog site and name recognition, such as signs voters see on the side of the road, will add up to thousands and thousands of views, which is better media coverage than the local papers and tv market provide.  In races like these, it adds up quickly and can make a big difference.  But just as in the case of Darbi and Isaac, Todd worked his ass off on this race, and ultimately people saw that and voted for him.  If anything helped with the blog, people saw Todd campaigning, saw his signs, and looked him up to learn more.  Then they could read more about him, which earned a vote.  So I feel good about my role in helping out.  But that takes nothing away from all those who won.  They did a fantastic job, and I am proud to see each one of those victories manifest into something meaningful and hopeful.  The future is a little bit brighter today because of election night 2021.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Progressive Labor Union, LEA endorses Trent Emeneker: Hoping to slide a liberal under the door for West Chester Trustee

The LEA Endorses Trent Emeneker

At this point, it’s pretty well known that the challenger for the West Chester trustee seat in Butler County, Ohio, Trent Emeneker, is not a conservative.  He has stated that he’s a registered Republican. Still, much of what he talks about, like wanting to turn West Chester into a big bureaucratic city full of city council positions and other nonsense, is excessively liberal.  It didn’t help that he did a meet and greet at Liberty Center’s AC Hotel hosted by an activist Democrat.  So Trent has loads of problems even before a single-yard sign was ever put into the ground.  But as if all that were not enough, the LEA (Lakota Education Association) has endorsed Trent, which is essentially the kiss of death in Butler County.  The LEA, of course, is the ultra-progressive labor union that runs the Lakota school system.  They work under the umbrella of the Ohio Education Association, and ultimately the National Education Association, which everyone knows by now are essentially PAC groups for Democrats and the advancement of progressive causes.  Those not sure what progressive causes are responsible for should know that they are encouraging sex education in early grade school and transsexual bathrooms.  I would go as far as to say that it is an evil organization of radical politics intent on the destruction of the United States.  But judge for yourself.  What matters is that they have endorsed Trent Emeneker and hope to squeak him under the door in an off-year race that typically has low voter turnout. 

There is nothing good that comes out of the LEA.  They essentially protect bad teachers from being fired and lobby to pay them too much money to do it.  They are wholly committed to the destruction of America as we know it.  They collect money from their union dues and apply it directly to Democrats nationwide.  If you can think of something terrible about government schools, and I can think of a lot, the root cause of the trouble goes back to teacher unions, especially the NEA.  So long as they exist and have a footprint of any kind in our schools with our children, there is no hope of making those schools better.  People understand that more now than they did even a few years ago.  At Lakota, there is an opportunity to vote for new school board members to replace the current ones, which might stand against these teacher unions better than we’ve had in the past.  Usually, there is no defense on the school board.  The LEA essentially runs everything, including putting their candidates on the board as they are trying again this year with Kelley Casper, Michael Pearl, and Doug Horton.  There are finally options this year with actual Republican endorsed candidates.  Many people are running, so voter turnout will have to be high to defeat the incumbent’s LEA has also endorsed.  So we’ll see if voters take advantage of this opportunity with great voter turnout on election day, November 2nd. 

The LEA endorses Trent Emeneker for West Chester Trustee

It is just that kind of low voter turnout that the LEA hopes push the liberal Trent Emeneker into a West Chester Trustee seat.  They usually have their activists who always show up to vote and preserve their intent to destroy America.  So Republican voters will have to show up and defend themselves to keep that from happening.  But as to Trent’s intent, there is no doubt about it now that the LEA has endorsed him on their web page.  When you have the LEA behind you, you know that a vast evil is not far behind.  Everything the LEA does is rooted in some destruction for the American way of life and the families that make the country great.  Behind all teacher union activities are actions intended to attack family and its institution to a progressive need.  Suppose there are members of the LEA who call themselves Republicans and just go along for the great six-figure paycheck at Lakota. In that case, they are doing like all RINOs do, help evil get a foothold into our lives with the death whisper of compliance which is silently killing our country as we speak.  Those teachers in the LEA are just as bad as the purple-headed progressives advocating gay rights, critical race theory, and globalism by saying nothing and letting evil have its way in the world. 

Trent has tried to sell himself as an old military guy hoping that blind allegiance to service might make people ignore his obvious liberalism.  His biggest complaint about the current West Chester trustees is spending a few million dollars on landscaping for the new Union Center exchange.  He considers that fiscal irresponsibility.  Yet West Chester is operating in the black, which is how it should be, and considering the amount of GDP produced at that highway exit, the landscaping costs are easily justified.  Oddly enough, at a recent debate where Trent tried to make an issue of this cost, it was Lee Wong who best slapped him down for it.  Now everyone knows I’m not a huge Lee Wong fan, one of the current trustees.  But next to Trent Emeneker, Lee sounds like Donald Trump.  Lee explained well the need for the landscaping in a very Trump-like way.  Union Center in West Chester is one of the premier spots in the entire country for economic activity.  I would put the GDP moving through that exit among the top in the country.  There is nothing wrong with having some nice flowers there to greet the mass commerce that occurs.   Of course, nobody talks about that the LEA is against all capitalist activity as they are socialists and communists in their origins.  They are “the vote red for ed” types. The red is the red flag of communism, so for Trent to attack a few flowers when Lakota is bleeding hundreds of millions of dollars into these LEA employees advocating against family values, small government ideas, and the promotion of the religion of climate change, Trent proves he’s just a stooge for the LEA liberalism and not interested in fiscal responsibility.  If he indeed were, the LEA would never endorse him because all they want is a run-away wallet with no limit on the credit card. 

