What is the strongest beacon for freedom in the world today? Is it Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, John Stossel, or any other modern commenter, publisher, or financier? I would say not. Is it the multitude of freedom oriented websites like FreedomWorks, or American Thinker? I would say not. Rather, I would say that it’s a new force to the entertainment world. Several years ago the former Fox News star Glenn Beck started his own news organization called The Blaze—which is changing the way the news is delivered. As an online publication that rivals traditional magazines like Time, Life, and People it also specializes in providing the latest scoop on news stories in the way that made the Drudge Report so important to the art of breaking news stories. But it’s not even The Blaze that I’m speaking about—not as a website based news source. In January of 2013 Glenn Beck created The Blaze Radio Network which is an all internet radio station that broadcasts online outside of FCC regulation. Normally these kinds of operations are fly-by-night and built with pure heart, but little money. Well, not anymore. Glenn Beck has invested a considerable amount of his personal fortune into the new Blaze Radio Network and brought in top talent like Doc Thompson and his partner Skip to provide 24 hour a day seven days a week news and entertainment radio that is unparalleled anywhere.
I was very disheartened to learn that my friend Doc Thompson was leaving Cincinnati. I have been a talk radio fan all my life. I used to lie in bed as a kid and listen to radio broadcasts from 700 WLW and WMOH till the pre-dawn hours while the rest of the world slept, literally and figuratively. During my working years, I would listen to talk radio through long hours of 2nd and 3rd shift hard labor. As I grew older and had started participating in talk radio actively I enjoyed being more than just a listener, especially on Doc Thompson’s Cincinnati show. I respect the art of being a talk show host. But Doc was a bit too freedom oriented for the sports talk stations of Cincinnati, and was too big of a name to put on a station that didn’t have a voice equaling his own booming enunciations. So it didn’t take long before Doc moved on to the Detroit market leaving a void in Cincinnati, and the freedom movement that was so strong here.
There are other voices, but on FCC controlled radio stations, they are somewhat handcuffed by their station managers, and the advertisers who essentially control the content. Doc has been a breath of fresh air wherever he has worked, but the stations he worked for never allowed him to utilize his full potential of talent consisting of humor, deep political analysis, and a tremendous range of topics that he can discuss. But more than anything, Doc is the opposite of the kind of radio host that Howard Stern has been—he has deep convictions and tries to be a good person. He wants to do good with his microphone, and that has hindered him during his long career………..until now. Glenn Beck hired Doc Thompson in January to start off his new Blaze Radio Network with the 6 AM to 9 AM morning show just ahead of Glenn Beck’s national show and the gloves have come off. For the benefit of my readers here I have placed two of Doc’s recent shows on the following video clips so that they can be listened to on demand in their entirety. I would suggest playing them and filling your day with their contents. There is a lot of comedy, loads of great information, and some deep sincerity from Doc and Skip which is typical of them in what I consider to be one of the best radio show in the history of talk radio that was only made possible because of Glenn Beck’s innovative, and bold investment in the enterprise.
The reason I consider The Blaze Radio Network to be the purest beacon available for the freedom movement is because it is free, and it is not under the regulation of the government in any way. This allows the programming on the Blaze Radio to be unusually unconcerned with regulators who can threaten to pull their license if at least a balanced approach to statist concepts isn’t adhered to. Every television, and radio station in America is typically concerned about these federal regulations, and it does water down the content, even on programs like Rush Limbaugh’s.
Doc and Skip are for the first times in their life completely free as talk show hosts, and they are making excellent use of that liberty. Before any organization can hope to be a beacon of freedom to the listeners they service, they must in fact be free themselves. Because of the commitment of Glenn Beck into The Blaze Radio Network, it is the most “free thinking” broadcasting anywhere in the world. It functions the way that The Constitution intended with the 1st Amendment of the Bill of Rights, to use free speech not in a destructive way to boost ratings with sex, and deviant discussion, but with high quality content from people who care deeply about the topics they discuss. And for the first time, radio hosts who work for The Blaze have a boss in Glenn Beck who is just as committed to liberty as they are.
I know Doc Thompson personally. I have been to dinner with him where he and Skip would not stop doing research for their radio show even at 1 AM in the morning. Doc never turns off his engine. He never completely shuts down. Radio work and the matters of current events are his number one passion. He is constantly analyzing material for his shows, and he ruthlessly looks for fresh content. Doc is one of the hardest working people I know, and in entertainment/news, this is certainly the case.
Doc has been fighting for a chance to do what he is currently doing for more than 20 years of radio in cities all over the United States. In one of his darkest days of recent past, he never let up off the gas. I remember vividly when his wife Yuna Lee left her television job in Richmond, Virginia so she could finally marry Thompson after several years of a long distance relationship. Finally they were going to be together, living not only in the same house, but in the same city. Yuna boldly left her job to take a job at Channel 2 in Dayton where she works to this day. But the very moment the two were married, Doc lost his job in Cincinnati. He was always a bit too passionate, too “wholesome,” and too “Tea Party” for the Cincinnati stations, which left him jobless again looking for a home. Even in those moments when he was most tempted to change his style to fit the producers of radio shows, he didn’t. He held tight for a syndication deal because he knew he was that good and he needed someone to believe in him with financial backing.
Glenn Beck was that guy, and the benefit to freedom is that finally Doc Thompson has NOTHING in his way to be a serious pain in the ass to statists, progressives, communists, union thugs, race baiters, education empires, and every parasitic entity hanging from the halls of government. For the first time in his professional life Doc Thompson is free to provide the kind of radio that hasn’t been conceived since the very early days of radio broadcasting before the FCC put its claws into the lives of every radio listener. Doc takes full advantage of this freedom, as evidence in the over 5 hours of broadcasting played above. I hope you took full advantage of those clips to let Doc’s voice bring the sounds of freedom to your ears. The Blaze Radio Network it has nearly replaced all my old news sources. I play it all the time, at home, in the garage, in my back yard, in my car, on my iPod—especially during flights, on vacation, in the middle of the mountains, and in the deepest valleys while camping. Because The Blaze is broadcast across the internet, and podcasting is always available on Soundcloud, every show Doc and Skip do can be listened to on demand. By loading his segments onto my iPod I can attend business engagements pausing his information, then resuming when my time frees up. When riding my motorcycle, I can broadcast Doc into my helmet through my iPod, which is a completely new technology. Years ago the only way to listen to a radio on a motorcycle was to have a bulky device attached to the handle bars. Now I can hear Doc anywhere at anytime of day and the information is free. CLICK THE LINK BELOW TO FIND DOC’S BROADCASTS ON SOUNDCLOUD:
For traditional radio talk show listeners, The Blaze Radio Network has a full staff that broadcasts out of New York the news at the top and bottom of every hour just like most other AM stations. They are doing much better work than Fox News is, and certainly leaps and bounds above CNN, MSNBC, or any other news source. The Blaze guys are on top of just about everything 24 hours a day 7 days a week. They are always there.
For these reasons listed above Doc Thompson on The Blaze Radio Network is the best and most authentic example of a voice for the freedom movement that there is in the world. Doc works harder, plays harder, and has the tools in his tool box given to him by Glenn Beck to be a monstrous success, which he and Skip are well on their way to becoming. What they are doing is the wave of the future, and the most effective form of new media there is. I trust The Blaze in ways that I have never trusted any other news source. Their news is good even when they don’t agree with what the other side has to say. Such as in this example:
The Blaze is a game changer in the news business, and Doc Thompson working for the Blaze Radio Network is a game changer in the world of radio. The radio business will never be the same again, now that Doc Thompson is loose and able to communicate the truth where it lives most brilliantly, at The Blaze operated by Glenn Beck and managed by hundreds of wonderful people who deeply care about the state of America and it’s role to the rest of the world who look with longing eyes toward the freedoms that only we have. I would recommend dear reader that you tune in to this wonderful tool for freedom and support it with your attention which will be mutually beneficial for many years to come.
Recently I stated that I was in open rebellion against the “establishment” and felt that a real definition was required so that the objective can be known. We need to know what the establishment is exactly? When the “establishment” is identified as a villain what is it that we are considering? Who brings it forth, and why? Where does the semblance of impoverished drabness which always follows the establishment come from–the tired routines, the stagnant monotony of the so-called “cultured activities” from the movie screen, to literature, to the allegedly intellectual publications? Anyone is still free to say, write and publish anything that they please in America, yet men and women keep silent as their culture perishes around them from an entrenched, epidemic of institutionalized mediocrity. Why? That is what we need to understand before we can rebel against anything. I encourage you dear reader highly to watch every one of these videos. If you love yourself you’ll do it. If you love your children, YOU’LL DO IT!
