Tag: Self Help

Zero-Point Energy Eliminating Your Electric Bill: Why J.P. Morgan sided with the IBEW Labor Union

How much money do you believe dear reader the IBEW labor union pores into the purchase of politicians and legislation that keeps its 750,000 members employed through their dues and donations?  To every mind that frets over Agenda 21 Smart Meters where an IBEW worker comes to every home in America and measures the amount of energy that home has consumed they are watching ghosts in the future manning a job in the present that is completely useless—kept alive only by politics and the labor unions attached to government for the purpose of preserving jobs that are essentially extinct.  Because what I’m about to tell you will make you very angry, and it should.  You have been scammed, lied to, and used to keep a system designed by J.P. Morgan a long time ago purely for the purpose of profit into believing that it was your only option for power—but it’s not.  As second-handers like Barack Obama spend billions, and billions of tax payer dollars on solar power, wind and silly battery operated cars, unorthodox scientists like John Hutchinson are perfecting the science of Zero-point energy.  I introduced Hutchinson in a previous article.  CLICK HERE FOR REVIEW.  John is developing a battery that never runs out of power and has actual prototypes that the world has no idea how to deal with.  The implication of this development means that every home, every business, every car, airplane,  anything that uses power to operate will have a self-sustaining source of power that never runs out meaning that the 750,000 jobs protected by the IBEW are in serious jeopardy sooner than later.  To understand the details of this exciting science, be sure to watch all the videos presented here today. This may be one of the most important articles you will ever read.

The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) is a labor union which represents workers in the electrical industry in the United States, Canada, Panama and several Caribbean island nations; particularly electricians, or Inside Wiremen, in the construction industry and linemen and other employees of public utilities. The union also represents some workers in the computer,telecommunications, broadcasting, and other fields related to electrical work. It was founded in 1891 shortly after homes and businesses in the United States began receiving electricity. Its international president is Ed Hill. The IBEW is affiliated with the AFL-CIO.

The beginnings of the IBEW were in the Electrical Wiremen and Linemen’s Union No. 5221, founded in St. Louis, Missouri in 1890. By 1891, after sufficient interest was shown in a national union, a convention was held on November 21, 1891 in St. Louis. At the convention, the IBEW, then known as the National Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (NBEW), was officially formed. The American Federation of Labor gave the NBEW a charter as an AFL affiliate on December 7, 1891. The union’s official journal, The Electrical Worker, was first published on January 15, 1893, and has been published ever since. At the 1899 convention in Pittsburgh,Pennsylvania, the union’s name was officially changed to the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.

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

The fear over Smart Meters is that the un-holy alliance that these labor unions have with government will allow federal snoopers to study the patterns of a family’s behavior inside a home predicated off their use of energy on the power grid.  That power grid is regulated by government for the benefit of government.  When a storm comes through an area, thousands of customers getting their energy off that power grid must wait for the IBEW workers to hit the streets and get all the downed power lines operational again.  The power grid system was solidified around 1900, with $150,000 (more than $3 million today; 51% from J. Pierpont Morgan) into a project that had a chance then to change the world for the better.  Tesla began planning a spectacular tower called the Wardenclyffe a facility which was designed to beat Marconi to be the first to broadcast a radio signal across the Atlantic.[116]

To Morgan’s discomfort, the Wardenclyffe Tower was designed to not only beat Marconi, but to carry energy to every corner of the world which was the real aim of Tesla on the project.  When Morgan realized that this was Tesla’s plan, he turned against Tesla as Morgan already had deals with Edison to use power in a grid system that was easy to make money off of.  So long as energy could be brokered for sale, there would be a need to rent that energy from someone who provided it, someone like J.P. Morgan and his investors.  Tesla later approached Morgan to ask for more funds to build a more powerful transmitter. When asked where all the money had gone, Tesla responded by saying that he was affected by the Panic of 1901, which Morgan had caused.  Morgan was shocked by the reminder of his part in the stock market crash and by Tesla’s breach of contract by asking for more funds and the desire of the brilliant scientist to offer “free energy” to the world, so Morgan denied Tesla the request. Tesla wrote another plea to Morgan, but it was also fruitless. Morgan still owed Tesla money on the original agreement, and Tesla had been facing foreclosure even before construction of the tower began.[113]

In December 1901, Marconi successfully transmitted the letter “S” from England to Newfoundland, terminating Tesla’s relationship with Morgan. Over the next 5 years, Tesla wrote over 50 letters to Morgan, pleading for and demanding additional funding to complete the construction of Wardenclyffe. Tesla continued his project for another nine months. The tower was raised to its full 187 feet.[113] In July 1903, Tesla wrote to Morgan that in addition to wireless communication, Wardenclyffe would be capable of wireless transmission of electric power, which of course Morgan was against.[116] On 14 October 1904, Morgan finally replied through his secretary, stating, “It will be impossible for [me/ Morgan] to do anything in the matter.”  The way power would be sold to the public had been established, and Tesla’s business format of free energy was not financially viable in proportion to the investment.  That is how America—the inventor of electricity, formulated a relationship with every citizen in America to buy power in the form of rent as opposed to owning a share of it for their own use.  The labor union of the IBEW formed along with the new technology to ensure that radical changes to the business structure, and their wage levels would never be put into jeopardy.

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

The way to think about Zero-point energy is to consider it as a closed system of power within the body of a household, like blood in a human body.  A battery that never ran down would run all the power needs of a home with a closed system that never depleted.  The washer, dryer, dishwasher, televisions, heating system, refrigeration, everything would run off this battery in a circulatory system that would keep the power in a perpetual state of usefulness.  The same basic ideal would be used for cars, trains, and anything else which needed power to operate.  This was the basic ideal that Ayn Rand utilized as her primary plot point in the popular novel Atlas Shrugged—John Galt’s engine was essentially inspired off of Tesla’s inventions.  Instead of the power being consumed by energy it would simply draw from the Zero-point which appears to reside within dimensional space within the quantum level—and simply never runs out because it is always present.  Much the way water is a stable force in the world there is never more or less of it, but it can be used and recycled many times over in various forms, energy is much the same.  The properties which energy is carried upon can change as the vehicle to deliver the power, but the energy itself is a stable force that can always be tapped in to.

Zero-point energy, also called quantum vacuum zero-point energy, is the lowest possible energy that a quantum mechanical physical system may have; it is the energy of its ground state. All quantum mechanical systems undergo fluctuations even in their ground state and have an associated zero-point energy, a consequence of their wave-like nature. The uncertainty principle requires every physical system to have a zero-point energy greater than the minimum of its classical potential well. This results in motion even at absolute zero. For example, liquid helium does not freeze under atmospheric pressure at any temperature because of its zero-point energy.  Now you know why government schools want to keep people in a state of ignorance.

The concept of zero-point energy was developed in Germany by Albert Einstein and Otto Stern in 1913, as a corrective term added to a zero-grounded formula developed by Max Planck in 1900.[1][2] The term zero-point energy originates from the German Nullpunktsenergie.[1][2] An alternative form of the German term is Nullpunktenergie (without the “s”).

Vacuum energy is the zero-point energy of all the fields in space, which in the Standard Model includes the electromagnetic field, other gauge fields, fermionic fields, and the Higgs field. It is the energy of the vacuum, which in quantum field theory is defined not as empty space but as the ground state of the fields. In cosmology, the vacuum energy is one possible explanation for the cosmological constant.[3] A related term is zero-point field, which is the lowest energy state of a particular field.[4]

In quantum theory, zero-point energy is a minimum energy below which a thermodynamic system can never go.[12] Thus, none of this energy can be withdrawn without altering the system to a different form in which the system has a lower zero-point energy. One of the hypotheses that claims that zero-point energy is infinite is stochastic electrodynamics. In it, the zero-point field is viewed as simply a classical background isotropic noise wave field which excites all systems present in the vacuum and thus is responsible for their minimum-energy or “ground” states. The requirement of Lorentz invariance at a statistical level then implies that the energy density spectrum must increase with the third power of frequency, implying infinite energy density when integrated over all frequencies.[29]

According to a NASA contractor report, “the concept of accessing a significant amount of useful energy from the ZPE gained much credibility when a major article on this topic was published in Aviation Week & Space Technology (March 1st, 2004), a leading aerospace industry magazine”.[30]

The calculation that underlies the Casimir experiment, a calculation based on the formula predicting infinite vacuum energy, shows the zero-point energy of a system consisting of a vacuum between two plates will decrease at a finite rate as the two plates are drawn together. The vacuum energies are predicted to be infinite, but the changes are predicted to be finite. Casimir combined the projected rate of change in zero-point energy with the principle of conservation of energy to predict a force on the plates. The predicted force, which is very small and was experimentally measured to be within 5% of its predicted value, is finite.[31] Even though the zero-point energy is theoretically infinite, there is as yet no evidence to suggest that infinite amounts of zero-point energy are available for use, that zero-point energy can be withdrawn for free, or that zero-point energy can be used in violation of conservation of energy.[32]  That is, until one looks at the work of John Hutchinson.

In the contrary of energy generation, a field of study where there is a somewhat realistic potential for the utilization of zero-point energy might be in the design of extremely small-scale devices like MEMS and NEMS or in distant futuristic propulsion technology of extremely long-distance space-travel.[12]

A document released by the NGIC shows there is ongoing worldwide research into zero-point energy, particular in China, Germany, Russia and Brazil. Some analyst of the DIA has indicated that research into successfully harnessing zero-point energy for energy generation purposes is a serious concern inside the intelligence community.[12]

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-point_energy

The implication of Zero-point energy is that cars never need combustible gas, which would wreck the oil industry, homes would never need to be taped into a power grid, which would wreck the IBEW union and all its affiliates in government, every home in every corner of the world—even the most backwater spot on the planet could have a power supply equivalent to what is offered in big cities, and it would never run out, and would cost nothing to use.  Energy could be broadcast across the globe to every point possible through towers like Wardenclyffe and would be as easy to use as cell phones receiving a signal in remote areas now.  The power lines that litter roadways would go away, and power grid infrastructure would no longer be a concern.  And politicians would no longer have poor people to exploit because the quality of life virtually everywhere would improve and the cost of renting energy from government controlled sources would be eliminated.

This is one of the premier reasons that John Hutchinson is a hated man at the center of conspiracy theories.  Governments cannot control the kind of technology that Hutchinson is perfecting any more than they can control the Internet.  They can monitor the information, but they can’t stop it as it is a free-flowing existence that now works inside of a new dimensional space called Cyberspace.  To kill that space now would be to kill the communication network that it is attached to, and every device which carries that network.  However, Hutchinson’s zero-point energy batteries will do for the power industry what the Internet has done to the telephone industry—who has a land line these days?  Who pays for long distance calls when they can now Skype?  Who needs a telephone line?  The energy breakthroughs will be much more dramatic than these inventions once they take, and the only reason they haven’t yet is that nobody can figure out how they can make money off something that exists in the air and is as common as water—which is technically free to everyone.  Government has learned to sell water to customers by offering a cleaning service, but every home could have its own well to draw from—if they wanted.

Zero-point energy is even more reliable than all these technologies because energy is literally all around us in virtually everything.  Hutchinson built his zero-point batteries out of rocks he found around his home.  But the reason we don’t have these things yet is because it has been accepted that energy delivery must come from the “power company” and that entity is usually publicly traded and tied directly to government—and labor unions, and neither want anything to change, because neither wants to give up any of the power they have currently over people in general.