So remember as you vote that the LEA endorsed Trent Emeneker.  I don’t think it will change anything.  The same several thousand people who will vote to keep the current big spenders on the Lakota school board will vote for Trent as a trustee.  But there are a lot more Republicans in Butler County than Democrats.  It will all come down to voter turnout.  If you don’t want to see more LEA liberalism contaminating our community, then be sure to get out on election night and vote. Don’t just show up and vote for Trump or the mid-terms.  Vote now and for the same reasons, defend your turf from these radical progressives and their plans of doom for our children.  And know when you vote that Trent Emeneker is one of them.  The LEA does not endorse Republicans, not real ones.  They are out to destroy conservative politics so they would never put their name next to anybody who won’t help them do just that.  Trent is a big government guy, which is why they want him.  But, if you show up to vote, you can stop their plans.  So, could you not take it for granted?  The time for action is coming up; make sure you are part of the solution.   

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

LEA Endorses Current School Board: More reasons to vote for Darbi Boddy and Issac Adi

The LEA is wanting to Pick their Own Boss

News flash, the LEA, the Lakota Education Association have endorsed their three picks for the school board.  They endorse Kelley Casper and Michael Pearl, incumbents, and support the Brad Lovell replacement, Doug Horton.  No surprise there, as I’ve always said, those are all the liberals on the school board and why it has never functioned correctly.  The labor union puts its own kind of people on the board, so it’s no wonder that union contracts get approved without a whimper, transexual bathrooms are something to even talk about, and Critical Race Theory is infesting the hallways of all the schools.  When you let the teacher’s union pick their bosses, you naturally get a disaster, which is precisely why public education all across the country right now is in a crisis.  But I think it’s good to see these endorsements because now the union is saying the quiet part out loud.  For so many years, they have hidden their intentions beyond a bipartisan mask that they used to hide the politics of these candidates. This year, because of the pressure, the LEA had to show their cards, and once they did, every voter is now armed with a truth that wasn’t there for them before.  I’ve always said it, but now people can see for themselves.

Two Republican endorsed candidates created the pressure I support emphatically, Darbi Boddy and Issac Adi.  There are other challengers as well, but it was the Republican endorsement that made the faces of the LEA melt and decry how unfair it was for them.  They expected everyone to keep playing by the rules of impartiality. At the same time, they put their people in the office in the background and destroyed the Lakota budget with union nonsense and progressive politics.  If there is ever a hope of fixing government schools, the priority is to get the politics out of them.  And there is nothing about labor unions that isn’t about politics, especially the teacher’s union.  As in the case of Lakota, the LEA is a subsidiary of the OEA, the Ohio Education Association.  Then, of course, the OEA is a subsidiary of the NEA, the National Education Association.  You end up with a massive political action group of members who are soldiers for progressive politics, and the money we pay them off property taxes is taken and used to fuel the Democrat Party.  These unions do not give money to Republicans.  They are purely a radical political arm of the Democrat Party.  And in Butler County, Ohio, where Lakota is located, many people would be surprised to learn that. 

I always thought it was common knowledge of the connection between labor unions and the Democrat party.  A decade or so ago, I dealt with this issue often, but to me, that felt like just yesterday.  There is a whole new generation of parents now who were little kids themselves back then, and they don’t know about these kinds of things.  They want their kids to have a shot at a decent life, and they think by dropping those kids off at a government school, that somehow their kids will get the support and education they need for life.   They’d love it if politics were not such a dividing line, and they glaze over when these kinds of topics come up.  But the truth of the matter is, even if Republicans just sat in a faraway office and did not play the game, the kids in all public schools would continue to be harassed into converts of progressive causes, the kinds of things that Democrats care about.  Just as the gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe said in Virginia recently, he didn’t believe parents should be telling schools what to teach. You see the same attitude among the teacher unions across the country.  They think they own your children and that they are a shared resource among us all for consumption as the collective sees fit. 

The game works like this; labor unions need an army to advocate for their future progressive causes.  And teachers specifically use the chaos of liberalism to drive change, making school boards throw endless amounts of money at them, spiking their payrolls to extraordinary levels.  When you hear the stories that teachers don’t make very much money, you hear union nonsense.  Many teachers at Lakota make six figures.  They aren’t going to go hungry in this century or the next.  And of course, their union contracts always get approved because, as you can see in Lakota, they advocate for their people to be on the board, union stooges who will lay down and give them anything they want.  Just as the incumbents at Lakota have over this past year, all three of the names the LEA has endorsed have worked essentially on behalf of the LEA union and not the community in general.  When we elect a school board, we are supposed to be putting in place a management team that will work with all the elements to make a successful school.   As things have been for decades, everything has been tilted away from the families and their children and leveraged toward the power of the labor unions and building up the Democrats as a national party. 