In 1971 the National Institute of Mental Health granted Dr. B.F Skinner $283,000 to write a book called Beyond Freedom and Dignity. The book argues that entrenched belief in free will and the moral autonomy of the individual (which Skinner referred to as “dignity”) hinders the prospect of using scientific methods to modify behavior for the purpose of building a happier and better-organized society.
Beyond Freedom and Dignity may be summarized as an attempt to promote Skinner’s philosophy of science, the technology of human behavior. His conception of determinism, and what Skinner calls ‘cultural engineering’.
Skinner invented the operant conditioning chamber, also known as the Skinner Box.[7] He was a firm believer of the idea that human free will was actually an illusion and any human action was the result of the consequences of that same action. If the consequences were bad, there was a high chance that the action would not be repeated; however if the consequences were good, the actions that lead to it would be reinforced.[8] He called this the principle of reinforcement.[9]
He innovated his own philosophy of science called radical behaviorism,[10] and founded his own school of experimental research psychology—the experimental analysis of behavior. His analysis of human behavior culminated in his work Verbal Behavior, as well as his philosophical manifesto Walden Two, both of which have recently seen enormous increases in interest experimentally and in applied settings.[11] Contemporary academia considers Skinner a pioneer of modern behaviorism along with John B. Watson and Ivan Pavlov.
Skinner discovered and advanced the rate of response as a dependent variable in psychological research. He invented the cumulative recorder to measure rate of responding as part of his highly influential work on schedules of reinforcement.[12][13] In a June 2002 survey, Skinner was listed as the most influential psychologist of the 20th century.[14] He was a prolific author who published 21 books and 180 articles.[15][16]
The direct result of Skinner’s work was that it began to be accepted in public schools the tendency of some students to be “hyper active” in relation to other students and that this behavior should be identified and turned down so that the collective whole could function better as an institution. Skinner of course justifies this by his term ‘cultural engineering.’ Not many people read Skinner’s book at first except the “academic elite” who would then postulate politicians at charity events, fund-raisers, and other social occasions on the merit of the esteemed Harvard professor and his studies into social behavior, and how they could then be corrected in young people starting in public schools.
Eventually after a decade or two of such postulating the criteria for ADHD began to take root in public consciousness as “established practice.” After all the studies came out of Harvard! Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD, similar to hyperkinetic disorder in the ICD) is a psychiatric disorder[1] or neurobehavioral disorder[2] characterized by significant problems either of inattention and/or hyperactivity and impulsiveness. These symptoms must emerge before twelve years of age for a diagnosis to be made.[3] There are three subtypes of the disorder: predominantly inattentive (ADHD-PI or ADHD-I), predominantly hyperactive-impulsive (ADHD-HI or ADHD-H), or the two combined (ADHD-C), which shows all three difficulties. Often people refer to ADHD-PI as “attention deficit disorder” (ADD), however, the latter has not been officially accepted since the 1994 revision of the DSM. ADHD affects school-aged children and results in restlessness, acting impulsively, and a lack of focus that may impair school performance.
Inattention, hyperactivity (restlessness in adults), disruptive behavior, and impulsivity are common in ADHD.[19][20] Academic and social skills difficulties are also frequent.[19] The symptoms can be difficult to define because it is hard to draw a line at where normal levels of inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity end and clinically significant levels requiring intervention begin.[10]:p.26 To be diagnosed as ADHD, symptoms must be observed in two different settings for six months or more and to a degree that is greater than other children of the same age.[21]
The symptom categories yield three potential classifications of ADHD—predominantly inattentive type, predominantly hyperactive-impulsive type, or combined type if criteria for both subtypes are met:[10]:p.4
An individual with predominantly inattentive-type may have symptoms including:[22]
Be easily distracted, miss details, forget things, and frequently switch from one activity to another
Have difficulty maintaining focus on one task
Become bored with a task after only a few minutes, unless doing something enjoyable
Have difficulty focusing attention on organizing and completing a task or learning something new
Have trouble completing or turning in homework assignments, often losing things (e.g., pencils, toys, assignments) needed to complete tasks or activities
Not seem to listen when spoken to
Daydream, become easily confused, and move slowly
Have difficulty processing information as quickly and accurately as others
Struggle to follow instructions.
An individual with predominantly hyperactive-impulsive type may have symptoms including:[22]
Fidget and squirm in their seats
Talk nonstop
Dash around, touching or playing with anything and everything in sight
Have trouble sitting still during dinner, school, and story time
Be constantly in motion
Have difficulty doing quiet tasks or activities
An individual with predominantly impulsivity type may have symptoms including:[22]
Be very impatient
Blurt out inappropriate comments, show their emotions without restraint, and act without regard for consequences
Blurts out comments better left unsaid (not always innapropriate)
Have difficulty waiting for things they want or waiting their turns in games
Often interrupt conversations or others’ activities.
According to the “establishment” some children, adolescents, and adults with ADHD have an increased risk of experiencing difficulties with social skills, such as social interaction and forming and maintaining friendships due to impairments in processing verbal and nonverbal language. About half of children and adolescents with ADHD experience rejection by their peers compared to 10–15 percent of non-ADHD children and adolescents. Training in social skills, behavioral modification and medication may have some limited beneficial effects. The most important factor in reducing emergence of later psychopathology, such as major depression, criminality, school failure, and substance use disorders is formation of friendships with people who are not involved in delinquent activities.[23] At least, according to the “establishment.”
In other words the threats to the established order that the government paid “B. F.” Skinner to write about in his book Beyond Freedom and Dignity is children who have “compliance” issues as listed above in the diagnosis for ADHD. Psychiatric professors with grants of their own using Skinner’s work as their foundation proceeded to frame their work to fit their grant criteria, which was to nudge their testing results into the direction of Skinner’s work, which is proven to have the ability to obtain federal grants for their intuitions of learning.
Very indirectly, the statist federal government has shaped and created “established” thought about the roles that government schools should have in superseding parental authority into making children into subservient within the schools of which the education institutions have a monopoly. In just a few short decades using the grant system and federal funds to gain power over local authority, the federal government has shaped the thoughts and minds of an entire American population into believing that their hyperactive, imaginative child fidgeting in their chair day-dreaming too much is actually sick, and needs to have their minds turned off so that the entire school can function better under rules of statism established by college professors eating out of the palm of the federal government with $283,000 checks to write books for the academic class to slowly, surely, become the new generational authority from which everything else will follow. This is the process that creates “the establishment.”
That is what I mean by rebellion and what the target is. It’s not people, political parties, or even buildings in Washington. It’s the philosophy that supports them all with beliefs that are detrimental to the cause of liberty and desire for every living life to function from free will.
‘’American Exceptionalism tends to set off tempers from the type of people who have been taught their entire lives that America should follow the trends of the rest of the World and not proudly proclaim the wonderful attributes that have come out of the freest country in the world-such as capitalism, human rights, individual freedom, and quality of life that is unmatched anywhere.’’ Did Rich or El Rushbo write this? Funny I was a Rush baby, some of us grow up and actually learn history, economics, free-markets, and real Conservative, ex. Russel Kirk, TS Elliot, Edmund Burke, and M.E. Bradford (who was originally appointed by Reagan for national endowment position, but sidelined by Bill Krystol for neocon Bill Bennett (Lincoln lover)).
The listener’s name is Ben Cowan and he is attempting to display that he has the superior argument by stating he has grown up and away from the way of thinking of Rush Limbaugh. People who use such arguments with a direct attack like that try to gain supremacy through insult instead of the quality of their statement. Cowan then proceeds to establish that he has a vast knowledge of history to draw upon as if I do not. He has obviously not read the more than 2 million words here at Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom, so if he starts now he may be qualified to make such statements in about 6 months. But until then he is functioning from ignorance. I enjoy the work of T.S. Elliot particularly “The Wasteland.” The point of his statement is to say that Cowan has evolved intellectually into thinking beyond Rush Limbaugh which is supposed to qualify everything that follows as fact, and everything he says about me as inferior to his arguments. This is a trick Cowan learned from the progressive intellectuals which he reveals further in the next section.