One of the downsides to yesteryear which helped propel the destructive feminist movement in America was that men sometimes did not let their wives learn to drive a car.  They did this because the men feared that the women would get jobs, get new boyfriends, and abandon their families.  The men were afraid of giving their wives freedom for fear that they would lose them to the temptations of the world.  Modern government is doing the same thing to people like Hutchinson.  They are purposely black-balling Hutchinson through orthodox scientific institutional channels to keep his technology away from a public that they know wants to be free of a power grid and the enormous expense of renting energy from a government controlled entity.

The natural regression that takes place because of this government barrier to innovation which uses crony capitalism—a mild form of socialism—to control technology through the greed of financial donars was exhibited in the wonderfully simple novel called Anthem by Ayn Rand.  Walt Disney built The Epcot Center to protect against—the regression of science in the face of discovery—the insistence by second-handers in government to pretend that the world is flat—because they don’t want to face the reality of it being round.  America could have had free power self-contained for over 100 years by now if Tesla had been funded by J.P. Morgan, and it is likely that poverty in the world would be next to nothing as even poor nations would have access to Tesla’s energy for refrigeration, and climate control.  But we don’t because Morgan knew there was no money in it, and union workers wanted no changes to a system that gave them jobs, and government wanted access to the financial donations given by the labor unions.  The net result is that millions of people have suffered.  There has been 100 years of commitment to dirty energy that has left America largely dependent on the Middle East and their radical religions, and has left millions dependent on government to provide stability in their life when all they need is a self-contained battery in their backyard giving them power month after month for years saving $300 to $500 a month on their energy bills.

Critics will say that John Hutchinson is crazy—that batteries do not have the ability to store such energy for a lifetime.  They will say that everything pointing away from the current controlled system is wrong, dangerous and unstable—and they will do it for the same reason that Edison was terrified of Tesla—because they know they have an inferior product that can only maintain its monopoly on the public so long as people don’t know that there are any options.  Well, now dear reader you know there are options, and it won’t take much to bring them about—and it all starts by reading articles like this one and taking the next step.  For that next step, it begins with John Hutchinson and his experiments into zero-point energy.  The step after that will be for a country to get behind his technology and begin introducing it to the world.  It might be Japan, it might be China, and it might even be Germany.  But because of the IBEW it won’t be The United States of America.

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

 

School Superintendent of Stuebenville Charged With Cover-up: Three other employees also charged during rape investigation

If not for blogs like this one, Twitter, and YouTube the crimes at Steubenville would have been covered up like many of the other crimes do in public education.  From the very beginning I stated that a cover-up was highly likely.  All public schools share the trend of sacrificing individuals to the collective whole, and when it comes to high school football, individuals are routinely sacrificed as athletes are often the symbolic stars of their community.  The tendency when school athletes commit crimes is to cover up the evidence so the entire community can continue to idolize the heroes of the football field and rally behind the schools they represent in battle.  Behind those athletes is a progressive education system that employees a lot of people off tax payer money, and schools need those tax payers to avoid looking too closely at real school activities—where scandals are common—not rare.  So I declared the scope of the crime in previous articles that turned out to be very prophetic.  CLICK THE LINK BELOW FOR REVIEW.

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2013/01/09/the-steubenville-rape-guilt-evil-sorrow-and-institutional-failure-in-education/

Before social media, a slick public relations employee would have swept this rape case under the rug, like they do many thousands of cases all across the country.  In Steubenville, Ohio it was only social media that exposed the crime in such a way that the media actually covered the story—which they usually don’t.  Because of the video evidence, which is rare, news outlets had to cover the information once it was brought to people’s eyes—and the case exploded into a national spectacle.  Many people didn’t want to believe that the events occurred, and many news outlets attempted to put on a happy face, while many in the Steubenville community who wanted to continue worshiping their football stars attacked the rape victim and her parents for saying anything about the issue—or “tempting” the boys in the first place. All of the ugliness of high school sports, public education, and the real relationship they all have with the communities which fund them was exposed in a raw fashion that many people didn’t know what to do with.

So it came to my eyes early on Monday the following AP news wire story confirming all that I had said previously, and a great relief swept over me.  The sadness for the poor girl was something I already dealt with—but this most recent news was the granting of a Thanksgiving Day wish provided early—justice for the victim and exposure of what public education is truly about—collectivism, sacrifice, and cover-ups.

STEUBENVILLE, Ohio (AP) – A school superintendent and three more people have been charged by a grand jury that investigated whether other laws were broken in the rape of a 16-year-old West Virginia girl last year in eastern Ohio.

Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine announced the charges Monday in Steubenville

http://www.wpsdlocal6.com/home/ticker/School-superintendent-among-4-charged-in-Stubenville-rape-case-233321851.html

William Rhinaman, 53, director of technology at Steubenville High School, faces four counts: tampering with evidence, obstructing justice, obstructing official business and perjury in connection with the case, DeWine said. Rhinaman was arrested Monday.

If convicted, he could face four years behind bars, more time than the two convicted boys will serve.

Details of the indictment, including what kind of evidence was allegedly tampered with, were not immediately available.

“This is the first indictment in an ongoing grand jury investigation,” DeWine said in a prepared statement. “Our goal remains to uncover the truth, and our investigation continues.”

http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/08/justice/ohio-steubenville-rape-arrest/

Most of the time, including what I have said about my home school district of Lakota, everything comes true—sometimes it takes months, sometimes years, but eventually, when I open my mouth about something—it comes true in nearly the exact fashion that I frame it.  It’s not because I’m a prophet of some kind receiving mystical guidance from beyond the grave—but because of Robert Pirsig’s train explanation regarding the metaphysics of quality.  When you live on the edge of the train, you see things before those in the caboose do.  Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom is all about that cutting edge.  So the Steubenville grand jury charges are the only real payment I get for the work that goes into this “New Media” form of reporting.  It is why I do this kind of thing—because if somebody doesn’t—these cases get swept under the rug by traditional media 100% of the time.  They always have, and will continue unless “New Media” reporters expose them.

In the case of Steubenville it was Deric Lostutter who exposed the rape from the school cover-up, and if he hadn’t posted the images sent to him by members of a group of computer hackers working in the collective hive of “Anonymous” there would have been no justice in the case at all.  The school officials would have covered up another crime, and life would have returned to normal for the members of the Steubenville community.  That is why the FBI raided Lostutter to begin harassing him once he was discovered as the man behind the exposure—which I have also explained in previous articles.  CLICK BELOW TO REVIEW.

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2013/06/14/why-good-men-wear-a-mask-the-case-of-deric-lostutter/

However, Lostutter is far from a hero in the “Anonymous” circles because he has gained individual fame for his stance in protecting the rights of the Steubenville victim.  Since his fame from the case, “Anonymous” has distanced themselves from him in the usual fashion.  “Anonymous” members tend to think the way their public educations taught them to, as anarchists, socialists, Marxists and other radical types all centering around collective identity—which is why they call themselves the “hive.”  They see themselves as a hive of bees I suppose serving some higher purpose.  They certainly aren’t capitalists, and once Lostutter showed a knack for dealing with the media and achieved some fame, he had distinguished himself as an individual which is a big no, no with “Anonymous.”  Here is a sampling of their thinking complete with grammatical issues:

Deric Lostuttter began once again seeking media attention by doing media interviews on behalf of Anonymous, and the organizers of #opmaryville. An operation to bring justice to a teenage victim and her family after a sexual assault occurred by football players in a tiny Ohio town

The victim and her family brought charges against Players on the high school football team, but those charges were promptly dismissed by local prosecuting attorneys(citing lack of evidence and the victims refusal to cooperate), and the victim’s home was burnt to the ground prompting the family to get out of town. Maryville’s Local sherrif quoted as saying that “they did all that they could, but charges were dropped due to lack of evidence and the victim and her family just need to get over it and move on.” The victim and her family accuse the sherriff and prosecutors of lying, and deny not cooperating.

As Anonymous geared up to rally behind the victim and her family, Maryville’s official sites were taken offline to protect the town servers, and the local sherriff began to mock the Anonymous Hive.

Lostutter, who as of Monday began tweeting and posting about the case on his facebook was told early on by members of anonymous that he would not be a part of this operation, as he’s a “famefagging attention seeker” and for the op to go right, his fake anonymous ass should stay the fuck out of things.” Lostutter then began once again comparing himself to Barret Brown, Jeremey Hammond, and Edward Snowden continued to post about Maryville even issuing a false press release about #opmaryville from his twitter. Lostutter now dubbed, The Leader of Anonymous in one article in which he admitted he knew nothing about #opmaryville. Which makes no sense because usually when you’re interviewed it’s because you have direct knowledge of what’s goin on. The Daily Dot quickly retracted the title of Anon Leader, but not until after a internet backlash which pissed off thousands.  This however didn’t stop Lostutter from continuing to seek out media interviews as the “Spokesman for Anonymous” in which he continued to speak for and about #opmaryville without being involved or having any knowledge of the real Anons organizing the operation.

http://mobilebroadcastnews.com/NewsRoom/Don-Carpenter/Anonymous-Deric-Lostutter-Stay-Hell-out-opmaryville

So there is a lot going on regarding the Steubenville case, but the bottom line is that it took the courage of individuals to expose the various levels of collectivism which attempted to cover up the crime.  Even with the New Media outlets that put the story on the front page of newspapers and brought national coverage to the issue collectivism is still the impediment to justice, but because of people like Lostutter, the ability to sacrifice single victims to the plight of a collective whole has been greatly minimized.

I am happy to see justice done, and I will enjoy my Thanksgiving that much more knowing corrupt school officials are going to jail over the incident. There are a lot more names to add to the list of indictments from thousands of schools all over the country doing essentially the same thing, but Steubenville is a good place to start—and the four officials citied are simply the first—they won’t be the last.  Because of “New Media,” traditional media must compete, and that spells doom for school districts and communities everywhere who are accustomed to cover-ups like the one in Steubenville.  And that is something to truly be “thankful” for.

 

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

 

The Hope That’s Coming: A Star Wars mythology to change the world under Disney for the better

It looks like I’ll get to see the next Star Wars Episode 7 with my family at the new Liberty Center movie theater as the release date is now December 18th 2015.  This is exciting news for me as my family loves Star Wars.  Philosophically, Star Wars if very healthy stuff full of optimism for human potential.  George Lucas has done something quite marvelous with it, he has combined the raw selfish energy of Han Solo—who is unquestionably Randian, and merged his usefulness with all the comparative religions of the world embodied in The Force.  I have said many things about Star Wars and the impact it has on our society upon these pages because I see it as a cultural phenomena that has the potential to produce a seismic shift in human consciousness, and I’m going to say things here that I think will give people a lot of hope.  I’ve been holding off until after the election to address some of these exciting developments, but I know you dear reader need a shot in the arm—so I intend to give it to you.