Well, at Lakota, we wanted to change that, and there are several good picks to choose from to replace Kelley Casper, Michael Pearl and keep Doug Horton from becoming a problem in the future.  The Republican endorsed candidates Darbi Boddy, and Issac Adi could work well with the current Republican board member Lynda O’Conner to gain a three-vote majority, and that by itself would dramatically help the situation at Lakota.  But people would have to show up and vote.  There are far more Republicans in Butler County than Democrats.  But on off-year elections with these kinds of races, most of the Republicans stay home.  Usually, there aren’t such good people to pick from, but this year there is.  We know that the union picks will show up to vote; they have their steady stream of supporters who always drink the Kool-Aid.  They will get a lot of votes, as they always do, from pro-union radicalism.  That would mean that many Republicans would have to show up on election night and vote for the school board, who usually would sit home that night.  The LEA is worried about it, and for a good reason.  We want them to worry about it.  They shouldn’t control our school board, and they want to keep it that way.  But for the first time that I can think of, voters finally have a choice. 

We don’t have to accept this premise of the labor unions running our schools and taking endless amounts of money from our tax base to stuff their faces and greedy hearts.  And in a not so indirect way, fueling a Democrat party seeking to destroy our country, starting with our children.  If nothing else got voters to go out into the night and cast a vote for Darbi Boddy and Issac Adi, it would be the chance to right wrongs we can all see.  But for once in our community, to do something about it.  We don’t have to sit around and take it anymore.  For a change, we can change that corrupt system for the better with a simple vote and set an example that the rest of the nation can follow.  We can lead in Butler County, Ohio and take back our schools and our kids, and beat back the power these labor unions have over our lives.  Once and for all.

Rich Hoffman

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The LEA Union at Lakota Goes Too Far: Trying to screen school board candidates to protect their stranglehold on the district

Labor Unions think they are Management, they aren’t

It’s safe to say it now; it’s no longer a conspiracy theory, as it used to be when I first started talking about it years ago.  Teacher unions formed under the John Dewey public education system have been communist recruitment centers meant to re-shape the minds of our children into diabolical menaces against American values, life, liberty, and capitalism.  In my school district of Lakota, the LEA labor union has been a treacherous disaster for decades, imposing on the community, which tends to be conservative, a lot of liberal ideology that people aren’t comfortable with.  Many of the kids who have been through the Lakota school system and are now adults can easily see the damage.  Parents tell me all the time the sad stories of their precious little kids who were so sweet and wonderful, who turned into delectable losers through their high school and college years.   By the time the kids get into their 20s and 30s, they end up as unrecognizable communists of anti-American sentiment.  And where did it all start?  Well, in Lakota, there is a group of mad moms led by Sandy Wheatley, an old name to me but likely new to unsuspecting parents new to the school district.  She used to lead the local teacher’s union at Lakota and still has been one of the “sweat bees” always aggravating Lakota school business in the ways you can see in this article.  All the trouble starts with people like her.  In truth, all labor unions were born out of the push for communism during the mid-1800s when Marx published his destructive concepts that have stifled the world in many ways we see today.  But it’s one thing to look at it happening and have feelings about it, but quite another for it to happen in our backyards and not be expected to do anything about it.  I’ve never felt compelled not to do something about it.  I think we should fight these losers everywhere they show themselves because now many can see what I’ve been saying for years.  Teacher unions have not just been bad for our public education system, wasting millions of our taxpayer dollars over the years as an actual imposition. They are additionally harmful to our flag and country and must once and for all be considered domestic terrorists and threats to our children’s very lives.  Because they are.

Recently I have told many stories about a group of school board challengers endorsed by the Republican Party of Butler County, Ohio, running this year to replace three seats on the Lakota school board.  They are great candidates functioning on their own for good reasons which they have determined for themselves.  But I’ve been around for a while and understand the impediments that get in the way of good people intending to do a good job where good jobs are needed, and old labor union presidents like Sandy Wheatley don’t want to see a good job done in public schools.  They function from a different idea of what “good” is.  You and I, dear reader, might call “good” a well-balanced kid who can read, write, think, and grow up to get married, have good kids, a job, run a good household, and come over to a happy family gathering on Christmas for some quality exchanges.  For the communist labor union types, “good” is to turn the kids into servants of the state, do drugs, experiment sexually, collect unemployment, and vote Democrat.  And when it comes time for Christmas dinner, to send those children into those nice American homes filled with nice American families and to torpedo them all from the inside out with disappointment, anxiety, and malice.  Yet many people have always thought that my statements about the teacher’s union were overstated and purely political.  Because I have been more involved in these school board candidates this time around, I have seen how the labor union at Lakota behaves from a different point of view, and that view has been ugly.

One of these school board challengers asked me the other day about the questionnaire shown in this article, along with correspondence showing some Facebook postings from old Sandy Wheatley herself disparaging members of the current school board and the challengers in ways meant to impact the vote the way labor unions all over America intend.  These documents show the intent of the LEA teacher’s union at Lakota in a very honest way that voters should know about.  I found the questionnaire sent to this particular school board challenger to be reprehensible.  As I explained to them, they want to do a nice job for the district, and all this labor union radicalism can be a bit scary, that as a member of the school board, they are the management.  The labor does not get to interview the management. The other way around is the first problem with managing all public schools, especially at Lakota.  These labor union types felt it was appropriate to gather information on incoming school board members at Lakota.  Just read the questions for yourself.  What is being proposed by this questionnaire is that the labor union wants to know how progressive the candidates are.  Will they support the current progressive political agenda such as gay rights in the schools or uncontrollable spending with perpetual tax increases on private property through school levies.  How the candidates’ answer will determine the level of activism the union will perform against those candidates.  The LEA wants people like what they have molded on the current school board, lapdogs of union appeasement from Julie Shaffer, Kelly Casper, Michael Pearl, and the Brad Lovell replacement, Douglas Horton.  As you can see from Sandy’s direct comments on Facebook, they hate Lynda O’Conner because Lynda has tried to do the job a school board is always supposed to do, represent the community who elected her into place.  While the rest want to get along with the communist teacher’s union so bad things won’t be said about them.