Notice how weak Rich’s arguments are that he portrays anyone who gets frustrated with Decepticons aka neocons using the term American Exceptionalism as someone who supports Obama or his ideology. As to Rich’s Bill Maher clip, I actually agree with some of Bill’s sediments in this clip. This is probably the only time that I have agreed with Bill Maher, but our solutions and reasons are much different. Did you notice how I separated the two complaint/Solutions without emotionally driven comments like Rich uses?
Prof. Kevin Gutzman liked this part of the main article ‘’Under the American Constitution, slavery was abolished- a move happened nowhere else in the world.’’ If the point is that slavery wasn’t abolished under the US Constitution outside the US, well duh. Slavery was abolished in Haiti, Cuba, Brazil, Martinique, Guadeloupe, Barbados, Bahamas, Suriname, Guyana, Trinidad, and Nevis. –Response by Prof. Kevin Gutzman (Author of Who Killed the Constitution).
Cowan attacks my arguments as weak without identifying the argument which is an anti-concept trick that was perfected by the political strategist Saul Alinsky. It is used, copied and heavily studied by radical groups to this day. People like Cowan pick up the behavior through observation and interacting with people who use the method. The premise of his attack is that my statement about Obama and his ideology is weak because it points to American Exceptionalism as strong, and that such a broad brush is not appropriate under the terms Cowan established in his anti-concept. By my definition of American Exceptionalism I am stating the concept “America is good.” The reason this angers people like Cowan, who believes that he is an evolved conservative to some degree, or just defining himself as some degree of libertarian, is that he has accepted that the concept of American Exceptionalism is a myth at some point in his past and he is defending his foundation beliefs from the concept of goodness. He then uses Bill Maher as validation to support his theory in the same fashion that he uses Kevin Gutzman as a crutch the way most academics use quotes and references to support collectively their own thoughts and beliefs. The implication of their need for reference crutches is their insecurity to their own thoughts. They attempt to build a public consensus by pointing at others and what they say as if to justify their own thoughts. The truth about slavery is that The Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage was the first Americanabolition society. It was founded April 14, 1775, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania by Anthony Benezet and others, and held four meetings.[1] Seventeen of the 24 men who attended initial meetings of the Society were Quakers, or members of the Religious Society of Friends. Thomas Paine was also among the Society’s founders. It was reorganized in 1784[2] as the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery and for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage,[3] (better known as the Pennsylvania Abolition Society) and was incorporated in 1789. At some point after 1785, Benjamin Franklin was elected as the organization’s president. The society asked him to bring the matter of slavery to the Constitutional Convention of 1787. He petitioned the U.S Congress in 1790 to ban slavery.[4]
During this time there were similar movements happening all over the world as many were questioning the practice. But the big driver in changing the culture of slavery was The United States in their fight for independence. Once that revolution was won other countries looked at their own situations and made adjustments. Smaller countries like Haiti, Cuba, Martinique, Guadeloupe, Barbados, Bahamas and so on were able to abolish their slaves more quickly than larger countries with more bureaucracy. My example of American Excepetionalism is that if America had failed in their revolution then other countries would have stepped back from such a task. It took America to lead by example. Cowan would then point out that many of those movements took place at the turn of the 1700s into the early 1800s. Yet they were using America as their example as many of the discussions taking place in the colonies from those Philadelphia meetings were exported all over the world through commerce. When America defeated the British, many countries became more embolden in their pursuit of individual freedom and passed anti slavery mandates. Sadly, many of those same countries Cowan mentions would submit to socialism just a few years later falling back into social slavery of a different type.
Capitalism is great and the best system in which people can move up and down mobile in a free society. Capitalism predates the Union of States and American Exceptionalism. Did it occur to Rich that Britain lead the 1st industrial Revolution, followed by Meiji Restoration in Japan, and the 2nd industrial revolution was led by the United States.
Yes, it did occur to me, yet Britain failed in their economy falling to socialism as they allowed Keynesian economics to ruin their capitalism, and Japan of course could not leave their feudal social functions once they submitted themselves to an emperor. To this very day many large countries make the mistake of attempting to emulate Japan for their manufacturing standards believing them to be of higher quality than American standards. The failure in this thinking is that the Japanese place themselves before their individuality in nearly every case. Their programs of lean manufacturing work well as their people do not question the methods. Their service to their country and business come before their own desires. American strength in manufacturing has always come from their ability to think outside-the-box as individuals, not blind compliance to a greater good such as country, company, or even community. America adopted foreign lean manufacturing methods as a direct assault against the American labor unions which infected manufacturing from the Red Decade with communist philosophy. It was the only way that companies could force the unions to not destroy their businesses with non-productive effort. Because the unions put a lock on productive output, American companies were forced to use foreign collectivist methods perfected abroad to keep the unions from destroying their companies that were legally allowed to organize against industry for the collective gain of the many. Even with these severe handicaps most new ideas still come out of The United States. Most literature, films, music, art and technical innovation are generated by free people with the prospect of profit blowing wind into their sails. Even with all the best lean manufacturing techniques produced for collective motivation of work forces, creativity is what makes American Excptionalism. Creativity is what is missing from all other countries that have stepped away from capitalism, and to this day seek alliances with others to disguise the fact that they are nations of suppressed thought praying to their religions for inspiration. In America, innovation is invented because the mind is free—that is the backbone of American Excepetionalism.
‘’Americans have been taught by their gov’t that the United States gained everything it achieved by consuming too many resources and stepping on the rights of others across the world.’’ -This is what would be taught at a progressive college, that so called conservatives send their kids to and help support and perpetuate. Many fake conservative send their kids to progressive colleges so Johnny and Suzie can watch people run into other people on Saturday afternoon and ‘’what’s the score of the game mindless thinking.’’ Again, Rich is using the absurd progressive logic to lump real Conservatives like myself into, to push ‘’American Exceptionalism’’, which is the progressive rights term invented by a Frenchmen, and used to spread democracy by force to any country whether they want it or not.
Not sure that I disagree with Cowan here. He uses my name in a way that implicates that my statement is wrong, but then he agrees with it, because I had just said the same thing. Americans have been taught such things as I stated and most colleges are infected with progressive thought. If Cowan doesn’t believe such a thing I’m not sure what planet he’s living on.
I enjoyed Rich’s definition of a neocon! How terrible of the social freedom of the people in the 60’s. Was Steve Jobs one of those people?? A neocon or decepticon is someone who left the Democrat Party to join the Republican Party in which they brought their FDR progressive foreign policy with them. They also brought the mentality that morals should be controlled through the Fed gov’t. They were Nationalist that the great founders feared, and why some didn’t sign the Constitution fearing the Union would end up like as it is now.
Steve Jobs had a good idea and left his indoctrination education to invent his own way. He used capitalism to bring a great product to market, so not all people who smoked dope, and listened to the garbage music of the 60s was a diabolical hippie menace. I would say that George Lucas was cast of the same mold as Jobs, and I’m sure that George loved the 60’s although he was more of a loner than his friend Francis was at their first studio set up in San Francisco where hippie mania was rampant. Somewhere in that drug induced haze Star Wars was born which I love. But these guys are rare examples that managed to rise to the top even as statism was increasing to put shackles on the mind of mankind by suppressing capitalism. The second part of Cowan’s statement I agree with for the most part, even though it’s pretty general. The real situation is more complicated, but Cowan is learning so I’ll give him a gold star on his paper for at least thinking.
The founding fathers wanted to be immortalized for their writings and their accomplishments ‘’Fame of our Fathers’’, they however were very humble; they had humility which Rich doesn’t seem to grasp! Jefferson studied Scottish philosopher David Hume, Switzerland’s decentralized country, the Indians free trade, and the ancient Greeks who prior to Alexander the Great were successful for centuries with their small [r]epublics in which Math, Science, Art, Philosophy, architecture, and sport was mastered in small [r]epublics of people. Jefferson wasn’t arrogant as to say he created our ‘’written gov’t’’ on his own without researching other countries and philosophers. Rich’s progressive right term “American Exceptionalism’’, he points to ‘’American Experience’’ of 1776, which I noted to Matt Clark in my response.
‘’The benefits of capitalism and the American Experience produced a unique type of person that had only been contemplated by philosopher fantasies prior to the declaration.’’ Again the arrogance of Rich’s comments, Madison and Jefferson both used Adam Smith’s a Scottish Philosopher book ‘’Wealth of Nations’’ as a guide to preventing a National Bank and advocating the market to work!