As I’ve discussed on several occasions I would say the most formal schooling I had which I didn’t consider a waste of time was the ten years I spent studying comparative religion and world mythology.  The most important person in my life and primary motivator of my ideals has been and will always be Joseph Campbell.  My parents did a good job of giving me value, but my intellectual development came from Campbell.  What he did in the middle of the progressive era was quite astonishing.  He was a conservative who had a following of radical hippies in search of meaning, and Campbell was able to transcend all those ideologies with an intellectual pursuit that has shaped our modern world.  One of those nutty hippies was George Lucas—who wasn’t like the rest of the drug induced film makers studying under Francis Ford Coppola in San Francisco.  He was a race car driver who had nearly died in a car wreck and had his life flash before his eyes with an intellectual hunger that was moving at a million miles an hour.  It was in this period that Lucas discovered Campbell’s epically important book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, the most important book in my personal library.   I spent ten years reading Campbell and was for a time a member of The Joseph Campbell Foundation while George Lucas sat on as a board of director.   Campbell had died in 1987 but ten years later we had a big meeting in Washington D.C. which for me was a personal odyssey similar to The Wizard of Oz.  Upon arriving at “OZ” I discovered that everyone was far from epic in their intellectual standards and had become mere cult-like followers of Campbell, which left me feeling as if I pulled back the curtain of an entire intellectual industry and discovered a decrepit old man attempting to appear greater than he really was.

I always took my kids to these kinds of things, which pissed off everyone as Campbell’s wife Jean had never had a child.  There were no kids at the big meeting of the minds and they resented me for bringing them.  But as a father, I always delivered to my kids the opportunity to live their own life of adventure without restriction of intellectual limits, and I wanted them to meet the kind of people who molded public sentiment.  After the meeting, my family broke off to do our own thing and we didn’t socialize further with the Campbell followers.  It was Halloween in Washington D.C. and my plan was to take my kids Trick or Treating.  We went to a neighborhood in Chevy Chase, but my kids refused to go up to a single door because they didn’t trust the neighborhood and felt out of their element.  So we went back to our hotel and I improvised.  Using lessons learned from Joseph Campbell I decided to give my children a mythic experience, since that was what Trick or Treating was supposed to entail.   While the Joseph Campbell Foundation members were down the hall trying to resurrect his dead spirit with chants and hand-holding, my kids went trick or treating at our hotel door.  They were only 6 and 7 years old at the time and my wife was worried that we were ruining one of their precious Halloweens of their youth by being on the road.  So I dressed up as a different character that opened the door each time my kids visited.  I’d give them candy then they’d run down the hall of the hotel giving me time to change into a different costume, then they’d come back.  I used everything I could find inside that hotel room to try to appear as a different person, or (creature) each time they arrived at the door proclaiming, “trick or treat!”

To this day, as recently as this latest Halloween where they are now girls in their twenties, they still talk about that Halloween in Washington as being their favorite—and it was a one man show put on by me exclusively.  My wife did help a couple of times as I struggled to find new costumes with what was inside our room.  The reason my children loved that Halloween so much was because I gave them a mythic experience, something that was representative of reality but spoke of higher ideals beyond temporal existence—which is what most everyone in one form or another yearns for.  Some people look for it in sex, love, career, drunkenness, financial power, or in eating—but everyone is looking for meaning to each breath they take.

Star Wars is the best embodiment in the modern world of human meaning.   It is mythology that goes well beyond a simple blockbuster film intended to make money for the Disney Company.  It has an importance that is unfathomable to contemporary thinking, and is a gift from George Lucas that only he could have come up with after surviving his devastating car wreck.  He lived a life of extremes; he was a race car driver, and an avid reader who wanted to be an anthropologist.  Those two radically opposite ideals are what make Star Wars so important to the human race.  The reason is that Star Wars is about values, and conveying those values through a story, which is the heart of all mythologies.  Star Wars because it was set a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away is able to transcend religious temperament here on earth and explore the meaning of value with conflict removed.  Such an example would be of whose version of religion is correct Muslims or Christians.   Star Wars explores the same values without violating people’s religious beliefs which is all too often the greatest hindrance to understanding.  So it is far more than just another movie, it has the power through its story to transform culture—and I predict that these new films will do just that.

When the first Star Wars film came out in 1977 America was in the middle of the Carter administration, Nixon had just been impeached, and gas prices were too high causing long lines at the pumps.  Iran was moving aggressively against America on multiple fronts and the USSR was trying to inject communism into America through every open sore.   A New Hope followed quickly by 1980’s The Empire Strikes Back changed Hollywood and by their own merit kick started the 1980’s and the Reagan presidency.  The way those movies captured the imagination of the world was a form that only mythology could generate.  Star Wars is bigger than Star Trek which explores ideals in an interesting way.  Star Wars is purely about mythology and the power of it to convey complicated messages.   For the same reasons that my daughters loved that particular Trick or Treat event in Washington D.C. as little girls, Star Wars for many people no matter how jaded, is their “mythic experience,” and they can’t get enough of it.  Star Wars is about values.

When George Lucas wrote the character of Han Solo played by Harrison Ford, he thought of all the motor heads he knew from his racing days.  Lucas unquestionably had read Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, and Han Solo was his answer to a Randian archetype.  He meant for Han Solo to be won over by altruism conveyed through Luke Skywalker during the course of the movies and learn how to think of others first—it is the classic sacrifice and the bliss stuff so crucial to Joseph Campbell’s writings.  That was before Lawrence Kasden got a hold of Lucas’ script and made Han Solo one of the most compelling characters in the history of film—unintentionally becoming the ultimate hero of the entire saga.  In fact, what is missing from Return of the Jedi and the prequal films is a Han Solo type of character.  Lucas attempted to humble Solo a bit by the third film, and it came out a bit flat.   Even though Lucas intended to make an altruistic film out of Star Wars, the values of the characters took on a life of their own and became their own mythic experience.  Lucas being enough of a lover of capitalism wisely let the story take on the form that THE FORCE intended and let things develop along their market value.  Harrison Ford went on to become an international sensation while Mark Hamill even though he was the star of the films, got lost in the shadows.

The new films are being written again by Kasden, and the implications of this are quite extraordinary.  Kasden is a very, talented story-teller who clearly understands mythology in ways that are different from George Lucas and very complimentary.  Harrison Ford, Hamill, Fisher and many of the original cast will be back for the new films, and Ford appears to have a multi picture deal with Disney, so the Millennium Falcon will survive well into the future of the Star Wars franchise it would seem.  The Falcon is the most important space ship ever created, even more so than the Space Shuttle. It is a modern-day pirate ship and symbol of freedom and rebellion in the Star Wars universe, and is one of the most recognizable objects on planet earth.  If I had to take a bet, I would say more people know more about the Falcon than who their local congressman is.  They probably know more about the Millennium Falcon than most of their own family members.  Disney wisely is beginning to flex their mythological muscle already announcing that they are building a full-scale replica of the Millennium Falcon at their Anaheim Park in California prompting this guy below to declare:

Robobob

This has been my life long dream… to walk in a full-scale replica of the Millennium Falcon. After this, I can die a content middle-aged man.

http://www.theforce.net/story/front/New_Rumor_Has_Disneyland_Getting_A_Millennium_Falcon_Ewok_Village_And_More_154601.asp

Well, I reflect his sentiment.  I’m right there with him and the hundreds if not thousands of others who share his opinion.  I have not been shy about my love for the Millennium Falcon.  My current favorite place in the whole world physical and virtual is aboard the ship I have on the game The Old Republic which is very similar to the Millennium Falcon.  I understand why people are so excited about a full-scale Millennium Falcon at Disneyland, it is for them a mythic experience.  I will love taking my grandchildren aboard a Millennium Falcon looking up at it from the foot of the loading ramp.  That will be magnificent.

After eight years of Obama no matter what their political affiliation, people are tired.  People don’t like communism and socialism, and for nearly 16 years, the United States government has forced heavy doses of socialism upon America growing government in ways that modern mythology has failed to capture.  Television shows reflect too often statism, music is too political, and our court system is loaded with greedy lawyers trying to make mountains out of mole hills taking advantage of ACLU cases.  Millions of online gamers have retreated from the real world to the virtual one to escape the tyranny of statism—because no place else is dealing with the mythic experience they require to comprehend the forces at play in their lives—except Star Wars.

When the next wave of Star Wars hits in 2014 with the Disney XD television show titled Rebels, it will have all the familiar signs of the past, the positive social impact, the economic stimulation, the cultural desire for goodness and fighting evil on behalf of justice.  But this time a Disney financial machine in need of a new wave of revenue will use its considerable power for good because for the first time in decades the market need for goodness will line up with the needed greed of corporate interests and will benefit society in countless ways.  It won’t be just a movie that comes out, but a mythological experience that will engulf most levels of human existence, and will be one of the greatest vehicles of capitalism displayed in a number of years.

Hollywood as a whole is in trouble.  Labor agreements with the various entertainment unions will paralyze the industry in the coming years—within four years to be specific.  Several studios will go out of business like the many steel and auto manufacturers of the past—collapsed by the labor unions and their collective bargaining agreements.  Money men won’t risk their money if they have to share too much wealth and will move on to other forms of revenue streams—likely oversea investments.  The reason Star Wars moved to December 18th, aside from gaining an extra 6 months to do post production work, was to avoid soaking up the money that can be made off the next Avengers film, and other big movies like Jurassic Park 4, and the Superman VS. Batman.  Once Warner Brothers and Disney have played out the superhero films, and the stars demand larger fees under union rules, there won’t be many other large projects that can carry the type of box office numbers these big action films produce.  The union wages being so high forces great box office turnout, and people aren’t going to line up to see the newest Oprah film, or romantic comedy getting box office numbers that justify the investment.  This is going to crush Hollywood, because the revenue stream won’t keep going.  Disney however has Star Wars, and they can hedge their labor costs with theme park revenue.  Without those theme parks, Disney would be victim to the same kind forces that the other studios are going to face—parasitic labor union practices.  Because of the vacuum of power that the Hollywood left will have in this period, they will be forced to compete with Star Wars, which is a force for good—or they will be financially crushed.  The string of progressive films that have been projected upon the silver screen for two decades now will abate, because capitalism will force their hand to abandon their liberal ideals the same way that Lucas had to re-think Han Solo as a character—because the market drove the character’s importance.

Behind all this is a rather solid formula that Joseph Campbell outlined in his life’s work on comparative mythology. That work directly shapes the kind of stories that are told in the various Star Wars formats, whether it be film, television, books, gaming, or comics—the need for the stories are what matter most, and the reason for the need.  Once those things are understood, they can be explored in the story telling process.  That is precisely what is going to happen when the first Star Wars film hits in 2015.  A market need is going to be fulfilled in a big way, and that need was created by anxiety driven through lack of mythological coordination.  Statist governments have attempted to suppress that mythological need and reshape it in their own image—and they have foolishly attempted to force it down society’s throat without listening to the market needs.  In the Star Wars equivalent, if government had been in George Lucas’ shoes, they would have forced the Luke Skywalker angle and suppressed the Han Solo one—and what they would have ended up with would be something along the lines of the prequels—entertaining, nice to look at, but lacking the kind of meaning that makes grown men want to walk through a full-scale Millennium Falcon as their life goal.  It says a lot that a fictional space ship that is over 30 years old has more mythological meaning than any other creation proposed over that same span of time.  The Falcon represents rebellion, defiance, speed, and freedom—that is why people love it.  And as long as those symbols exist in our society, statist government will not succeed.  So when Star Wars hits the new theater at Liberty Center, and a wave of excitement emits in a way that few people have seen in their lifetimes, more than a movie will be presented.  A mythology will be offered, and that is more powerful than all the weapons of the world—because weapons are built to destroy the will of an enemy with fear.  Mythology is designed to build a mind up to withstand the fears they are presented with, and in a perpetual game of tug and war between those two forces one that is generally regulated to only religions and some mild forms of entertainment, the other is supported by large governments with the endless ability to steal the money of their tax payers to support their grip on power.  Star Wars does what only mythology without the congestion of focus on the afterlife can achieve, and that is to bring the mind to what it truly craves which is freedom, innovation, and rebellion against those who seek to suppress it.