People never wanted to face the facts of the origin of the labor movement, especially when it came to their kids.  Parents wanted to like their teachers; many of them started with good intentions.  Everyone always does, including Sandy Wheatley and the union thugs sucking the life out of the Lakota school system.  Even in the human body, viruses want to live.  Cancer wants to live by being a parasite of the host.  Everyone from their perspective wants to live.  But good is determined by logic, and that is why we elect school board members to insert reason into the management of children in a school and the millions of dollars it takes to teach them with free education.  But the quality of that education has always been under attack by teacher unions who want far more than just a job in a school district.  They want to act as parasites to our children and the property we own and maintain to fund their menace.  Attacking private property is one of the communist goals as they were adopted directly from Karl Marx and John Dewey was quite aware of it from the beginning.  It was a mountain of corruption from the start, and it shows in the products of public education, most of us, our children, and the state of our nation now.  And based on these documents shown here, you can see what is going on in your local teacher’s union.  These aren’t unique to Lakota.  But they do require action from voters who have a mind to fix the situation.  In Lakota, during 2021, voters will finally have a chance to do something about all this nonsense.  But really, this is a nationwide problem, and it needs to be addressed in America once and for all.  Otherwise, we won’t have a country, making all teacher union members very, very happy.

Rich Hoffman

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Vote for Darbi Boddy to Lakota School Board: Sandy Wheatley and Old Joan Powell are terrified she’ll win

A Great Young Lady to Run for the Lakota School Board

For much of the last year, some of us from the old No Lakota Levy group have been looking for a way to replace the school board at Lakota with fresh new faces.   We heard from the school board that they had wasted all the surplus money from declining enrollment and that Brad Lovell was pushing for a property tax increase in either 2021 or 2022.  So rather than get the gang back together to throw money at fighting an eventual tax increase because the school board couldn’t manage their money, we started having meetings looking for school board replacements. These people would be interested in becoming a school board member but weren’t sure how to get there.  This year, in 2021, three school board seats are coming up, all flat-line liberals.  And I’m happy to hear that we now have three Republican-endorsed candidates to challenge them.  Butler County will see that they are voting for conservatives instead of the usual closet liberals. The latter is always the teacher unions’ pick to grease the skids for the next contract negotiation for mandatory pay increases, which Lakota doesn’t need. I’ve written articles on two of those three Republican-endorsed candidates.  But there is one that I’m happy to announce who received her endorsement at the end of August, Darbi Boddy.  I first met Darby at one of those early meetings, and since then, she has impressed me with her diligent work ethic.  She is sharp and is running for all the right reasons, and I can say that she would be great on the Lakota school board.  Instead of just fighting the current school board’s bad decisions, Darbi will be part of the solution with a few more votes.

Darbi Boddy and Her Very Nice Family

One of the big tricks is that the school board candidates have been sold to us as non-partisan.  That has essentially allowed Democrats or people who call themselves Republicans to get elected in Butler County.  But they vote and manage as liberals, which is why Lakota has been a mess for so many years.  No matter how much money we have given them, they have wasted it as all significant government types do.  It’s one thing to get angry at how the rest of the world is, but school boards are local and are some of the parts of our government that we are supposed to have the most control over.  But when you can’t even get a school board to do the right thing, you know government is hopeless.  However, this year we finally have a choice. We’ve tried before to get conservatives elected, and when we do, it’s been one here, one there.  Then they get attacked because they are outnumbered, and it’s just been an absolute disaster.

For the old No Lakota Levy folks, it’s all about money.  We all have grown children, and we don’t want Lakota asking for money over their bad decisions.  We want the local community who want the free babysitting service to do well, have nice kids and have an overall asset to our neighborhoods.  But there comes a price where that sentiment expires.  Lakota hasn’t been asking for money since 2013, when they finally passed their last levy after we fought them on it for four years, and it was sometimes bloody.  My policy was to leave Lakota alone for the most part so long as they weren’t asking for money.  But now, in 2021, Brad and the gang have spent their surplus.  Now it’s time to deal with it.  The best way to do that is with a management change of the board now that a majority of the board is up for re-election. 

Darbi Boddy on Channel 5 News

I know all the candidates running as Republicans very well.  And one thing about Darbi Boddy specifically is that she works hard.  In almost every event I have been to over the last several months, she has been there shaking hands and introducing herself. I’ve seen her pressed under contentious conditions, and she has conducted herself exceptionally well.  She has always been cool and intelligent, and the more I have come to know her, the bigger a fan I have become.  I will say I am voting for her without hesitation.  She is conservative in every way I can see; she is the opposite of our current school board.  And in speaking with her, I am sure she can help manage the budget, which is very generous for what we already give Lakota.  All this Critical Race Theory nonsense starting in Columbus by the DeWine administration will be overturned at Lakota by Darbi.  She is also solid on the transexual issues that have been trying to creep in through the current board members, especially with the pick your sex bathrooms that progressive politics has been trying to sell us with old radical progressive activists like Sandy Wheatley and Joan Powell. 