As to Cowan’s point, there is nothing “progressive” about my term other than such an identification about American Exceptionalism is needed to defend what’s good about The United States against the progressives. Other than that, Cowan is indulging himself in wishful thinking to believe that I adhere to something because of some progressive invention that has not been carefully considered from all angles. In this paragraph the real weakness of Cowan begins to emerge, his real gripe with me. As a victim of a mixed economy he believes certain things. As a flawed human being who probably has events from his past that he regrets, he chooses to maintain a view of the world that supports notions that flaws make humans, “human.” Many people wish to believe such things because it would be hard for them to get up every morning and put on their shoes. But I am very aware of the origins of Jefferson’s belief and studies of Scottish Common Sense, which I have written about elsewhere, CLICK FOR REVIEW. I have said on many occasions that the work of John Locke was inspired by the pirate Henry Morgan, which then also showed the colonies how to shake off a nation the way that Morgan took on Spain nearly single-handedly with their presence in the Caribbean. But the fact remains that these elements came together not in Scotland, England, Spain, or France where they were talked about. It was only in America where the dialogue was able to move away from dinner tables, congregations, and card games to become part of the governing philosophy of a country on the rise.
Now to deal with the “arrogance” portion of this debate–being humble is a taught theory by statist oriented groups, be it religion or government to force compliance of the masses to the desires of institutionalism. Grace in victory and humbleness are often confused to be the same thing by people like Cowan, but they are not. It is often perceived that confidence is “arrogant” by those who lack it which is to say that such a declaration is just another anti-concept. By calling me arrogant Cowan hopes to dismiss everything I have said and place himself in high esteem with a reader who identifies their internal value with humbleness, which is sheer nonsense. The concept of serving God with humbleness may be what the majority of human beings believe, but that belief was created during the Dark Ages of Europe and should be confined to the corners of one’s own home. Humility and “duty” to something greater than oneself is a statist concept that was created by the churches of Europe to maintain political control over their flocks. Under the rules of engagement for people like Cowan he is quick to associate humility with arrogance so that he doesn’t have to deal with the root cause of the word. It is the tendency toward humility that Eric Holder continues to lie directly to the American people, it allows Barack Obama to lie about the impact of the scandals he’s at the center of, it allows scum bags like Anthony Wiener to lie, lie, and lie again to anybody and everyone about his sexual lust for other women making his wife look like a buffoon who will forgive anything just so she can be married to someone in a powerful public office—like her mentor Hillary Clinton. These predators all have in common a desire to use the humility of civilization to hide their true intentions. Humility is not a good human trait, kindness is, intelligence is, even compassion, but not humility. Yielding to ones faults, which humility implies, is a sin against the individual soul of every human being and people everywhere will continue to live in bondage to social parasites so long as they believe in the kinds of things that Ben Cowan believes, that humility has value, and equals arrogance. More on this in a bit because it’s not the only time Cowan uses the term. But as far as how to behave when you win, the following videos are from the bullwhip competitions that I was at when Ben started this little fuss through Matt. Notice my behavior when I win. I expect the same from every American. You don’t rub people’s face in it, but you don’t cower away from it either. When you have something to be proud of, be proud of it.
‘’Life in virtually every facet is better in America because of the philosophy of personal independence that is much larger than the ‘’American Experience.’’ This is so obnoxious, that is the American Experience, limited gov’t. The founders referred to their states as countries, they didn’t speak in homogenized tongue like Rich! The South traded throughout the world (off the backs of slaves) and the Northern States were protectionalist!
This is the kind of thing that caused Cowan to start this dialogue off with an anti-concept attack instead of fact based thought. He does not understand the American Experience in spite of all his supposed education and conservative thought. He doesn’t understand it as a graduate of Rush Limbaugh thought so he finds my statement, “obnoxious.” He lacks perspective to see the world through common sense instead of memorized standards which is why he surrendered his statement to some implications of racism and isolationism—both agreed upon violations of universal understanding. The American Experience is being born in a free country with no hooks into the soul of the child. Many believe that the World Bank owns us all, but at least philosophically, in The United States there is at least the assumption of personal freedom that is held in high regard. In America one does not have to social climb to be successful. That is a European trait. One does not have to marry someone else to become powerful. That is a European, and Asian trait. One does not have to become a member of the political class to gain wealth. That is a European trait. In America one can be just about anything they want to be and they can be it anytime they want to. Just as a byproduct of American culture, which is a direct result of the American Experience, look just at Comic Con in San Diego. America is dedicated to the products of the mind, and no place else in the world is there anything like Comic Con. There are other countries that attempt to host such events such as the recent Star Wars Celebration in Germany, but the products displayed there are not developed in other countries, it is in the United States that they were created. Or consider the British Invasion of music that came out of England during the 60’s, a period that Cowan seems to enjoy. They came to America to be superstars as England had too small of a stage to gain such fame. That is the American Experience. Cowan because of his very weak position again took a page out of the progressive notebook of anti-concepts and attempted to use racism and isolationism to gain control of victory in the debate without having any facts to cover his emotional lack of understanding about the American Experience.
Walt Disney should be honored as a great entrepreneur that used determination, creativity, and thrift which is missing in today’s culture. People don’t know what thrift is, these days!
Rudolf Diesel a German inventor invented the diesel engine, which we use very much in the Union today. I could see German’s going around saying this is German Exceptionalism. I have never heard German’s speak in that tongue, but I detest our countrymen arrogantly beating their chest say we are the Awesomest of the Awesome! People don’t like pompous people, they are attracted by humility, what you don’t have Rich.
This is where I get really angry, and why I took a few days to cool off before answering Cowan directly. Let me start on a positive, which I agree with Cowan on the thrift issue. I would like to see a return to that type of mental exercise. And the German’s would have every right to proclaim German Exceptionalism. It was they who produced some of the finest engineering feats in the world during the 20th century and even as members of the European Union, they manage to be so productive that the rest of their European neighbors continually want to borrow their money. German BMW and Mercedes automobiles are fabulously engineered earning them the right to beat on their chest about that particular field. But here is where people like Ben Cowan are deeply flawed human beings bringing in the front door the tyrants of our modern age because they fail to project the proper mentality to combat attacks from villains who prey on humility.
When making a point that most of society will reject people who do not display humility he is right, but wrong. Being “liked,” being “popular,” or having people think you’re “awesome,” is the furthest thing from my mind. I don’t have humility because I don’t want it Cowan. I do not conceal from hangers in my closet skeletons of shame, I do not fear violence by my attackers, or need to be liked in any fashion. I do have people who like me, who share my values, but I have no desire to be liked by people who do not share my values, which is very few. If I had such a thought I wouldn’t say half the things that needed to be said in this day and age. Even people who read here every day get angry with the things I say. But it doesn’t change my stance and it never will. When you start caring what people think of you, you are finished in the philosophy business. When you desire to be loved, you are prone to be corrupt, to be bought, to allow enemies to gain emotional leverage over you. People should like you because they share your values or respect you, not because you pander to their own weaknesses. It is that process that has turned our entire society into a nation of fools led by idiots, and I would guess that many of them think just like Cowan.
Cowan believes he stands on high moral ground backed by historical fact, but all he stands upon is a pile of his own metaphorical feces created by years of such thinking. It is because of this weakness in him personally that he attempts to skirt around the edges pretending to be a sophisticated conservative that is beyond refute. But in reality he is a child of the mixed economy that has bought into some of the statism that is rampant in American culture, much of it culminating in the 1960s a period Cowan appears to enjoy.
A defeated person uses an emphasis on humility, weakness, or accusations of pompousness to justify their lackluster existences. It is easy to be an armchair philosopher, a casual listener of a radio broadcast, and a Facebook junkie that comments on things other people do. It is quite something else to be the leading edge of an ice breaker, to crash through all opposition knowing that the pain will never ever go away so long as there is ice to smash through. To the broken ice, the ice breaker is a villain, a un-compassionate destroyer, an uncompromising force of sheer will and something to be feared. To me the value is in the ice breaker who can smash through the progressive ice even if people like Ben Cowan have built cities upon the ice believing that the surface was sturdy underneath. They believe such things until they see the ice breaker coming and to cover their fear of seeing for the first time the waters under the ice, they attempt to direct the ice breaker somewhere else so that it doesn’t violate the cities of thought they have built upon progressive corruption. That is the motive behind their diatribes of humility, arrogance, and pompousness. Notice in the events shown in these clips that I was competing in as Cowan sent me his half-baked diatribes, that I don’t rub anything in when I win events. But I don’t show modesty either. If you are good, you are good and should not be ashamed of it. People like Cowan mistake pride, confidence, and determination for evil vices created in the courts of Europe for the determined strategy of controlling the masses to limited thinking and self imprisonment by social shackles.