I can’t freaking wait!

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

 

Why Voting For The Lakota Levy Is Stupid: Darryl Parks talks about the 2013 school levy on 700 WLW

It was good to hear Darryl Parks maintain his position on school levies, and specifically, the Lakota school levy.  I have purposely avoided doing talk radio during this latest campaign primarily because the levy fighting going into the future needs to grow and more people must to be involved—and for some talk radio can be an intimidating forum to utilize.  Aside from that, there is already a large collection of talk radio interviews that have been done in the past, which are still relevant online.  More broadcasts talking about the same topics tend to become counterproductive, so they were avoided strategically.  Also involved was the issue that No Lakota Levy wished to maintain their message of fiscal responsibility within the Lakota district where I have evolved into questioning the basic premise of public education and believe that it should be abandoned all together in its current form.    Darryl’s position is closer to the No Lakota Levy view, where mine isn’t something that many people are ready to hear, because the answer requires difficult choices—and admissions.  Yet Darryl is well aware what is driving the Lakota levy and he talked about it on his Saturday, November 2nd show which can be heard below.  The Lakota levy is about wealth redistribution, it is a socialist concept created by progressives, and it’s unconstitutional.  It is all about taking from the rich and giving to the poor which is the ugly underbelly of all school levies—but one that gets avoided because of the implications pointing to communist roots.  Nobody wants to admit that their school where their children are attending is a socialist concept.  Nobody wants to face that the educations they received when they were young was a communist creation, but if they think hard enough, the admission becomes easier once they understand the meanings.  CLICK HERE TO REVIEW.  Darryl smartly stays off that topic, but discusses the result—the cost of the Lakota levy for people with $300K to $400K homes will be an additional $600.00 to $800.00 a year and that will likely mean no summer vacations, no big purchases of new furniture, televisions, or even air travel to an overseas destination.  If the Lakota levy were to pass, the people with the most money would have to make sacrifices that those without so much money would otherwise have to make.

Most of the supporters of the Lakota levy are either people who have ridden the coat-tails of those who do have money yet don’t understand the real value—so they are quick to give it away, or they are simply new parents who want what’s best for their children and they believe that public education complete with busing services is the best way to give it to them.  These types make up the vast majority of the levy supporters, and they believe that a “rich man” or a well to do household can afford an extra $800 dollars in taxes a year because they have a $400,000 house.  They believe that if a business can afford to carry payroll, or the owners have a net worth of over a million dollars that they are required to pay more in taxes so that the child of a family not so fortunate can have an education.  Well—anybody who thinks that way is wrong.  That belief is a communist sentiment brought to America through the labor union movement, and it is at the heart of every single school levy.

Just before the Lakota levy vote, superintendent Mantia sent out the following letter to business owners all across West Chester and Liberty Twp.  She likely broke the law sending it because it is campaign literature for levy passage created during her contract hours of work which is technically against Ohio Revised Code 3315.07, which states in part “no board of education shall use public funds to support or oppose the passage of a school levy or bond issue or to compensate any school district employee for time spent on any activity intended to influence the outcome of a school levy or bond issue.”  But whose going to prosecute her………..Sheriff Jones?  He has a deal with Mantia if the levy passes, so he’ll gladly look the other way and so will all the state prosecutors.  The letter from Mantia is a thinly disguised reminder that the business community must pay their “fair share” as determined by the needs of the many.  Mantia means to strong-arm the business community into supporting higher taxes so to avoid the public disgrace of refusing.  I know quite a few business owners in and around Lakota and not a single one of them believe the arguments Mantia presented on the document.  They know that less than 5% of the proposed levy revenue is going to the kind of things she addressed.  The rest of the money is going to Lakota employee raises.  Yet they have felt compelled in the past to just go along to get along.  If the school raised taxes, they’d just raise their prices of service.  This worked for decades until the present time when consumers have proven that they have had enough, and won’t purchase items at a higher price.  So businesses are no longer willing to pass off those higher costs as they are between a rock and a hard place.  If they chose not to support a levy they get called names like selfish, mean-spirited, and have the PTA organizations threaten boycotts against their businesses, such as what happened after the last election.  CLICK HERE FOR REVIEW.  If they pass the tax increase off onto their customers, they will lose business.LAKOTA-LETTER[1]

The levy advocates have a bottomless pit of need and they believe that because a homeowner owns a Mercedes, spends $800 on a meal for business clients, and has a home valued over $500K that they have an obligation toward higher taxes—and they are dead wrong.  Because the taxes never stop, one of those wealthy tax payers today might pay taxes at $600 to $800 more a year every four years for the life of their businesses and will find that they will either have to move to a district with less taxes, or let the value of their assets decrease so that there will be nothing left once their children inherit their lifetime of hard work.   Lakota business owners and residents have been relatively smart in voting down continued school levies—not passing one since 2005.  West Chester and Liberty Township are thriving economic communities where other places like Fairfield, Finneytown, and Evendale are struggling because they are yesterday’s has-beens.  They said yes to similar letters from school superintendents in the past and it cost them their livelihoods.

Butler County in general was built on a foundation of lower taxes.  Why does anybody believe that Bass Pro Shops is leaving Forest Park and moving to West Chester—or here is a better question—why is the economy at Forest Park so bad that the mall there is a virtual ghost town?  One, it is taxes, two it is too much government housing and a demographic population that lives off government money.  The people of Forest Park have less value for money because the government sends them a check in the mail.  Therefore, they do not enjoy the kind of things that Forest Fair Mall tried to offer them over the years as far as retail shopping.  So companies moved out or went out of business.  They went to West Chester where the taxes are less, and people appreciate nice things.  West Chester is still driven by capitalism where Forest Park is drowning in socialism—a string of unfortunate and unintended consequences.  I know this first hand, about twenty years ago I was a personal driver for a Bengal player.  It was my job to drive him around and make sure he got home safely while he jumped from bar to bar.  If people got too close, it was my job to make sure he was covered.  I’d drive this guy all over the city to every hot night spot in town.  Since I didn’t drink or do drugs, I was a good candidate for this kind of thing and wasn’t tempted to play along.  At the end of the day, around 4 AM I’d take him home to his wife.  They lived in a nice part of town full of promise.  They lived in Forest Park, and thought of it as a land of luxury.  Today, that same home is surrounded by Section 8 housing and a welfare demographic that has very few people officially employed.  That is why Forest Fair Mall has failed, and the former Bengal player is no longer married to that woman.  Bad investments lead to bad lifestyles.  Bad lifestyles lead to failed businesses.  Failed businesses lead to empty malls like the one at Forest Fair Mall.

Every resident in the Lakota school district has an obligation to defend their homes and property from the clutches of big government spenders like superintendent Mantia.  Failure to say no to them will result in the same kind of declining community as seen in present day Forest Park, Fairfield and many other places where high taxes and demographic changes have destroyed their communities.  In Lakota, it is the targets of Mantia’s letter that make the community such a nice place, the restaurant owners, the developers, and the financiers.  If they get frustrated with the tax rates and pick up to move, they will leave behind in Lakota a community with crushing tax rates yet no businesses to pay them, because nobody takes the risk of owning something without expected to earn money from it.  The value of any money earned goes down with every tax increase.  Communists, or those trained in the ways of communism have no value for money—they find themselves seeking government employment because that is the only place they can earn a decent living thinking the way they do.  Superintendent Mantia does not understand business.  She thinks because she gets a hand shake and a bit of idle chatter at a charity event from many of the people she sent that letter to, she is on good terms with them.  But she’s not.  What she gets is appeasement the way a person who gets pulled over by a cop tries to appease the cop so that they don’t end up in jail.  Business owners want to keep the peace and the looters out of their pockets.  Taxes like the one proposed for this November levy permanently change wealth, and gives business owners less money to invest in the community, and that is not a good thing.

The communists who devised this ridiculous plan knew what they were doing.  They hated the rich, and sought to level the playing field in every endeavor.  Most levy supporters when asked enough question will reflect the communist roots of their belief when they state that everyone could afford to pay just a bit more for the good of the children.  Many of them will only pay $30 dollars more a month, and since they have kids in the school, it’s no big deal to them.  It’s cheaper than driving their children to school if they are lucky enough to get busing back.  They may cut one trip out to eat with their family a month, and pay their higher tax without further complaint.  But for business owners with millions of dollars in assessed property value, they will be taxed much higher, and the levy supporters with much less personal value will directly benefit.  It’s called confiscation of wealth by the needy majority, and it is a communist concept—and a sickening enterprise.

The school levy at Lakota and every other school district is simply a redistribution of wealth scam that uses children to fulfill a political agenda that as Darryl Parks stated, is unconstitutional.  For the same reasons that superintendents like Lakota’s Mantia ignore Ohio Revised Code 3315.07, authorities under state control ignore the unconstitutional nature of the school levy system because they have allowed the monopoly of public education to dominate the political arena with a communist sentiment that belongs in Kazakhstan, not West Chester, Ohio.  There is nothing good that comes out of tax increases, but everything bad—an element missing from Mantia’s letter.  She likely has no idea what the people who she sent that letter to really think of her, and probably thinks they believe what she is saying as much as she does.  But the difference between her and them is that they actually produce things, while she is just another government parasite, a worker living off the tax payers and again advocating more taxes so her ilk can sustain their unsustainable wages for a few more years.  If there is no other reason to vote against a school levy anywhere in Ohio, it is because the concept is a flawed one that goes against everything America is supposed to stand for—capitalism.  School levies are wealth redistribution attempts by progressive minds for aims that are not beneficial to thriving economies.  And every one of them should be voted down because they won’t end in 2013.  They will continue well into the future until there is no money left to loot and people finally say no because they have nothing left to give.  For the sake of Lakota, and the community that feeds it, the NO VOTES need to come now, while there is still money being produced in an economy that is the envy of Ohio.  Voting NO on the Lakota levy goes a long way to keeping that status.

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

Give yourself the gift of ADVENTURE.  CLICK HERE!  

Why To Vote For Mark Welch and Matt King: A debate for West Chester Trustee

Over this past week, there were a couple of public debates allowing the current West Chester trustees Catherine Stoker and Lee Wong to defend their records against the challengers Mark Welch and Matt King.  I support Mark and Matt and you dear reader will too after watching the video shown below.  Clearly Mark and Matt are much more competent as potential trustees.  Just listen to them.  There really isn’t any question.

Listening and watching Wong and Stoker defending their records,  Stoker came across as a career, 20 year politician.  Her comments were political, polished, and non-committal, the way long time politicians always are.  Wong on the other hand declared that the reason he should be trustee again was because “people like bike paths, they like to talk to one another, and he rides his bicycle all over West Chester.”  Serious!  He must have said it 7 times during the debate.  The most telling aspects of the debate are the things that Stoker and Wong took credit for and the things they said were out of their control.  A couple of those things were: “zoning regulations were voted on by citizens.”  We are not supposed to blame the trustees who had final approval of these regulations, because it was the will of the people. “The land use plan was put together by a citizens committee.”  In other words, voters cannot blame trustees who had final approval of the plan, because a citizen committee of ass kissing Agenda 21 loving statists created it under their subtle nudges.  “Zoning review committee is manned by citizens.”—whom Trustees appointed and Trustees will have final approval of their work. “The citizens voted for the aggregation program(s)”—(so trustees who voted for approval are off the hook).  See how it works?  Listen carefully to the way the current trustees try to shrug off any responsibility for anything that might be unpleasant.