But further than those negative factors, I think Darbi cares about the school system.  She cares about it in ways I don’t.  I believe public education is a disaster that needs to be completely fixed, starting with everything John Dewey built it with.  Darbi reminds me a lot of Lynda O’Conner.  Lynda is the only Board member at Lakota who has been trying to make things better, but she’s outvoted 4 to 1.  And the peer pressure against her by the other progressive disasters has been reprehensible.  Darbi would be a good compliment to Lynda on the board. 

What’s best that I have learned about Darbi is that she is very engaging, friendly, and knowledgeable.  When I have talked to her, I have thrown her lots of curveballs, little things that I use to measure character, and she always hits them.  She has been great at speaking with lots of different types of people without being fake about it.  Her sincerity is unquestionable. Since I first met her, I’ve been a fan of hers, but you never know how things will turn out.  On this little journey, which was to get things started, it’s nice to see someone like her running as an option.  I always say that you have your favorite people about these types of projects, but things don’t often go the way you’d like them to.  Things happen; people don’t get along for this reason or that.  But at the end of it, you want to get the lawnmower started, and it needs to run on its own.   The intent from the beginning was never to micromanage the school board members.  We needed people who would be their own people and run things as reasonable people would on their own.  We started the conversation, and of those, Darbi has turned out to be one of the best and most potent candidates, and I’m happy to see her on the ticket. I’ve known many politicians, and of them, I can’t say I’ve ever seen one who works harder than Darbi Boddi.  And it’s not just been for a week or two here and there.  With Darbi, it’s been hard work for months and months.   If that’s what she’s like, imagine what she could do on the Lakota School Board.  I can’t wait to find out. 

Rich Hoffman

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Joan Powell Comes Out Anti-Union as a West Chester Trustee Candidate: The difference between good management and being a suck-ass

 

One of the things that most shocked me from the recent West Chester Trustee Candidate Forum at Indiana Wesleyan College sponsored by the West Chester Tea party was that Joan Powell stated quite emphatically that she was anti-union and would like to see Ohio become a right-to-work state.  Who would have ever thought she’d say such a thing because it was Joan who sat on the Lakota school board for so many years caving into the union demands wrecking the budget with increased payroll with no management in sight.  Now that Joan is running for trustee in West Chester she has come out against labor unions which is interesting given the fact that many union radicals have targeted the trustees with their themes of dissidence exclusively because Mark Welch and George Lang had been exploring ideas to bring right-to-work legislation to West Chester specifically because Ohio’s governor Kasich has been soft on the labor unions due to his defeat of Issue 5 several years ago. Because of her friendly attitude toward labor unions in the past, strategists would have thought that Joan would seek the Lakota union votes in this trustee race but oddly she tossed that away with the statement seen below.

This may be the first time I’ve ever agreed with Joan Powell.  When I was heading the effort to make Ohio a right-to-work state in 2012 Joan turned her political guns on me and did whatever she could to erase me from what she was doing as president of the Lakota School Board.  At the time Joan was trying hard to give the teachers who worked for Lakota a raise when I had been showing that the exclusive cause of the operating levy she had been seeking was to add more to the wage rates which were already well over the average household income.  Joan’s position was extremely friendly to the labor union at Lakota, and her track record is her track record.  There isn’t anybody who can assume based on her history that Joan would do anything but lay down in future negotiations with the various unions that are in West Chester’s wheelhouse, like the police and fire departments.  I mean it’s easy to say that we value school teachers, fire fighters and police officers—and to give them all the money they are asking for.  It’s hard to tell them no, and that they already make too much money.  In the case of fire and police officers they always give you the speech about how they run into danger while everyone else runs away, so when their contracts come up public support usually favors the unions but as trustees elected to manage the finances, sometimes you have to do the hard things then explain it to people even when its unpopular.   The easy thing is to do as Joan has done in the past and that is to just give the union what they want to keep them from going on strike, then seek tax increases to cover the costs.  That’s why her statement here is so surprising.

If this Joan Powell had revealed herself 10 years ago we might have avoided a lot of bloodshed in the Lakota school district.  I might have gotten along with her!  But, my experience with her says that she knew what kind of crowd she was speaking to and she formulated her comments specifically to her audience.  What she really believes is something else entirely.  Nobody can look at the record of Joan Powell over the years as a president of the Lakota school board and determine that she was anything but excessively friendly to the public union effort.  Yet you can hear with your own ears her declaration that she is against labor unions so who could really know what to believe.

I personally think public sector unions should be illegal.  If you have a job funded by tax payers you should not be able to organize against tax payers or their representatives for more money.   In private business competition can help bring reality to labor union activism so the free market does the job of helping to manage the situation.  But in government, we are talking about monopoly status over the tax dollars in question so labor unions have unfettered access to the funds of the communities they are supposed to serve.  It’s easy to obtain the funds they desire because often the only people who stand in their way are politicians like Joan Powell who never want any bloody conflicts with their labor unions, just peace.  Elected politicians find the temptation to throw vast amounts of money at these public sector unions too easy.  It’s far easier for them to ask for tax increases from a faceless community hiding the effort behind children or the safety of our citizens.  That makes those types of people terrible managers and Joan Powell is certainly guilty of that.