Instead of comparing us to China, India, Spain, and Russia, how about you compare us to Switzerland, Estonia, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Chile. We are the 10th freest country in the world now! Using the left/right paradigm gets old. It is now Nationalism vs. Federalism, Limited gov’t vs. Central planning. Obviously you want the Fed Gov’t to plan social cultural norms. Steve Jobs was a capitalist; he listened to the Grateful Dead and was an advocate of LSD. I don’t own any apple products, but luckily he was never jailed for 20 years with your authoritarian leaning positions. How many jobs did Steve Jobs create Rich?
I didn’t try and put Matt on the defensive. ‘’American Exceptionalism’’ comes off as arrogant to the average person and turns them away from limited decentralized gov’t that the good founders embraced! It also gives the average person the mentality that we need to export our awesomeness to other nations, which is the opposite of the founders. ‘’American Exceptionalism, is a term that Hitler would have embraced if he were American, getting people to believe in the good of the state. He detested divided gov’t and decentralization. He wanted to instill Nationalism in the German people, and he commended Lincoln in his book Mein Kampf for Nationalizing the US and trampling the states. No critical thinking allowed in their worlds, similar to Rich’s.
And here is why I find Cowan such a repulsive parasite that is more dangerous than the average progressive, because at least those threats are easy to identify. Cowan sells himself as a logical conservative, but since his value system was threatened by my statements he has retreated to comparing me to Adolf Hitler! Cowan, America needs to export its awesomeness to other nations! You bet your ass! I’ll say it again. “AMERICA NEEDS TO EXPORT ITS AWESOMNESS TO OTHER NATIONS!” Other countries would be much, much, MUCH better off if they adopted American ideals of independence, economic freedom, and creative enterprise.
As for celebrating in sports, I don’t watch those main stream sports! I play sports that are gentlemen’s games, where you can call a penalty on yourself because the people who play have virtue! Humility and lack of explaining in a story of how the Union came about and how the founders studied other countries to help craft written documents such as the ‘’Declaration of Independence’’, ‘’Articles of Confederation’’, and ‘’The Constitution’’ is what is missing today. Broad rhetoric and arrogant phrases ‘’American Exceptionalism’’ detour people from discovering our founding generation’s great works!
Just as the definition of Welfare 250 years ago, ‘’it was a deliverance from evil’’, which now means gov’t assistance. The American Experience is the correct term in which to use! I have served my country and I am a small business owner and it makes me upset when people use terms that confuse people into thinking the person is bragging about America or is trying to invade another country and impose its Exceptionalism on them! So let’s teach kids limited gov’t and to promote trade with countries we don’t see eye to eye with. Encourage kids to read about the great risk takers and inventors of our country and the rest of the world!
Finally what Ben Cowan is really about; he considers himself a gentleman, something of a Victorian gentleman at that. Well, dude, it was considered against the “gentleman code” to attack during bad weather or other adverse conditions, but George Washington attacked the Hessians at Trenton anyway against every kind of “gentlemanly” code of conduct there was, early in the morning, right after a holiday, and during bad weather. Then again at the fall of Yorktown, Cornwallis attempted to send his surrendered sword by Deputy General Charles O’Hara to give to General Rochambeau. When Rochambeau rejected the offer O’Hara had to give the sword to Benjamin Lincoln because Washington refused to allow Cornwallis to avoid acknowledging the American General as his superior in combat. Cornwallis was a gentleman. Washington was gracious in victory, but demanded respect—which is a lesson we should all be embracing! I can only imagine what kind of “gentlemanly games” Cowan is talking about, Croquet, basket weaving, coin collecting? I hang around knife throwers, gun marksman, and bullwhip artists. CLICK HERE FOR REVIEW. The “gentleman code” is just another anti-concept. There is a difference between being respectful of other people, and then pawing off inaction, indecision, and just plain being a pussy to behaving like a “gentleman.” Cowan, you be a gentleman all you want. I’ll take the win, I’ll take the American Excepetionalism, and I’ll take the freedom that comes with it. You keep the European terminology and keep calling me arrogant. It lets me know I’m doing the right things.
An 11-year-old girl apparently from Yemen made an impassioned online plea for her parents to stop pressuring her into an arranged marriage which gained international attention. In the video, brown-eyed Nada Al-Ahdal chastised her parents whom she called “criminal” and said she would rather die than be married off and throw her life away at such a young age. For many Americans, the idea of arranged marriage is a radically foreign concept. In America, the typical marriage arrangement is one of choice where two individuals pick one another for a shared life. However, in many countries, even to this very day, marriages are arranged with the belief that the sacrifice of a bride to a well-connected groom is acceptable so that a family can prosper through the marriage. Daughters are often traded away into marriages to perceptively strong families so that collectively the whole family will rise in public stature.
The idiocy of this belief may seem remote in The United States, but it is closer to home than many believe. As England produced from the Royal Vagina a new baby, the world clamored to the news like mosquitoes in an early summer evening after a heavy rain. Just for being born to a member of the Royal family, a future King of England was born. The future King did nothing to earn the merit, yet the people of England chose to believe that there was something special about the Royal blood flowing through the new-born baby who has done nothing to earn such a social role. There are many thousands of Englishmen who are far more qualified to be King of England based on merit, yet a baby born of Kate Middleton was given the title because of the family he was born in.
When parents attempt to arrange the marriage of their children, they are attempting to create social alliances that will benefit them in the economic world through politics and status. The individual desires of the marriage party are of a secondary concern. Young women in many cultures throughout the world are expected to marry spouses chosen by someone besides themselves. In the case of this young 11-year-old Yemen girl, she only wanted the opportunity to be a little girl. She does not want to be a wife. She does not want to be the bed partner of a perfect stranger who can do by law whatever he pleases to her body any time he wishes. Yet her parents were willing to trade her away in an arranged marriage so that they could earn through her life improvements to theirs.
People, who think like this, even in The United States, are the type of people who become progressives. They are collectivists who believe that the sum of the social whole is greater than any individual. The parents of Nada Al-Ahdal believe that the little girl’s life is subservient to their needs as a family. The situation with this family is more obvious than the American socialite who tries to get their daughters married to some perceived powerful person like a doctor, a lawyer, or a politician because of the influence of pull that the arrangement will provide. These mentalities have their origin in Europe and are of the same type who camped out for weeks in London to witness the birth of a Royal Prince. The willingness to believe that a family has more merit over other families just because society has said so is the kind of belief that drives a statist society. The belief that value is something that some people are born with as opposed to others is to not understand what gives people value—but to assume that it is granted by chance, political pull, or even heredity. Arranged marriages, belief in Royal blood, or astrologers who believe the character of a child is shaped by the position of the sun, moon and stars in the heavenly sky are the cheerleaders of statism. The hidden epitaphs of this statist behavior is a fear of taking responsibility for their lives, and instead are happy to throw their lives away on chance so that some mystical powers beyond their knowledge are responsible for the misery they issue to their existence.
For any Englishman to behold beyond tabloid amusement the realization that an unproven baby is qualified to be King of a nation is to shrug responsibility away from their lives and surrender their very souls to the state. For a family to wish away their 11-year-old daughter in exchange for some alliance with another family is to shrug away their responsibility as individuals to bring fortune to themselves by their own merit. Their actions are the same as the head-hunters of New Guinea who believed that by eating their enemies, they could gain power over their rivals.