Stoker blamed the withholding of legal expenses from inclusion in the trustee agenda on staff not being able to pay a vendor, a vendor billing at the current rate of $290 per hour that could not be contacted for longer terms, a vendor whose billings were included in over half a million dollars of legal expenses to the township during 2012?  In defending the Wong and Stoker exclusion of Fiscal Officer from executive sessions, Stoker cast doubt on the integrity of the Fiscal Officer without cause.  But yet, as trustees, Wong and Stoker claim all the credit for the successful operations of the township and the growth of commerce and industry.  No credit to the developers, investors, merchants, donors, etc.—the visionaries who really made it work—or the staff and employees of the township who helped enable it.  Bet you didn’t know that video was so exciting did you?  Watch it again with “educated eyes.”

If this debate doesn’t clear things up about who the people are behind the campaign signs, then it needs to be watched until it does—because the differences are incredibly obvious.  The decision is basically does West Chester want a couple of long-term career politicians who have little idea how to run the community, or do they want a couple of highly competent businessmen who have more than two cents to apply to the various problems of community management.

For me it is easy to decide.  I wouldn’t vote for Wong because he’s certainly not competent.  He is a nice enough guy, but there is more to running a community’s finances than riding a bicycle around West Chester.  And with Stoker, she is too politically savy to actually do the will of the people.  She is a typical politician, and that alone makes her unqualified.  The only real answer is Welch and King.  Those two guys represent opportunity.  The other two represent stagnation, complacency, and a slide backwards toward the business cycle of so many Cincinnati communities that have had their day in the sun, then fallen to decline due to corrosive politicians.

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

Give yourself the gift of ADVENTURE.  CLICK HERE!  

The Panic Driven Lakota Looter: Helping the pro levy side find some help

If you are a Frito eating, couch sitting, pill popping insecure parent who is seeking a free education for your children off the backs of residents in the Lakota school district I want to help you with an announcement.  The school principals working with the various PTO groups at Lakota are frustrated that there aren’t more social degenerates to join their ranks in this election of 2013.  They are concerned that there doesn’t seem to be the same “passion” for helping to pass a devastating tax increase this time around.  At least that is the word from within their pro levy ranks.  Outwardly, it is business as usual—apply socialist leaning tax increases to brainwash children into mass collectivism—and lie, cheat and steal to accomplish the task.

So just to make this election a little more balanced, I want to help those enemies of intelligence by distributing their advertisement for a Pro Levy rally that is being organized by the Endeavor PTO group—the type of people I called “latte sipping prostitutes” during the last election.  CLICK HERE TO READ THAT ENQUIRER ARTICLE AND REVIEW MY OPINION OF THESE PEOPLE.  They are at it again, but this time fewer people seem interested in helping the school principals dodge Ohio state law working in favor of tax increases with brain-dead, neurotic levy supporters as their foot soldiers of social destruction.  So for those who are stupid enough to vote for a school levy and secretly seek a baby sitter to watch their children because they are too lazy to care for them personally, below is an event you will want to attend, to be around like-minded pro tax supporters.  As for the rest, here is a glimpse into the mind of social menaces disguised as smiling community patriots.  In reality most of them are simply latte sipping prostitutes with asses………………..well you know the rest.

Hello Endeavor Staff and PTO!

Thank you for sharing your personal emails with me so I can efficiently communicate levy campaign information. (A couple of the staff emails I received are not valid, so please communicate this information with your colleagues.  Jen and Kym, please forward to everyone you can!)  We have two important events coming up as we head into the home stretch of the campaign and we need our Endeavor community to help us make them successful!

October 26th Caravan and Rally!

 

Join us at Endeavor at 9:00 am for this fun event to generate excitement and encourage early voting!

We will dress up our cars and caravan through the community on our way to Plains where we will meet up with the rest of LAKOTA  at 10:00 am for a brief rally, celebration and prizes.  We will have decorating supplies on hand along with donuts and coffee to fuel our spirits.  (Feel free to bring your own decorations as well!  You can print “For Lakota” logos at forlakota.com.)

Following the program, join the group as we head to the Board of Elections to cast our ballots and be counted!

Bring your friends, bring your neighbors and LET’S GET OUT THE VOTE!!!!

Please let me know if you are able to join us so I know how many supplies to purchase.  Let’s make Endeavor’s caravan the most impressive!!!

October 30th Canvassing!

 

I PROMISE it won’t be as bad as it sounds!  Endeavor already filled a phone banking session back in September and made HUNDREDS of calls in less than 2 hours – and everyone came out alive!  🙂  Now it’s time to fill a canvassing session to get people out to VOTE!  As the people who participated in the phone banking can tell you, we are not trying to convince “no” voters to change their minds.  We are simply getting information out and reminding people of the importance of actually casting their ballots.  The levy committee will provide training, including a script and materials. We will travel in teams of 2 so you don’t have to go alone!

We are sharing a session with Heritage on Wednesday, October 30th.  Endeavor is committed to filling 20 spots (10 teams of 2).  We will all meet at Heritage at 4:30 pm for training and then head out from there.  Missy (Heritage’s principal) and I will provide pizza for our awesome volunteers before we hit the pavement.   Please consider volunteering about 3 hours on this evening to help get the “yes” votes to the polls!  Research proves that door to door communication is absolutely critical to winning any campaign.

Please let me know if you are able to support this effort so I can let the committee know how many routes to prepare.  Thanks!

If you cannot participate on the 30th, but would like to help another day, please follow the link below to Sign-Up Genius.

http://www.signupgenius.com/go/10C0C4CACAD2CA2FB6-canvassing1

Thanks so much!  Please let me know if you have any questions!

Joanna

As it can be seen, the principals of several Lakota schools are behind this effort and there are scripts, phone banks and all out attempts to turn NO voters into Yes voters.  They are supposedly doing this on their own time, to avoid violating Ohio law which states that school employees cannot support levy activity. It doesn’t matter to anybody that many of these plans, emails and phone calls do occur during work hours.  But when it comes to what a lot of these school principals get paid at Lakota, a few weekends of time volunteered is worth it to them. Look at what they get paid, seen on the No Lakota Levy website.
2012 Salary Analysis: Lakota School District

Click here to see for yourself! 

http://www.nolakotalevy.com/salaries.html

It becomes clear quickly what’s in it for the school administrators at Lakota.  It’s all about money, and they need enough mindless supporters to jump on board and support their financial scam.  Unfortunately, because of the efforts over the years of educating the public, more people than ever know what is behind these types of games.  It gives me great pride to see that No Lakota Levy has evolved into such a respectable organization that provides so much wonderful content.  It has come a long way from a website that my daughter and I put together on a shoe string budget.  Some of the smartest minds of the Lakota business community are behind the website, and it shows.  I am very proud and happy to share a community with those people as they have taken No Lakota Levy to new levels of competency.

Without groups like No Lakota Levy, there is no defense against the kind of school sponsored activities described in the literature above from the PTO group.  No Lakota Levy today is a kinder, gentler version of a tax fighting organization than when I was with them, but that doesn’t reduce their effectiveness.  I feel more passionately over the wrong doings that occur within the education industry than most people do, so my attitude over public education has reflected that social position.  I obviously do not like supporters and employees of public education for philosophical reasons that I see detrimental to the human race—and capitalism.  The current members of No Lakota Levy are good community minded people who simply wish the facts of the education nightmare currently going on in the Lakota school district be known, and on their new website, they let the facts tell the whole story without a lot of emotion to drive the temperament—which is very good.

The reason for this upcoming Lakota levy, for the proposed impact on businesses, residents barely scraping by, and all the tax payers about to be rampaged with 20% increases in their health care costs due to Obamacare, is to support the salary structure shown above, from the No Lakota Levy website.  The reason that the principals of the schools mentioned are hard at work building a network of levy supporting zombies to do their dirty ground work of tax increase promotion is to protect their wage structure with perceived value hidden behind layers of emotion.  They are protecting their jobs which pay outrageously high benefits for being simply glorified baby sitters, and they need the levy to continue their corrosive pillaging of the Lakota community.

The reason the numbers of people volunteering for these PTO rally events is declining is because more people than ever know why Lakota is financially strapped.  It’s not for lack of money, in the same way that Washington politicians just approved a debt ceiling increase over $17 trillion while tax payers are paying more money to the government than at any point in American history, the government is still spending more money than they are taking in—Lakota plans to spend more money than they take in because of poor management choices—which become glaringly clear when the salary structure is shown.

I’m normally not a person who calls other people names.  I actually do listen to people who think differently than I do.  However, I have learned with these levy supporters that they are fanatically ignorant to the facts of reality and they truly wish to hurt other people with their misguided world view—and neurotic sentiments.  I find them despicable, detrimental to the furtherance of human evolution, and woefully destructive as thinking sentient beings.  I have grown to despise them for their desire to harm entire communities with high taxes based on no fact driven analysis which stays with every single property owner of Liberty and West Chester Townships for most of their lives.  The short-sightedness of the levy supporter angers me greatly.

But even I have a little compassion for them when they try to host a rally, and nobody wants to show up because everyone thinks they are idiots.  They’ll have the usual levy fanatics—the kind of people who still think they are high school cheerleaders and feel so guilty over what crappy parents they are, that they think by passing a levy with all their volunteerism they can show their kids how much they care.  But a vast majority of the people will sit on the sidelines and resent the bastions of greed which the pro levy supporters at Lakota represent because they understand the end game.  The sum of the entire ordeal is in the extraordinary wages the school employees make, and their willingness to use children as emotional hostages in order to secure even more money for themselves at the expense of everyone.  For that reason I think these levy supporters are the most disgusting people I have ever met, and deserve to feel the pain of reality with a NO vote on November 5th.

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

Give yourself the gift of ADVENTURE.  CLICK HERE!  

The Media Controversy: What Trayvon Martin and Barack Obama have in common

There are a lot of problems with Barack Obama’s past, which don’t matter much anymore as he won a second term with the help of the media that refused to report on those tribulations.  Their reasons were ideological and cohesive as they have displayed an alarming collectiveness about them that is like a symphony reading sheet music for their individual instruments.  The author of that sheet music is Karl Marx and before him it was Immanuel Kant.  The media learned this collectiveness in their education institutions that universally accept statism as the future of the human race—after all controlling the media was one of the strategies outlined in the 1958 book The Naked Communist, which has been fulfilled—make no mistake about it.  Barack Obama should not be president if the law were followed correctly.  He is however a concoction of that media control for the reasons they stated, so that a president like Obama could sit in the White House and bring to the world, global socialism.  But is what I’m saying just another “rant” from a disenfranchised voter who doesn’t like Democrats?  No, it’s a deeper problem than that.  The situation is far more sinister.  To understand how sinister, examine the latest media cohesive display of the Trayvon Martin case as articulated by Bill Whittle.  Watch this video and you will begin to see the problem.

The media, collectively from The View, to Ellen, to the CBS Nightly News read from the same Civil Rights sheet music, the same talking points which where practically invented as a work of fiction—yet reported as fact.  George Zimmerman was found not guilty even with all the other aspects of the Martin case that were left out such as the drug abuse, the violent Facebook postings, and the social demeanor of the young man just short of his 18th birthday.  The media wanted to believe that Martin was just a child going to get a harmless drink and some Skittles from the corner convenience store, not that the kid was an MMA obsessed drug experimenter.  Collectively the media projected the same Civil Rights message to the weakened masses which the typical person had little patience to understand.  They were caught wanting to trust those media sources because they were simply too busy in their lives not to.