Yet for the record in 2017 Joan has declared that she is against labor unions so as a note to the police, the firefighters and the public school teachers who might think that they might vote for Joan Powell looking for an easy run over politician to engage in future negotiations with—she has indicated that she is anti-union.   I mean perhaps she has learned some lessons over the years.  I wouldn’t vote for her as a trustee, the only people I think have a chance of doing good work as a West Chester trustee are Mark Welch and Ann Becker.  Lynda O’Conner may be a good pick for that third seat because Lee Wong is a disaster and Joan Powell has a terrible track record at managing big budgets.  But in regard to her statements on labor unions, I actually agree with Joan Powell on something.

In actuality Joan was likely just telling the audience what they want to hear, which is worse than being an open liberal because as a voter you can never be sure what the person you are considering really stands for.  Knowing a bit about Joan Powell I think she is very malleable—her thoughts always go to the path of least resistance and that’s fine if you are a grandma handing out cookies to your grand kids—but when you are supposed to protect millions of dollars from the greedy hands of public employees who want the most money for doing the least work—you want someone who will manage that money with some valor.  Labor unions may want to vote for Joan because they smell the blood in the water, but one thing they won’t be able to rectify is that she did come out against labor unions in the 2017 election.   Her comments are now part of the public record and they will be used against her in the future.  That’s why we have these forums, so that we can test the candidates in the forges of reality to see how they hold up to a little scrutiny.  Obviously Joan Powell says whatever she needs to in order to appease the people she is addressing.  If it’s labor unions, she gives them what they want.  If it’s the Tea Party, she does the same.  So there is nothing about Joan Powell that indicates she would ever do anything but tell people what they want to hear.  The damage she has always done, and obviously seems committed to in the future, is that she is more in love with the popularity of being a public official than in doing the hard work of management.  And that is what deciding this election of 2017 is all about.  If people want good management, Joan Powell is not their person.

Rich Hoffman

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The Tragedy of Kobe Steel: How the smoke is fading and mirrors are breaking on lean manufacturing–revealing a diabolical academic scheme that was always there

The truth is there isn’t any magic wand that takes manufacturing techniques and turns companies into winners at the bottom line. Just like going to college couldn’t turn a kid into a success story without extremely hard work to go with it.  The harsh reality that many people have come to face is that you can’t buy quality, and you can’t wish yourself into profitability.  If you want to be successful in life you have to be willing to work harder than a competitor and you’ll have to figure out the latest trends before everyone else does in an ever-changing world.  It’s not enough to memorize the work of Eliyahu M. Goldratt or to study really hard the techniques of James Womach so that you can call yourself a “black belt” of lean manufacturing.  It’s still the case and it always will be that innovation and creativity are ever-changing opportunities for market dominance.  And let’s face it, that’s the name of the game.  That’s also why this global tragedy involving Kobe Steel is such a case study into the temperature of the world regarding manufacturing that it merits our tenacious considerations.

Kobe Steel is a large producer of various industry metals, particularly aluminum and due to the nature of the world marketplace distributes their product all over the world to the largest companies currently in existence.   The assumption is that since the company is Japanese that they make high quality products at Kobe Steel—just because they are made in Japan.  That country has done a great job building up their brand with an eye toward quality—which is precisely why Womack, Roos and Daniel T. Jones featured them so prominently in the 1990s book The Machine that Changed the World.  In that classic book Womack had pretty much closed the case on western mass production techniques and very subtly implied the takeover of manufacturing practices being instituted right in front of our faces.  College academics were essentially attempting to use lean manufacturing practices revolutionized by Japan—specifically Toyota into a global revolution that would help pave the way to a one world global government by unifying all various markets under the flag of lean manufacturing.  And this failure at Kobe Steel, which is quite serious presently, has the fingerprints of failure rooted in this rapid expansion of manufacturing approach that has been taking over the world since the 1960s.

The attempted academic takeover of all industries has been going on for a long time and their goal is almost always the same.  Generally the academic believes in global collectivism and that the power of the individual is subservient to the needs of group think—and the view of American mass production was that a single foreman, and a single process engineer were things of the past and that hive behavior in the form of lean manufacturing developed from Japan would become the dominate way of doing business.  But the real villain was not American manufacturing; it was the kind of rugged individualism that often emerged in American car companies and steel manufacturers.  If you peel back the onion even more behind these academic reformers they were ahead of themselves on global wealth redistribution and they purposely worked their way into the various industries with mountains of paperwork for employers to fill out so that the tasks would become so cumbersome that companies would just flee overseas to run away from bureaucracy.  The subtext to all this academic insurrection for the last 50 years has always been lean manufacturing and that American companies better get with the pace of the rest of the world or they’d be out of a job.