In America these goofy ideas of arranged marriages and worshiping kings was rejected by the Declaration of Independence. Collectivism in all forms was rejected. In Europe the Troubadours from France in the 13th Century were among the first people in the world to reject this collectivist notion of arranged relationships and their evolution became the norm in America. CLICK HERE FOR MORE. The behavior of families in Yemen who have no value for the lives of individual women, even children who are only 11 years old, is a pre-evolution social behavior that belongs in the camp ground of a Neanderthal. And the behavior of England who collectively chanted behind their facades of socialism for the birth of their future king, they are only a step outside that same campfire as they yearn to elect a village chief to instruct them of their life’s direction. The reason that America is the greatest country on earth is because it has a tradition of appreciating merit, and merit is obtained through individuality, which is nurtured by embracing such factors in their relationships. In America the family traditionally is designed to invoke individual growth in their children. In collectivist societies, the children exist to serve the collective family—who is just a microcosm of society at large. The individuality is removed, and sacrifice is the dominate belief.
I would say that 11-year-old Nada Al-Ahdal is no longer a little girl from Yemen, but has taken the bold steps into becoming an American and claiming her life for her own right. It is the American concept of individual recognition that she seeks, and because of her social refusal, she deserves it as she speaks for a countless horde of unfortunate young women who find themselves arranged in marriage by a social structure that sees them as needed sacrifice for the gods of benefit to rain upon an ignorant society. Any society that believes such arranged marriages are a positive practice for their citizens is clearly functioning from ignorance, and thank goodness that within such seas of corrupt fools there are bold young women like Nada who are more like Americans living in the country of Yemen than most Americans living in New York City who are behaving like Yemenites.
I spoke about this a bit the other day, but now that the dust has settled more details are necessary in regard to the Detroit bankruptcy. Darryl Parks during his Saturday program on 700 WLW did a wonderful couple of segments about the Detroit situation which deserves to be highlighted, and can be heard below. Darryl as he usually does comes to these types of topics armed with many facts and in this case many I did not know about the Motor City. I have family who lived in Michigan and worked in the auto industries who were big union supporters. Every year my family visited them at least once, so I learned a lot about Michigan during these childhood adventures, especially during the 70s and 80s when I was growing up. I watched firsthand the decline that Darryl Parks articulated during his program. I watched Detroit go from the richest city in the United States in 1965 to currently the poorest. I knew that Detroit was at one time a source of entertainment as The Lone Ranger radio program was launched from Detroit and the city still owns the rights to the Howdy Doody puppet. Detroit at one point in its very recent history was a center for art, entertainment, and manufacturing—which drove the entire economy. But what destroyed Detroit is a reoccurring theme everywhere in modern America, the notion of collectivism framed within the labor union movement which is failing on a massive scale. Click Darryl’s broadcast below to begin to understand how many labor unions are listed as creditors in the Detroit bankruptcy and it will quickly become clear how destructive unions have been on the American economy, the role they’ve played in wage inflation, and the way they’ve prevented the proper management of Detroit’s resources.
When Michael Moore made his first big film Roger and Me, I enjoyed it as I shared with Moore a love of the Midwest. His film was about the decline of the auto industry in Flint, Michigan and the loss of entire neighborhoods becoming a gigantic ghost town. But Moore lost me all those years ago in 1989 when he assumed that General Motors CEO Roger Smith had a duty to the people of Flint to give back to the community his large wages so that fewer jobs would be lost. Moore’s position in the film was typical of most union households in Central and Lower Michigan from the 70’s to the 90’s that was raised on soft communism disguised as American patriotism. Moore’s beliefs were harder than socialism, and shy of Russian, or Chinese communism but were certainly anti-capitalism in their nature. Moore failed to understand that it was capitalism that brought jobs to his town of Flint which is just north of Detroit. It was communism that had infiltrated the labor unions and made Moore believe that Roger Smith owed Flint, Michigan anything.
The film launched Moore into the national spotlight as a left leaning media was hungry to team up with someone who could capture their instructed beliefs into a film format. But the parasitic nature of the type of contracts the unions negotiated for themselves continued. Jobs left the Detroit area for destinations that were not friendly to labor unions, like China, and Mexico, countries already utilizing a social philosophy of socialism and communism. I liked my family members, but found myself in contention with the adults who had cars in the driveway with bumper stickers stating, “Buy American” which was a typical union slogan at the time even though the Japanese were making better cars cheaper. Their assertion was the same as Michael Moore’s, and that was people had an obligation to buy an American car built with union labor because of some misguided patriotic duty. All those elements never added up to my mind, even at the ages of 8 through 15 when my years in Lower Michigan were most active. No matter how much the adults from that side of the family yelled their philosophy never made sense to me.
When I was 18 years old I worked in a metal stamping plant while I was majoring in economics in college. The economic professors didn’t seem to understand the real world of manufacturing the way I did because I worked in a real metal stamping plant known as the meat grinder at the time. I saw many very serious injuries and I learned quickly that the parts we made at this facility required salesmen to sell them to a distributer somewhere in the world and that purchasing had to find the metal coils somewhere so we’d have materials enough to manufacture the goods. I worked with some tough, rough neck people and fights on the shop floor were common. When I first started at this place a man older than me by about 10 years picked a fight in the break room. I launched a full can of Coke at his head and luckily missed his forehead by only a few inches. The can exploded against the wall and after the man saw how serious I was about winning the fight decided to befriend me, and we remained friends for all the years I worked there. There were many other fights that involved serious cuts, broken bones, knocked out teeth and eyeballs that were actually removed from their sockets. The foremen would look the other way, especially in my case because I without question out produced everyone in the building. My manufacturing rates were very high. I didn’t work so hard because of fear for my job, or to earn praise from the foremen, but because I enjoyed it. I liked working fast—I enjoyed pushing myself with sweat pouring off my body. The fights came from the workers who were trying to unionize this facility and wanted to bring me in line with everyone else.
The college professors had no advice for my young mind as they leaned toward labor’s position in the matter when I asked about it. Their arguments I know now were Keynesian in their nature and rooted in European socialism, but at the time, I assumed they knew what they were talking about. Because of the economic professor at the college I was attending I tried to understand the union mentality so I listened to the advocates instead of fighting them. This led them to ask me to present a list of union demands to the company president. Even though everyone in the company was much older than I was, they wanted an 18-year-old kid to approach management and negotiate on their behalf. So I did.
I sat across from the President and gave him the grievances from the workers but as I sat there I saw the man who ran the company with his hands that were too smooth from lack of work, a belly that was too fat from eating in too many nice restaurants and was having an affair with his secretary who was half his age. But I also saw a guy who was taking all the risks in the company. If sales were down, it was his fault. If supply could not be meant, it was his fault. If he didn’t grease enough wheels at OSHA politically, then it was his fault. In essence I felt the grievances from the workers were stupid, short-sighted and childish. At the end of the day the “workers” were able to go home and forget about the work they did while the president was always tuned in to what was happening, even when he was on the golf course—because he was the risk taker. For the employees to declare that their labor was worth the same as those who took the risks it was preposterous.
I gave the demands back to the union organizers and told them I would not represent them. They attempted to reorganize without my help and fell flat on their face. Whenever they tried to cut back on their labor hours to force reductions in manufacturing rates the foreman would give me extra overtime to cover their slack. When they tried to paint me as a “scab,” we went out in the parking lot and solved the problem, and a lot of people got hurt. But I never yielded my beliefs on the matter and everyone ended up shaking hands in the end, even over broken bones and busted lips. It was these types of people who made America a manufacturing powerhouse—but only as individuals. The collectivism of labor unions destroyed this trait, which makes America less competitive globally, which is why the labor movement was introduced to America by European insurgents wanting to level the playing field for all economically. And this is what happened in Detroit. The unions got what they wanted and nobody fought them on it. When the companies gave a little, the unions asked for more. The companies became frustrated and just packed up and voted with their feet and behind them all the competent workers left to follow the jobs and Detroit went from being the wealthiest city in America to the poorest in just a few decades of bad policy and bad social philosophy.
To this very day I despise labor unions because they fight against individual responsibility and merit. They are simply gangs of thugs who attempt to extort away from the companies they work for values they have not earned. Collective bargaining is the absolute dumbest idea in economic theory. All people are not of equal value, some workers are faster, stronger, smarter, more efficient, more technically savvy—and they are not all deserving of equal pay. To force companies or governments to pay wages on collective bargaining takes away the incentive of the very good to perform well, because slugs, malcontents, and the ungifted receive the same wages for doing much, much less. This is what killed manufacturing in Southern Michigan and more specifically destroyed Detroit.