The trouble with collectivism is that there is no individual thought, and the obvious evidence that so many in the media participated openly in the Trayvon Martin conspiracy as an attempt to sacrifice George Zimmerman to the altar of a progressive Civil Rights power grab shows how effective their propaganda machine is over just one court case.  Imagine what they can do on a large-scale, when Presidents and their administrations are involved.  A glimpse behind the collective façade has been seen with the IRS Hearings, the Benghazi killings, and the unconstitutional appointments that received very little initial reaction from the media until whistleblowers put the issues in front of the worlds’ eyes.  The hypocrisy was very obvious, and millions of Americans aren’t sure what to do with the information now that they know they’ve been lied to.  The Martin case and the Obama administration are connected not just in casual observation, but in this case Obama and his Justice Department activist Eric Holder personally became involved in a states’ rights issues for the simple attempt of inciting race wars in hopes of grabbing more group based power—with the media at their backs to blow wind into their sails.

To understand how this happens one simply needs to understand what kinds of things are taught in high schools and colleges all across the country, especial liberal arts type courses which often dangle from journalism degrees.  Collectivism is taught at these institutions and blind acceptance of memorized information.  Individual thought is rejected as critical applications are paid lip service to, but tucked out of sight in all reality.  If there are federal grants involved, or federal money of any kind such as Race to the Top, or Common Core instruction, that institution is teaching the desires of the government, and that is statism.  When over 90% of all journalists come from colleges particularly with liberal arts degrees, they were all taught the same methods of following orders and sacrificing their individuality to the good of the collective which is why they report the way they do.

Further, the culture on campuses, “the party life” is designed to rob away innocence and individual integrity so that the mind of the campus students can be brought into line with concepts of statism which is taught in the class rooms.  Wonder not why the campus presidents do not fret about the hundreds of rapes that occur every day at their colleges because the personal invasion of a woman’s personal space by sexual predators who are also students are part of the design of the campus experience.  When a young female journalism major wakes up in a strange apartment without her cloths facing people she has never met before at escapades that occurred the night before, when that young student gets a job at the New York Times, or The Washington Post she will avoid the stories of scandal about disgraced political interns who have been black mailed, or the many prostitutes who men of statist power utilize to allow extortion to move their mouths like marionettes, she will report on environmental concerns and social collectivism instead.  The idea of sin will stay in the back of her mind and she will pursue altruistic stories as social redemption might wash away her past, and all the mistakes she made in college.  The collectivism is a natural human reaction to individual shame, so statist desire to see individuals shamed so that they can gain control of individual actions in service to the collective is the typical social strategy that is learned in virtually all education institutions where government money is present.  That is how it starts.  The mistakes in college through drunken orgies are designed to remove individual identity from the participants and therefore critical thought generated from their mind.

After 10 to 15 years of this kind of practice, soon the marketplace of the media is filled with thousands of like-minded professionals who are ready to accept their marching orders from their editors who are promoted based on their left leaning philosophies.  The editor gives the slant and the reporter finds the angle and cuts up the story to fit the direction.  That is what happened clearly in the Treyvon Martin case, and is why President Obama is still president.  The withheld evidence about Treyvon Martin shows to what extent the media can work together without a lot of shared information to arrive at a universal collective strategy.  Critical thought has been stripped from their minds, and they cannot be trusted to provide the truth.  This has always been a problem, but it is worse today than it has ever been because the amount of social penetration progressives have had into college campuses since the 1950s has finally produced virtually every range of influence in the media from those about to retire, to those just entering the business.  For the first time, all ages of media employee have been through the college system after The Naked Communist established the desired strategy, and they all think the same way.

Bill Whittle made a compelling case about the Trayvon Martin evidence, and he was right to end his piece contemplating to what extent the same has happened with Barack Obama.    In an honest world where the media used the First Amendment to pursue truth, justice, and the American way there wouldn’t be a President Obama in The White House, and the Martin case would not have been reported the way it was—and George Zimmerman most likely would have never had to spend a single day in jail.  But the media isn’t honest, and we do have to worry about those types of statist strategies seen in Whittle’s video.  The evidence is audacious and the proof is beyond refute.  But the behavior continues because most people lack the courage to face the truth, even though it is painful.   And for many people their past is laced with the same shame that haunts many journalists—and hampers their decisions from one of individual value instead to collective embrace where judgment is vacant, and sins are revered, in an empire of statism that is protected by the modern gate keepers of the truth.

Rich Hoffman

“Justice Comes with the Crack of a Whip!”

www.tailofthedragonbook.com

Take Away 2 1/2 Fries from a Big Mac Meal: The real cost of federal sequestration

On the day after the sequestration implemented from the federal government on March 2nd Darryl Parks from 700 WLW covered the events that transpired in the aftermath as government officials calculated that society might come to an end because of the cuts.  Well, in his usual fashion Darryl brought some non-partisan, non emotional, non group affiliated analysis regarding the sequestration cuts to the light of reality.  As many might be afraid of the rhetoric coming out of Washington Darryl put into the context the extent of the cuts in a fashion that everyone can understand.  The ridiculous amounts that Darryl laid out in his broadcast, and that I break down below in written form are so small that they aren’t even worth discussing.  Yet all the news broadcasts on television cried like infants for over three weeks along with virtually every politician, especially Barack Obama about the costs of these cuts to the social fabric of American society.  So without further fanfare have a listen to Darryl’s broadcast as it was given on March 2nd at 9 AM in the morning.

Most people think that 44 billion sounds like a lot of money, but in regard to the sequestration cuts, it is only 1/80th of the total federal budget.  The federal budget is in fact so large, and deliberately made complicated by the same politicians who have been crying wolf, that most Americans cannot even wrap their mind around the numbers.  Nobody can envision a trillion dollars, and one billion is well out of touch from most people’s minds.  Yet American spending is in a deficit trend of over a trillion dollars per year from an income stream where only 1.35 million Americans at the very top of the income bracket pay as much as the bottom 95%.  In total roughly 130 million Americans pay taxes into the total federal budget minus some revenue generated from foreign trade and travel gathered in the form of sales taxes.  So when it is learned that most of the federal yearly budget supplied to the government is provided by only 130 million Americans—while almost as many more pay no taxes off payroll or other direct measures, the situation becomes incredibly frustrating, and daunting.  Like their counterparts in the government school system, federal bureaucrats make it a practice to deliberately deceive voters into protecting the empire of spending they have recklessly erected.  For more information check out the links below:

How much the Top 1% pays in taxes:

http://www.aei-ideas.org/2012/12/top-1-of-american-taxpayers-pay-almost-as-much-in-taxes-as-bottom-95-and-half-of-that-group-paid-nothing-in-2010/

Federal budget by the numbers from the Heritage Foundation:

http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2012/10/federal-spending-by-the-numbers-2012

Most people start to blank out when such large numbers are expressed so they cannot get their mind around such concepts.  Looting politicians like Barack Obama know this, and have successfully hidden the extremity of these federal numbers behind relatable faces, like children, National Park employees, government janitorial staff and so on—so that tax payers will be inclined to vote in favor of more tax increases to help out their fellow Americans.  The federal government essentially uses the same tactics that we have been fighting locally in the school levy debates—they clearly manipulate the numbers in hopes that nobody can wrap their mind around the truth.  However, Darryl Parks did better than President Obama in showing the hypocrisy of the federal diatribes by putting into a context that everyone can understand the amount of the sequestration cuts that prove just how small they really are—and how much politicians in Washington and the doomsday press blew out of proportion the extent of the damage—which proves that none of them can be trusted.

Darryl did the hard math and discovered that it was much easier to understand the 44 billion in cuts coming from the sequestration reductions that went into effect on March 1st by proportionally breaking it down against something that virtually everyone can relate to, a McDonalds Big Mac extra value meal.  Darryl took the known value of 1320 calories that are contained within a Big Mac extra value meal consisting of a Big Mac sandwich, a medium Coke and a large order of French fries that normally contain 87 individual fries within the container they come in and for sake of argument gave that value of 1320 an equal value to the federal budget.  Now we know that 44 billion in cuts is only 1/80th of the total federal budget, so if we apply the same reduction to the Big Mac value meal, we discover that we will only lose 2 ½ French fries from our feast

Most people eating such a meal would not notice a 2 ½ fry reduction, and in the society at large, particularly the 130 million Americans who pay nearly all the federal tax, they won’t notice any reductions at the federal level.  The only people who will notice the reductions are those who have built their careers in the flimsy existence of government and find themselves jobless in the sequestration cuts.  It will be discovered that many of those reduced jobs were not necessary to begin with just as many of the local schools who have had to reduce their staffs have found that they can still operate with fewer employees as they work to meet their budgets.  The impacted parties are those who work for government at wages that are too high for jobs that were created by government for government reasons.

Nobody in their right mind can argue that losing 2 ½ fries per Big Mac value meal will ever be noticed and will drive down the quality of the meal itself.  Just like the sequestration cuts don’t even come close to bringing our federal government into the light of reality when it comes to fiscal spending of those poor 130 million tax payers who are covering the whole bill.  Yet everyone who covered the sequestration in a negative way is guilty of openly misleading the American people with radical rhetoric that belongs in the basement of old hippie flower children engulfed in pot smoke as they watch reruns of Sesame Street and think themselves sophisticated contributors of society.  In reality, much, much, much more needs to be cut from our extra value meals if we wish as a nation to lose any weight and take measures to truly get our budget under control.  Taking away 2 ½ French fries out of 87 won’t do the job—and is not even worth the discussion which has transpired.

Rich Hoffman

“If they attack first………..blast em’!”

www.tailofthedragonbook.com

Looters of Cincinnati: The end of the line is here

As many said during 2011–without Issue 2–which was repealed by the public unions in Ohio, Cincinnati was in deep trouble. Now in the summer of 2012, Cincinnati is facing a $34 million dollar deficit as the progressive Mayor Mallory pushes for higher taxes to pay for the enormous amounts of money that his street car project is going to take from the Cincinnati budget.

Kathy Harrell Fraternal Order of Police President also is pushing for higher taxes to pay for the high salaries of her members as she extrapolates public safety over the luxury of a street car, because the police and Mayor Mallory are after the same money provided by the tax payers, and they both expect to get it from the property owners in Cincinnati who are being pushed to fund all these projects with their tax dollars.

Issue 2 would have allowed management of the salary structure of the police officers of Cincinnati without drastically decreasing their numbers. To get an idea of what many of these police officers make, CLICK HERE to see what they make just to the north in West Chester Twp. Many police officers make close to six figure salaries by the time all their benefits and overtime are added up. 1000 employees who cost the tax payers $100,000 each per year cost the city $100 million dollars—just to put it in perspective. The actual cost is much higher since many city employees make a lot more than $100K per year. The way to manage those costs is to drive down the wage amounts so that they fit within the current budget. It’s essentially the same problem that tax payers are having with public school teachers. Teachers in government schools expect too much pay. But Kathy will not even consider such an option as asking her members to take a pay cut. Listen to her two years ago the last time City Council tried to balance their budget. You can hear the audio from Darryl Parks show on 700 WLW.