I’m never one to throw out the baby with the bath water; there are some really good things that Womach and his buddies came up with in that aforementioned book.  And I’m a fan of the work by Eliyahu M. Goldratt.  I like those guys, but in relation to the problems of today, I have my own thoughts—and I dare say I often go much deeper than anything that came previously.  I’d say that you have to if you want to invent something new, otherwise how would you ever stand out in a world that is so competitive?   I can also say that I’ve been through many lean manufacturing seminars over the years and all those companies that sponsored those activities are now out of business, because what they did was attempt to copy what worked in Japan to an American market, and it clearly didn’t work.  I watched with disapproval as many companies tried to take the concepts in Womack’s book and applied them directly to manufacturing facilities where American workers resisted, and resented the efforts to the point where the company just folded—because nobody seemed to understand what was really going on.

The Japanese had a unique problem after World War II.  They had lost a war and needed to rebuild their economy from the ground up.  They also had an occupying force that changed all the rules of manufacture on them, and imposed on Japanese companies union friendly policies that made innovation so much more complicated.  Just like American manufacturing at the time was peaking because the mass production techniques had created in American workers this new idea of lifelong employment instead of just doing a job in the city then returning to their fields in the country to resume their independent life—socialist oriented labor unions took root and started managing things at manufacturing facilities across America.  At that time it was a trend so America forced Japan into the same box of thought for which they needed a way to get out.  So Japan offered a policy of lifelong employment to their employee but in going a step further than unions did in America, they adopted a decentralization of authority policy where wages and promotions were attached to tenure, not performance and that essentially stabilized their work culture into a nice predictable pattern that they were able to inject into a market share that essentially ruled for the next fifty years.  This was fine with the academics because it sapped the wealth from American manufacturing and relocated it to the orient and even into Europe.  As time passed and American companies still struggled with the concepts of lean manufacturing because at the core of it is a group think that purposely diffuses the merits of individualized behavior then more American companies became Chinese and Korean companies because people in those regions already were somewhat predisposed toward lean manufacturing thought—it’s an Asian thing.  For people who will eat the eyeball of a chicken as a snack it’s no big deal to stand at an assembly line and decentralize authority to the masses of group think.  But to the six-foot six ,300 pound redneck from Appalachia that has a Confederate Flag on the front of their pick-up truck, it’s quite difficult.

However, life was never all that great in Japan.  They were willing to work hard and long, but they were still an occupied country infused with western ideas on the collapse of their great empire which was destroyed at the end of World War II.  Before that they had the samurai culture which had been destroyed by the emerging new emperor—so the people were always ready and willing to fight for something but they had been shell-shocked over the centuries with a lot of disappointment.  If they could get back at the West by imposing lean manufacturing techniques on those “cowboys” then they’d be very happy, and thus they have been riding on that reputation now for many decades even though it took a lot of smoke and mirrors to maintain the illusion.  But those mirrors essentially broke with the release of this news from Kobe Steel.  To keep up their shipments and deal with the focus of the world on their products Kobe Steel had to fudge the paperwork they helped to create and due to the constant pressure from other Asian markets which have emerged over the last twenty years, Kobe Steel had to take short cuts on quality to stay relevant.  In essence, they became dominated by new, leaner and more ambitious manufacturing techniques just as mass production had been destroyed by lean manufacturing in the 80s and 90s.

I had a front row seat to all this activity, I worked at Cincinnati Milacron in the mid 1990s and it was going out of business by the day at that point in time.  They had us studying lean manufacturing techniques just to stay alive.  I could say the same about the Fisher Body planet in Fairfield, Ohio where my grandfather worked.  I could also say the same about the Camero plant in Norwood where I knew several people who worked there.  Now there is nothing left of those places, Milacron and the Camero plant were completely bulldozed away erasing their memory.  People visiting those locations today would never know that they ever existed.  In the final days of their manufacturing lives they had the same desperate anxiety about them that we can now see out of Kobe Steel—and it saddens me to see it, but it doesn’t surprise me.  These trajectories of failure are predictable and can be traced largely back to our academic institutions that impose themselves on the creativity of any industry that must move with much more nibble feet to compete in an ever-changing world.  By the time the academics get their published opinions out about global trends, they are too late and those who listen to them find themselves on the hot seat toward losing immediately.

I may tell my secrets later, but certainly not now.  Innovation didn’t stop with Womach.  Lean manufacturing has some good things to offer, but it certainly won’t deliver anybody to the Promised Land without a lot of hard work and a new take.  Just because you study the words of something it doesn’t mean that success is guaranteed, and so many people even today think that success can be bought.  For those who think such things just look at the Kobe Steel case—a Japanese company that is still struggling to find their place in a competitive world as their niche concept of lean manufacturing is proving to be more of a gimmick now than a justifiable strategy sold by academics for the purpose of destroying manufacturing in the West so that the East could spread communism to every corner of the planet.  That was always on the mind of the academic after all—that much should be clear to everyone now.  But lucky for us all, the wheels fell off at Kobe Steel before we went too far down that road—and the good news is that innovation and the next great things are still out there waiting for the world to copy them.  Until then, I’ll keep the smile on my face watching others try to figure out the latest riddle in the world of competitive manufacturing.