The disease of economics that destroyed Detroit is the same idiocy that is at work in our public schools, the IRS scandal, and virtually every branch of government as it is only in the public sector that unions have managed to survive as they have embedded themselves on financial supply that cannot pack up and move out of the country to flee the parasites of economics. This put the burden on tax payers to cover the labor costs and in Detroit’s case, smart people moved leaving behind a city of dependents that did not pay taxes. In just the last five years Detroit went from having a balanced budget to being billions of dollars in the hole—because they do not have a tax base to support their unionized legacy costs. They ran tax payers out-of-town with tax rates that were too high and attempting to sell the concept with “shared sacrifice” which is to say, “wealth redistribution” stolen from the earned and given to the unearned.
Detroit is the first major city in modern America to see such an impact of their mismanagement, but many cities are short in toe. Michael Moore in his film Roger and Me stumbled around revealing his utterly failed philosophy about the way life works as his arguments are only based on observations and not the cause. Further, Matt Damon’s new film Elysium set in the year 2154, where the very wealthy live on a man-made space station while the rest of the population resides on a ruined earth, never really covers what ruined earth. Damon like Moore has been given the progressive task to communicate the union message to mainstream America which continually falls short on logical thinkers who know better. In Damon’s film he takes on a mission that could bring equality to the two polarized worlds. The nature of the story might as well be the same as Detroit versus the suburbs where smart people of value flee the type of people who make themselves social parasites and consume much more than they contribute productively. Progressives somehow think the math will just work out in the end, but it never does. Even as a child I saw what was happening to Detroit and I wanted no part of it in my life—and I have lived by those terms. But not everyone is as combative as I am on issues they believe in, and most will think what I do, but they will not fight. They will simply pack up and move to someplace else that offers less imposition on their lifestyles, which is the root cause for why Detroit has failed as a city. Detroit imposed themselves on the productive, forcing them out-of-town leaving behind only the destitute like Michael Moore to look about their neighborhoods and wonder what happened. The only word their failed philosophies have for the tragedy is “greed” but it is much more complicated than that. The real villain is “financial incentive” and in the case of Detroit, the lack thereof.
Not everyone at the Lakota school system located in an affluent northern Cincinnati suburb is a levy zombie. 16-year-old Emma as a student was fourteen during the period of time Doc Thompson referenced as he was hosting Glenn Beck’s radio show from New York City. On that very popular midday nationwide radio broadcast Doc Thompson thought back in time to our experiences fighting the Lakota school levy when the district retaliated against voters by cutting busing to residents wishing to impose inconvenience and turn, a “no” vote to a “yes” vote in the next election. (CLICK TO REVIEW.) Recently Michelle Obama advocated as part of her nationwide health initiative that school districts activate a really dim-witted program called Walking School Buses, which are essentially packs of kids who walk to school instead of riding in a vehicle. It wasn’t lost to Doc Thompson the hypocrisy as he remembered the reason for Lakota’s busing cuts and thought it ironic that now Michelle Obama—as the queen of public education avocation was proposing that the very thing districts used as weapons against tax payers was now being sold as a healthy solution. This prompted Emma from Lakota to call Doc Thompson at his New York City studio to poke some fun at the hypocrisy. Click the video below to listen to the hilarious radio segment.
As crazy as the dialogue between Doc and Skip was in the radio bit they were not kidding. The Walking School Bus program is real, and an officially endorsed theory of The White House. From the website advocates declare:
“Studies show that fewer children are walking and biking to school, and more children are at risk of becoming overweight. Changing behaviors of children and parents require creative solutions that are safe and fun.
Implementing a walking school bus can be both.
A walking school bus is a group of children walking to school with one or more adults. If that sounds simple, it is, and that’s part of the beauty of the walking school bus. It can be as informal as two families taking turns walking their children to school to as structured as a route with meeting points, a timetable and a regularly rotated schedule of trained volunteers.
When beginning a walking school bus, remember that the program can always grow. It often makes sense to start with a small bus and see how it works. Pick a single neighborhood that has a group of parents and children who are interested. It’s like a carpool—without the car—with the added benefits of exercise and visits with friends and neighbors. For an informal bus:
Invite families who live nearby to walk.
Pick a route and take a test walk.
Decide how often the group will walk together.
Have fun!”
To verify everything you have just read and everything that Doc Thompson elaborated on with comic delivery—but was 100% true, you can see the link for yourself below.
Unbelievably the site is actually maintained by the Pedestrian and BicycleInformationCenter for the Partnership for a Walkable America, in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Transportation. That means that tax payers paid for the employees who came up with this whole idea which was an obvious waste of money.
Public schools for years have done just what Lakota did when they did not pass their tax increases—they took away school busing putting the burden of transportation on homeowners to drive their children to school. When that method failed to work, which began to happen in the summer of 2010 all across the country as per pupil averages in public schools climbed to around $10K per student, Americans had shown that they had enough and tax requests were being defeated in greater frequency as a diminishing marginal return had been reached. Now the same kind of public employees who came up with the failed strategy of extorting tax increases against communities have changed their strategy completely and are now declaring that walking to school is good for children.
The foolishness of both stances taken by the government employees involved in these decisions is catastrophic to any society that wishes to advance. Just for putting their name at the bottom of the Walking School Bus web site, The Department of Transportation should be eliminated. If walking is what The Department of Transportation considers under their authority, or concern, then they are overstepping their boundaries tyrannically and must be stopped. If this is the way they spend their time and resources, they are ineffective and worthless.
It was good to hear a young lady from Lakota call into a gigantic national show that has a footprint throughout that portion of the day which ranges between 7 million and 15 million listeners. Doc is aware that Lakota is seeking another levy, and now that his exposure is national as opposed to regional when he was in Cincinnati his voice carries to many more ears. It surprised me that a young lady was listening to the broadcast and cared enough to call in and offer some satirical commentary to a ridiculous problem. The caller Emma was much younger when Lakota implemented the busing cut plan and she has seen, as many students have, the hypocrisy of those who are in charge, and it is good to witness that she cared enough to voice her opinion. In past levies, the school has used children as pro levy advocates, and certainly Lakota has managed to recruit a fair number of Zombies of Lakota to carry on the progressive message of public education that Michelle Obama so hypocritically represents without any real thought. But Emma was a ray of hope that not all children or even parents in Lakota are zombies and have the cognition to participate in an intelligent discussion, even on a large national stage that is heard by millions.
As for Doc, I hope he and Skip had a good time on the Flight Walk from New York. If Michelle Obama and The Department of Transportation have their way we will all walk before we drive, walk before we fly, and find ourselves sitting around campfires awaiting orders from some village chief dictating our movements. The march of the typical progressive is a regression to the time before invention so to not advance human kind into a new age, but to preserve Mother Earth for all time as a superior idea to the products of human intellect—which they detest. That is why people who think the way they do are the Zombies of Lakota.
Sharon Poe is a tax fighter in the Mason City school district and a personal friend of mine who was on 700 WLW with Darryl Parks recently as they discussed the ridiculousness of the local school levies that are emerging for the November 2013 ballot. Darryl Parks and I used to have very similar views of public education and the stupidity of school levies as a way to fund learning for children. But that has changed over the years. My fight with Lakota has been intense at times and they asked me through members of No Lakota Levy for a cease-fire in the spring of 2012, which I gave them. The terms of the deal were that I wouldn’t continue to expose their inefficiencies on national radio stations and television, and they wouldn’t ask for a levy for 2 years. The deal was made two months after the famous “Latte Sipping Prostitute” comments that I made about the typical levy advocate at Lakota and I told Channel 19 the specifics of the deal when they interviewed me for the announcement of the levy truce from Lakota. CLICK HERE to review. During the broadcast on WLW Sharon told Darryl that Lakota was getting ready to put another levy attempt on the ballot because she knew what I had told her, about the 2 year deal with Lakota. Basically Lakota made a deal with their teachers union in 2011 to take a pay freeze and that deal expires in June of 2014, so they need money to pay their teachers long promised raises. But my argument all along is that the teachers and administration at an average pay of over $63K per year in wages were making too much money to begin with, and needed to slash their wages by at least 5% to properly balance their budget which has been ignored by the administration. Instead the school board chose to spend a lot of money rebuilding their public relations image and disregarded any attempt to reign in their extraordinary wages and hoped that the community would go back to sleep in time for them to pass another levy in 2013, ahead of the new teacher contract. Their actions were known all along, and Sharon warned over the 50,000 watt flame thrower of WLW that Darryl could expect to “Hear from Mr. Rich Hoffman” once Lakota made their announcement, which they now have. For me, this officially breaks the cease-fire, and now the campaign against their tax increase can begin. They won’t like the results.