The proposed new tax is $6 per $100,000 of property value which doesn’t sound like much until one considers the impact on businesses with values of $1 million or more. For them, the tax increase is quite steep. For a business, $1 million dollars of value is very much the norm. The average Wendy’s restaurant is valued between $1 million and $1.5 million, so every place of business in the city of Cincinnati is at risk of seeing significant property tax increases since their businesses are all valued close to those numbers. Political looters like Roxanne Qualls reminded city council that if taxes do not increase, then they had better be ready to make serious cuts to programs, which she knows nobody has the political will to do. The prospect of city council members taking a stand against tax increases has led to the rumblings of law suits against those who resist the tax push. She was quick to point out that only 14 percent of a property owner’s tax bill goes to the city. Most of the money goes to the Cincinnati Public Schools and Hamilton County levies, which of course ties in to the stadium debacle for the Reds and Bengals sports franchises.

To make matters even worse, the Cincinnati Public Schools just announced that they are seeking a $51.5 million emergency operating levy—most of which goes directly to the wages of government workers. CPS has cut 200 jobs and finally placed their employees on a base salary increase freeze, yet they still need money to cover their $467.5 million dollar budget. And in just three years in 2015 CPS intends to seek another $65.2 million dollar levy renewal, so the increases against property owners will continue into the next decade easily.

If I were a business owner looking for a reason to locate my business in downtown Cincinnati, to lease a space in Carew Tower or some other downtown location, why would I when I could place my business in West Chester, Mason, or Northern Kentucky with a lot less tax burden? The answer is I wouldn’t. I will put my business where there are the most people with the most money, and the taxes are lowest. And downtown Cincinnati isn’t it. There is too much public housing that creates home owners who do not have a personal investment in the property, so property values will continue to spiral downward because investors would be out of their minds to invest in a community that will only be trashed within 10 years. The high taxes currently have pushed out many good jobs from the downtown area and into the suburbs and the general irresponsibility of the city funds have driven completely out-of-town the type of property investment that helps curtail crime, which creates the need for too many police officers to keep the peace.

One of the reasons Kathy Harrell cited as a risk to the layoff of police officers in order to pay for the street car is that if the number of employees drops below 700 officers, then the city will lose federal funding—which means that the police department already is receiving tax payer dollars from the federal government and they have that money spent. So laying off too many police officers will take away federal dollars that will force yet another tax increase on property when that money goes away. This is not only stupid from a financial standpoint, but makes the 10th Amendment of our Bill of Rights completely negligible, since every school and public employment entity has their hand out to Uncle Sam. It makes the state a servant to the federal government so when politicians in Washington decide they wish to enforce the NDAA Act for instance, our local police that we work so hard to pay for with six figure salaries become military troops who report directly to the federal government to enforce martial law—and that is a serious problem. It allows Constitution burning politicians like Obama to build his own army at the expense of local tax payers under the disguise of safety, which makes self-government much more difficult when a dictator attempts to climb into power.

Mayor Mallory who is a very progressive mayor directly connected to the Obama administration seems to have the same economic ignorance as his friend. Mallory as a mayor of a small city in the Midwest spent a lot of time during his first two years in office visiting communist China so he could take pointers from the mother country of his political ideology. It is from his Chinese friends that he learned that he needed to build a streetcar, and that the ballot language needed to be confusing to get it passed by an already apathetic community plagued with debt.

The sum of the problem is that a vast majority of all the government employees involved at every level of the city government from the schools to city council have tried to solve problems by stealing from one place to satisfy the needs elsewhere. And since the entire system is made up of looters—people who seek to take from others to fill the needs of themselves—they have taken away so much from the tax payers that there isn’t anything left to take.

The responsible thing to do for residents of Cincinnati would be to vote at the ballot box and if that doesn’t work then to vote with their feet. It is interesting that the Cincinnati Area Board of Realtors lobbied against the property tax increase from city council because they will be forced to vote in favor of the CPS tax, since realtors use good schools as a way to sell homes and in people’s minds, passed levies equal good schools which to a realtor equals sales of homes. Tax payers in Cincinnati are much less likely to pass the CPS levy if city council forces a $6 tax hike per $100K home. In Cincinnati there is no end in sight for tax increases because the looters of Cincinnati have spent too much, and made taxes so high that new investment is staying out of the city. And for the same reason that residents do not want to move into high crime neighborhoods to avoid being robbed, investment dollars avoid communities with high taxes, because the politicians are no different from the kind of looter who would rob a person at gun point. Threats of lawsuits, threats of declining police presence violating public safety, threats of a declining community of tax payers who do not approve tax increases are still coercion made under inflicted duress—not under the logic of clear conscious—which is how Cincinnati ended up in the situation that it’s in. The problems were caused by the Looters of Cincinnati and nobody else. These politicians were warned, and Issue 2 was created by forward-looking legislators to attempt to curtail the impact of these upcoming times, but nobody listened and now there is hell to pay. The good of Cincinnati will now make plans to leave leaving only the ugly to reside within the city limits with the rest of the looters. And years from now when archeologists wonder why the city of Cincinnati fell into drastic decline it will not be because it lacked highway access, or a wonderful airport—it will be because taxes were simply too high and that destroyed everything that was good about the city and turned it into just another ghostlike victim of the present economy that is indiscriminate in it’s destruction of anything but the most efficient leaving only the Looters of Cincinnati to feed off each other once everything productive had been consumed.

____________________________________________________________

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Rich Hoffman
https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
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www.overmanwarrior.com

Lakota Superintendent Discovers Mars: Public unions examined at Hillsdale College

I take great pride in knowing what the latest scientific discoveries are, but apparently, I missed a big one. Superintendent Mantia of the Lakota School District has apparently colonized Mars and has found a way to fly between earth and that red planet routinely. I read in the Pulse Journal from Thursday March 15, 2012 that Mantia said that the Lakota School District “Is being run better than most businesses.” Very interesting statement, however, you have to read such things with a discerning eye, and keep in mind that Mars doesn’t have any businesses. So what Mantia said was true—from a certain point of view–only if you consider that Lakota is operating better than most businesses on the planet Mars, because here on earth such a statement is preposterous.

I don’t know of any businesses that allow their costs to drive them, where the tail wags the dog like it does at Lakota. In that same article there are a lot of bullet points that read like a resume such as “reduced number of mailings, took advantage of bulk mailing—saved $25,000.” Or, “Implemented an in-house computer and battery backup repair process, instead of renewing warranty coverage, allowing for cheaper parts and no labor costs—saved hundreds of thousands of dollars annually.” There were 44 such points in that article most of them were things that the school should already be doing, yet Mantia puts out those facts as though she should get a pat on the head. The question still remains however—why is Lakota still hemorrhaging money if it’s operating as such an “effective business.” Well the answer is that out of all the costs discussed in the Pulse article, it only adds up to roughly 20% of the total budget.

The rest of the budget—the other 80%–is tied up in labor wages and benefits and according to that same Superintendent upon advice from the school’s legal counsel, are off the table for discussion. After knowing that it’s easy to see why Superintendent Mantia of the Lakota School District thinks her performance is so robust—because she’s not speaking from this planet. She’s comparing the business enterprise of her job with the microbial business of some undiscovered life form on the Martian surface, because there aren’t any other businesses there. On earth however there are, and even a local fast food restaurant would go out of business if it operated the way Lakota does.

But why is Lakota and public education in general in such a fix with their labor contracts? Well, the problem is rather epic in scope and it didn’t become that way over night. The best way to describe it would be the radicalization of the work force by national labor unions that have driven up education costs to unsustainable levels. This overview of how organized labor has taken over our education system is articulated very well in one of the latest Hillsdale College articles which can be seen at the link below, or in full text after the link.

As Superintendent Mantia was sending out her resume to The Pulse Journal hoping that nobody would ask the question—“but what about the other 80% of the budget,” and I was defending myself in the Cincinnati media as not being a sexist, due to Mantia and her “employees” saturating their email networks with links to this site and my controversial statements, (thanks by the way—a lot of people got an eyeful of good information) in an effort to discredit me, William McGurn was speaking at the Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar in Newport Beach, California. What follows is the result of that very informative discussion, and will explain clearly why Superintendent Mantia is either reporting her information from the planet Mars, or she has no idea what efficiency in the private sector means and is simply comparing her version of businesses to other government-run facilities—like perhaps the license bureau. It may seem like a lot to read, but it’s worth it and very good.

http://www.hillsdale.edu/news/imprimis/archive/issue.asp?year=2012&month=03

March 2012
William McGurn
News Corporation

What Public Employee Unions are Doing to Our Country

WILLIAM MCGURN is a vice president for News Corporation and writes the weekly “Main Street” column for the Wall Street Journal. From 2005 to 2008, he served as chief speechwriter for President George W. Bush. Prior to that he was the chief editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal and spent more than ten years in Europe and Asia for Dow Jones. He has written for a wide variety of publications, including Esquire, the Washington Post, the Spectator of London and the National Catholic Register. He holds a B.A. from the University of Notre Dame and a master’s degree in communications from Boston University, and currently serves on the board of Notre Dame’s Center for Ethics and Culture.

The following is adapted from a speech delivered on February 15, 2012, at a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar in Newport Beach, California.

MANY SCHOLARS ARE better versed on the history of public employee unions than I am, but there is one credential I can claim that they cannot: I am a taxpayer in the People’s Republic of New Jerseystan. That makes me an authority on how public sector unions—especially at the state and local level—are thwarting economic growth, strangling the middle class, and generally hijacking the democratic process to serve their own ends rather than the public.

Now in my experience, when one says the words “New Jersey,” people for some reason think it is a laugh line. Perhaps you know us from The Sopranos or Jersey Shore. You might think that such a state has nothing to teach you. If so, you would be very wrong. New Jersey offers something that can profit the entire nation: We are the perfect bad example.

As conservatives, of course, we believe in virtue. We like to point to policies and practices that work—low taxes and light regulation for the economy, a strong national defense to keep us safe from foreign attack, and social policies that favor community over government. These are all valuable. But the bad example has its honored place as well: It’s how we illustrate our warnings.

As parents, for example, selling virtue only takes us so far. To make our point when we see a character trait we don’t care for in our kids, we’re far more likely to say something like, “You don’t want to grow up to be like Uncle Bob, do you?”

This is the reason Governor Chris Christie’s reforms have had such resonance. Almost anywhere he points, he has before him an example of how New Jersey’s bloated public sector is hurting growth, limiting the efficiency of government services, and squeezing middle class families. How many state governors and legislators might be more inclined to do the right thing if before they acted they first said to themselves, “We don’t want to be like New Jersey, do we?”

These days, when conservatives get together to discuss the debilitating role played by government workers, we reassure ourselves with statements by FDR and labor leader Samuel Gompers about the fundamental incompatibilities between a union of private workers working for a private company and a union of government workers laboring for our city, state, or federal governments. We also trace the line of expansion to various events, including John F. Kennedy’s executive order that opened the path for collective bargaining for public employees at the federal level.

I don’t want to rehash that today. Today I want to talk about the situation as we find it, and suggest that the first step toward a cure is to diagnose the illness accurately. This means changing the way we think of public sector unions. And in what I have to say, I will concentrate on public sector unions at the state and local levels.