Rich Hoffman

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THE NFL IS CORRECT: Bruno Mars should pay to sing in a Super Bowl

Labor unions have quietly been percolating in the background trying to repair their image after several years of close scrutiny. They are trying to re-tool their public presence carefully which they unleashed shortly after their Labor Day holiday by providing their intrusive input into the upcoming NFL season of which largely consists of labor union representation. When it is wondered why Hollywood leans left no matter what the industry—music or motion pictures—it is because they are all members of an entertainment union. And within those unions progressive values are constantly espoused. I should know, the Writers Guild of America came close to representing me during the 90s on a few occasions putting me on their mailing list and I received a constant parade of pro Bill Clinton propaganda. I was also a part of a manufacturing facility around the time of the controversial Al Gore, George Bush election of 2000, and clearly the labor union was in support of Gore. Typically when speaking with these types of people I have always taken a hard-line in favor of conservatives which has most of the time been a deal killer for my projects—so I know all about discrimination against conservatives in labor unions—especially in entertainment and manufacturing.

Recently the NFL floated a proposal that their half time acts at the Super Bowl should pay them for the public exposure on such a large stage which was met with a general utterance that the football sports organization was acting greedily. Union pushback is mounting. The AFL-CIO’s Department of Professional Employees just joined the American Federation of Musicians in condemning such a plan.

“No one should ever pay to work. No organization should ever get a kickback from a worker they employ,” the labor organization said of the plan, first detailed in the Wall Street Journal. “The Department of Professional Employees, AFL-CIO, its affiliates in the entertainment industry, and the other unions, 22 in all, will stand with the AFM in condemning and will fight back against any attempts to make workers pay to perform,” the group said of the plan to convince music acts to cough up cash to play the halftime show, most likely in the form of a cut of post-show ticket sales, downloads, etc.

“It’s not like the NFL and its Super Bowl organizers don’t have any money and can’t afford to pay for halftime show performances, it’s about the insatiable thirst for profits at the expense of great musical entertainment and those who create it,” AFM President Ray Hair said last week. “You can find kickback schemes like this coming from unscrupulous bar and nightclub owners, but for the NFL to descend to such depths would be unconscionable.”

http://deadline.com/2014/09/super-bowl-halftime-pay-to-play-afl-cio-fight-nfl-827894/

The dialogue against the NFL by most people—especially union leaders like that Ray Hair fellow–is wrong especially in regard to the entertainment unions who on one hand preach against greed while they force collective bargaining agreements for their players valued at millions of dollars for kids in their mid-twenties fresh out of college. Musicians who are superstars are in much the same boat and are typically young and fall hook line and sinker for the union propaganda that comes with their memberships. But they are all confused as to what creates value and who is responsible for what.

The NFL has created the value which all these parties seek to be a part. The NFL Super Bowl was created in its value by the efforts of the National Football League. Aerosmith, Prince, or any other headline acts which plays at the Super Bowl did not create the value of such a large game—it was created by the NFL owners who put a product on the field that millions of people enjoy. Players come and go, but the product of the NFL continues on season after season because the management of that product is successful. Yet the labor unions want and expect equal value for their participation—which is clearly barbaric and ignorant—if value is the measuring unit utilized. Players are not equal to owners, and halftime acts are not equal to the players which make the Superbowl such an exciting enterprise.

Most musical acts benefit from sales of their recordings after they perform for over a billion people on live television. I would argue that groups like the Rolling Stones and Aerosmith are equal to the NFL in value and should just be honored to be a part of the festivities. Those classic bands who are household names have built their reputation to such a level that they benefit very little from performing at a halftime show during the Superbowl. Their participation is purely out of respect and nostalgia. But for smaller acts like Lady Gaga or Bruno Mars, they will receive a spike in sales just for appearing in a Super Bowl and they should pay for that advertising just like every other vendor trying to make money off the product that the NFL created.

Every labor union who argues that their members participate equally to the product of the NFL just because they show up and play a part during a few years of their life are thinking about the whole thing incorrectly—their philosophy is framed by socialism, not capitalism. The NFL itself is a capitalist organization, and it is not greedy to expect payment for using their product—their intellectual property. People who have a problem with this are functioning socialists. It is anti capitalist to refer to the NFL as greedy for expecting compensation from those riding their product to success.

If Bruno Mars sings a song in the middle of the woods deep in the mountains, nobody cares. If the Superbowl puts him on stage for billions of people that they organized for the event Bruno Mars benefits as does the NFL. But the NFL has to make a business decision as to who should play in their halftime show and it is up to them if they want payment in financial compensation, or if they want to honor musical legends like the Stones or Aerosmith with a free party and chance to have some fun during one of the biggest American events of the year. The players, and other entertainment professionals participating in the Super Bowl do not make the value of the game. They simple play a part. If they refuse there are other Russell Wilsons in the world who are willing to throw a football in front of millions of viewers. Some people would do it for free just for the opportunity to do it. The unions have only one function that is anti-capitalist in its desire and that is to loot off the productive enterprise of value creators like the NFL create. They are leeches that are beneath contempt and are dead wrong in their assertion about payment regarding halftime entertainment. As usual the collective bargaining agreements of these labor unions are more appropriate in Soviet Russia during the 60s and 70s than in capitalist America during a football game that embodies the economy of the most successful country on earth. The labor unions are purely second-handers looting value from those who created it and trying to make it appear that those who created that value are greedy for not wanting to “share the wealth” with their members. Their basic premise is that the NFL has money and we want it. That is the bottom line—and why the labor unions are wrong.

Rich Hoffman

www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com