It’s not that I don’t consider the unionization of federal workers to be an issue. Plainly it is an issue when the teachers unions represent one of the largest blocs of delegates at Democratic conventions, when the largest single campaign contributor in the 2010 elections was the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, when union money at the federal level goes at an overwhelming rate to Democratic candidates, and when the Congressional Budget Office tells us that federal employees earn more than their counterparts in the private sector. Nonetheless, I believe that the greater challenge today—to state and city finances, to democratic representation, to the middle class—is at the state and local level. This is partly because state and city unions have the power to negotiate wages and benefits that their counterparts at the federal level largely do not. More fundamentally, it is because we cannot reform at the federal level without correcting a problem that is bringing our cities and states to bankruptcy.

When I say we need to change our understanding, what I mean is that we have to recognize that public sector unions have successfully redefined key relationships in our economic and civic life. In making this argument, I will suggest that the elected politicians who represent us at the negotiating table are not in fact management, that our taxing and spending decisions at the city and state level are in practice decided by our public sector contracts, and that when you put this all together, what emerges is a completely different picture of the modern civil servant. In short, we work for him, not the other way around.

Who is Managing Whom?

Let me start with the relationship between government employee unions and our elected officials. On paper, it is true, mayors and governors sit across the table from city and state workers collectively bargaining for wages and benefits. On paper, this makes them management—representing us, the taxpayers. But in practice, these people often serve more as the employees of unions than as their managers. New Jersey has been telling here. Look at our former governor, Jon Corzine.

You Hillsdale folks are a genteel sort. When you speak about the unions being in bed with the Democratic politicians, you mean it metaphorically. In New Jersey, we take it to Snooki levels: Mr. Corzine once shared a home with the New Jersey leader of the Communication Workers of America, Carla Katz. Back when he was running for governor, he was asked whether that relationship would compromise his ability to represent the taxpayers in negotiations with outfits such as CWA. “As the governor,” Mr. Corzine responded, “you represent eight-and-a-half million people. You don’t represent one union. You don’t represent one person. You represent the people who elected you.”

That’s the way it ought to be. In real life, it turned out that during heated negotiations over a contested CWA contract, Mr. Corzine and Ms. Katz had a long email chain—subsequently published by the Newark Star Ledger, despite the governor’s legal attempts to keep them private—in which she pressed him on the union issues.

But it wasn’t just the CWA. Scarcely six months after he was elected, Governor Corzine appeared before a rally of state workers in Trenton in support of a one percent sales tax designed to bring in revenues to a state hemorrhaging money. Not cutbacks, but a tax. Naturally, Mr. Corzine’s solution was the one the public sector unions wanted: Get the needed revenues by introducing a new tax.

The twist was that there was someone in the New Jersey government who understood the problem—who understood that a new sales tax wouldn’t do much to fix New Jersey’s problems, and that the only way to get a handle on them was to get state workers to start contributing more to their health care and pensions.

These were the pre-Chris Christie days, so the author of this bold proposal was the Senate president, Stephen Sweeney. Mr. Sweeney is not only interesting because he is a prominent and powerful Democrat. He is also interesting because in addition to his political office, he represents the state’s ironworkers. And what Mr. Sweeney proposed for the public sector unions was something private union members such as his ironworkers already paid for. It was also common sense: He knew that if New Jersey didn’t get a handle on its gold-plated pay and benefits for its government employees, it would squeeze out the private sector that hires people such as ironworkers.

If the leader of an ironworkers union could realize that, surely so could a governor who had earlier served as a high-powered executive for Goldman Sachs. But Mr. Corzine was having none of it. Instead, he told the crowd of state workers: “We’re gonna fight for a fair contract.”

The question is, whom was he planning on fighting? Wasn’t he management in these negotiations?
Six months later, Governor Corzine proved this was not simply a slip of the tongue. When workers at Rutgers University were planning to unionize, he turned up at their rally. This was too much even for the liberal Star Ledger, which—in an article entitled “Jon Corzine, Union Rep?”—noted that Mr. Corzine’s appearance at the rally raised the question whether he truly understood that “he represents the ‘management’ side in ongoing contract talks with state employees unions.”

Manifestly, the problem is not that Mr. Corzine and other elected leaders like him—mostly Democrats—do not understand. In fact, they understand all too well that they are the hired help. The public employees they are supposed to manage in effect manage them. The unions provide politicians with campaign funds and volunteers and votes, and the politicians pay for what the unions demand in return with public money.
In New Jersey as elsewhere, most leaders of public sector unions are not sleeping with the politicians who set their salary and benefits. They are, however, doing all they can to install and keep in office those they wish—while fighting hard against the ones they oppose. And until we recognize the real master in this relationship, we will never reform the system.

The Tail Wagging the Dog

My second point relates to my first. Not only have the public unions too often become the dominant partner in the relationship with elected officials, but the contracts and the spending that goes with them are setting the other policy agenda. In other words, even when we recognize that the packages favored by public employees are too generous, we think of them simply as spending items. We need to wake up and recognize that in fact these spending items are the tail wagging the dog—that they set tax and borrowing decisions rather than follow from them.

Take the case of Northvale, a small, affluent town of about 4,600 people at the northeast tip of New Jersey. Its median income is about $99,000, comfortably above both the New Jersey and national levels, and its budget is $21.8 million. Of this, $13.2 million—or nearly two-thirds—goes to the schools. The lion’s share of that, of course, goes to salaries and benefits.

Northvale’s school budget is voted on in the spring. That’s part of the scam, because turnout for these elections is much lower than it is in November for the regular elections. With lower turnout, it’s easier for teachers and other interested parties to dominate the elections. Thus the great bulk of Northvale’s budget is not determined in the regular elections, or by the mayor and city council. Effectively, it is determined by the education lobby and school officials—who in turn are chosen in elections involving only 20 percent of the electorate.

From the other one-third of the budget, Northvale has to run its police force and fire department, remove snow, arrange for garbage pickup, and so on. That means there is not much discretionary spending left. Even when voters rebel—last spring Northvale voters overwhelmingly repudiated the budget—they are frequently ignored, and the back door system ensures there is little in the way of accountability.
But there are consequences: This dynamic helps explain why, in the decade before Chris Christie was elected governor, the property taxes of New Jersey residents went up 70 percent.

Mr. Christie is not in charge of local spending. But he understands that this is part of an exceptionally unvirtuous circle. So he’s made some changes. Last year, for instance, with the help of allies such as Mr. Sweeney, he pushed a reform through the legislature that required public workers to start contributing to their health care and up their contributions to their pensions. It’s not nearly the same percentage as their counterparts in the private sector, but it’s a start.

Mr. Christie also put through a property tax cap that forces cities to go to the people for a vote if they increase property taxes by more than two percent. And just last month, he signed a bill that will allow towns to move their school budget votes to the November ballot—not only saving money, but also ensuring that more citizens vote, not simply those who have a vested interest.

At the same time, Mr. Christie has begun to campaign against abuses using language that people can understand. His most recent target is the practice of awarding six-figure checks to public employees who are allowed to accumulate—and cash out—unused sick pay. In New Jersey these payments are called “boat money,” largely because retired government workers often use the money to buy pleasure boats when they retire. Across the state, cities have liabilities of $825 million because of these boat checks.

And what’s been the opposition’s response? Instead of agreeing to reasonable cuts, the Democrats keep thumping for a millionaire’s tax. New Jersey being New Jersey, the millionaire’s tax aims at people making far less than a million dollars. But even if it didn’t, it’s hard to see how driving millionaires out of the state will help it meet its huge and growing unfunded pension liabilities.

To summarize my second point: You and I make spending decisions the way all households do. We take our income, and we live within our means. In sharp contrast, public employee unions have introduced a whole new dynamic: They negotiate pay and benefits in contracts we can’t rewrite. When the revenues to meet these obligations fall short, they push to raise taxes to make up the difference.

The Corruption of Public Service

That leads me to my third and final point: If I am right that the public employee unions are in fact the managers in the relationship with politicians, and that public sector spending is driving tax and borrowing policy, the inescapable conclusion is that you and I are working for them.

That’s not how we usually understand and speak of public service. Traditionally, the idea of a public servant is someone who is working for the public, with the implication that he or she is sacrificing a better material life to do so. But can anyone really define today’s relationship this way? Especially when health care and pensions are included, government workers increasingly seem to live better than the people who pay their salaries. How many of you walk into some local, state or federal office these days and leave thinking, “The men and women here are working for me”?

In some ways the change has been driven by larger changes in union life. From one out of three workers at its high point in the 1950s, today fewer than one out of 14 private sector workers belongs to a union, and the percentage continues to drop. Conversely, the unionization of government employees continues to grow, to the point where public sector union members now outnumber their private sector counterparts for the first time in American history.

In a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal, Fred Siegel notes that public sector unions have
become a vanguard movement within liberalism. And the reason for that is it’s the public sector that comes closest to the statist ideals of McGovern and post-McGovern liberals. And that is, there’s no connection between effort and reward. You’re guaranteed your job. You’re guaranteed your salary increase. There’s a kind of bureaucratic equality.

“This vanguard,” Siegel continues, “becomes in the eyes of many liberals the model for the middle class. Public-sector unions are what all workers should be like. Their benefits are the kind of benefits everyone should get.” So instead of the private sector defining the public, the public sector is thought to define the private.

As public employees unionize, their dues—often collected for the unions by the government—fund a permanent interest constantly lobbying for bigger government. To pay for this bigger and more expensive government, they advocate for higher taxes on those in the private sector. Only when they are threatened with layoffs are they inclined to compromise, and sometimes not even then. That is what I mean when I say that we work for them.

Where to Go From Here

One of the few silver linings of our tough economy today is that it is forcing tough decisions. Big city mayors and governors are having issues with their public employees, because we’ve reached a point where we simply cannot afford business as usual. With a sluggish economy—and fewer taxpayers—the problems that have piled up are becoming too difficult to ignore.

Across the nation we have governors and mayors trying to solve their public employee problems with varying degrees of seriousness, from Chris Christie in New Jersey to Jerry Brown in California to the great experiments going on in the Rust Belt—in Indiana, which has done the best, and Wisconsin, Ohio, and Michigan. Only Illinois, led by Democratic Governor Pat Quinn, has opted for business as usual with a mammoth tax increase that is now being followed up, in today’s typical way of Democratic governance, with tax breaks for large companies threatening to leave Chicago because of the tax burden.

In most of these places, there’s probably little we can do about the contracts that exist. What we can do is bring in new hires under more reasonable contracts and pro-rate contributions for existing employees. Even marginal changes can have a big impact, as Wisconsin found out when Governor Scott Walker’s collective bargaining reforms for public workers helped restore many of the state’s school districts back to fiscal health.

My father was a federal employee, as an FBI agent. I spent some time as a government worker in the White House. I also know many fine and devoted people on the public payroll who work hard, are good at what they do, and earn everything they get. But there are also those who work without results. I believe Americans are a generous people who can recognize the difference. We need to restore our public sector to a place where those in charge can make those distinctions and allocate rewards and resources accordingly.

In the meantime, I think the best thing we can do is speak honestly. That is what Mr. Christie is doing in New Jersey. His style isn’t for everyone. Yet his popularity suggests that Americans appreciate a politician willing to talk about the reality of public employee unions today—and the unreasonable costs they are imposing on our society.

We’ll never return to the ideal of public service until the rest of us start speaking honestly as well.
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Oh, and a special message to the public relations boy at Lakota.  You can’t make crap look like a diamond as much as you might try, and you can’t make a diamond into crap, as per your work on Thusday March 15th.  Bad move.

Rich Hoffman

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
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