Unlike Darryl Parks, where he supports public education because it is attached to property values, I have evolved into thinking that government should not be involved in education in any capacity. The more I learned about the kind of characters in public education, the more I am convinced that those types of people should not be teaching the next generation. My position has moved from one of pure logic centering on cost to one of philosophy. The game plan of public education is wrong, and I cannot support it knowing what I do after my experiences in dealing with Lakota administrators, then comparing those observations with districts all over Ohio. The failure of public schools repeats in virtually every district no matter what the wealth demographic, or population density. I see that competition needs to be introduced to the education process, and that property values need to be divorced from school districts if such values can ever be expected to stabilize over time. To continue to participate in the reactionary nature of school aged real estate catering is to destroy communities over the long haul, and Lakota is a prime example of how this process needs to implement such changes in public perception.
So I have no desire in any way to preserve the current education system. Nothing Lakota says is important as far as rationalizations for their monetary needs. I am not sympathetic to their issues. Lakota has become arrogant in their assumption that they are the center piece of a community, and they were only allowed to become such a thing because of the government monopoly of public education that is tied directly to property values. The arrangement is a government scam that ends up teaching children liberal oriented values using money from conservatives to pay for instruction they fundamentally don’t agree with. As a tax payer, I do not support Common Core education, I do not support Global Economies, and I do not support global warming greenie weenie philosophies which are so persistent in public education. I do not support an education system that teaches the earth is more important than a human being. I support an education system that teaches that the human being as a thinking, conscious creature has dominion over the earth and can use the tools of the planet, and rules of nature to fashion a better life for themselves. This is not the teaching of public education, and children should not be forced to learn such anti-concepts. Tax payers who do not agree with the voodoo ideology of the philosopher Kant, the economics of Keynes, or the fuzzy science of AL Gore should not be forced to pay for their own philosophic destruction in a social context. A couple of years ago when I called my political critics “prostitutes” I did so knowing that I was finished supporting public education as a legitimate social mechanism, because I was tired of supporting with my tax dollars people who were hostile to my outlook on life.
During the span of time that Lakota agreed to a ceasefire I decided that upon the next levy, I would do what I could to get more people involved in the levy fight. Prior to my experiences at Lakota the number one concern that anti levy advocates had was the constant social abuse they received from levy supporters who clearly use peer pressure to override logic during elections. My reasoning for calling the bullies of Lakota the names I did was to demonstrate to the many hundreds if not thousands of Lakota residents the limits of the pro levy supporters power, so that they could see for themselves that the bullies had no real weapon beyond name calling. In that way, upon the next levy attempt, more people than me could speak out against them without fear of boycotts, vandalism, or social castigation, which are all tactics of school levy supporters. Over the last two years, this has been the case. More people than ever are feeling comfortable speaking about their displeasure of school levies. More of them are willing to go on the record in the local newspapers, and speak on television, and that is the key to defeating a fourth attempt by Lakota.
I have argued every logical angle there is against the need for any levy, and Lakota doesn’t listen and has no desire to start. So further broadcasts of logic on the radio which are recorded for all time online, did not teach the Lakota administrators anything, so to continue to do the same kind of thing would be a waste of time. Instead, I promised that when Lakota did propose a new levy that I would have something special in store. I will leave the conventional arguments to others who can take the place of what I used to represent. My new position will be much different, but every bit as sensational. The intent won’t be this time to just examine the foolish nature of public education funding methods that are based idiotically on Keynesian economics, but on the utter debacle that the statist philosophy of learning under the United States Department of Education has created, and continues to ask for more money to perpetuate.
I welcome the help from other anti-tax resisters, yet recognize that new strategies must always be utilized if fresh ideas are to be injected into any given argument. For the Lakota Levy of 2013, it is time to take those fresh ideas to a new level which represents my true feelings of what the levy represents to the community, and to the poor minds of the children who are subjected to such progressive education that teaches chaos, irresponsibility, and perpetual government dependence from unionized public workers who disguise their greed and lust for power behind the innocence of children who have been abandoned by short-sighted parents, and exploited by statist public school administers to be delivered into adulthood as shells of their true potential all in the name of tax increases.
It’s time to turn things up a bit now that the truce has been called off by the Lakota school system. Sharon was correct when she told Darryl Parks that he’d be hearing from me. But to what degree has been a secret that I’ve kept close and thought hard about over the last two years. And its time to let that secret out of the bag…………………….
As of 9:45 on the evening of June 24th Lakota administrators had not called a vote for the most controversial issue of the meeting–whether or not they would attempt a tax increase on the fall ballot. When the last of the crowd had left for the evening in sheer boredom, only the school board members, Superintendent Mantia and a couple of levy addicts remained for the unanimous vote to consider a 5.5 mill levy. At that time of the night, Michael Clark of the Cincinnati Enquirer already had his article written, as it was due for the next day’s edition, so he had been given the details before the meeting by the administrators who deliberately held off the vote till the end of the night to avoid any controversy. The type of deception that took place at the school board meeting is just the tip of the iceberg in the district of Lakota, who like all public education institutions is top heavy with administration and well behind the times of how proper education should be conducted. In government schools the goal is to create government jobs and pay their employee salaries, not to care for children, and Lakota knowing that there would be push-back to their announcement, waited till everyone had left to make their grand proclamation, which was already printed up by the Cincinnati Enquirer before the meeting was half-way finished. That article read as follows:
The Lakota Board of Education voted unanimously Monday evening to place a combination operating levy and a permanent improvement tax on the Nov. 5 ballot.
Voters will decide on a 3.5-mill operating levy and a 2-mill permanent improvement levy combined into a single 5.5-mill school tax hike issue.
The board’s vote is the first of two required under Ohio law to place school tax issues on the ballot. Lakota officials have until Aug. 7 to file with ButlerCounty election officials for the Nov. 5 ballot.
If approved, the levy would cost an additional $168 annually in new school taxes on a $100,000 home.
Some of the 2-mill permanent improvement levy money would go to enhancing security at Lakota school buildings, including adding more cameras. Other funds would go to improving student technology.
The 3.5-mill operating levy would largely fund labor and other costs.
In a statement today, Lakota Superintendent Karen Mantia said approval of the combination levy would allow $6.3 million for upgraded security and $13.5 million for a multiyear technology upgrade program.
“Security has always been important,” Mantia said. “But unfortunately, with the world we live in now, we need to do even more.”
She added that the security spending would include tripling the number of police officers and sheriff’s deputies in Lakota schools, as well as physical changes to school buildings.
Lakota’s student and district network of technology needs updating, she said.
“We can use technology to be more effective and cost-efficient,” she said. “But we need the infrastructure in place to do that, and we’ve fallen far behind. It’s about building a network infrastructure that allows the district to use technology the way it should be used in a large organization.”
Read the rest of the article at the following link:
The article was just as deceitful as was the conditions from which the vote was conducted. Mantia stated that the levy a 2-mill permanent improvement levy would go to enhance security at Lakota school buildings, including adding more cameras. Other funds would go to improving student technology. The remaining 3.5 mill would go to fund the new teacher contract for the Lakota Education Association which expires in June of 2014. Attempting to capitalize on the recent fearful circumstances of school shootings, Mantia attempted to divert attention away from their horrendous management of school finances to declare that the new tax increase would make “children safer.” But Dan Varney, treasurer for NoLakota was quick to call out the ruse saying that “Lakota officials are “trying to exploit the Sandy Hook killings” by including a promise of spending more money on school security if the tax is approved.
“In December, a gunman killed 26 at the Sandy Hook Elementary in New Town, Conn. The shooting deaths of 20 children and six adult school staffers launched a nationwide examination of school security measures.
“That’s the security card they are playing and I’m sure that will be our position as the campaign moves forward,” said Varney.
As stated elsewhere, Lakota does not need more money. It has a consistent tax base that is already taxed too high. Yet Lakota’s employee demand is decreasing. Lakota needs to lay-off workers, not hire more, or even keep the ones they have. With the student enrollment decreasing every year for the next decade, Lakota schools will only need half their current school buildings before the close of the decade, primarily because the barrier to entry in the Lakota school district for families with school aged children is prohibitively high. Families with children won’t be buying used homes in Lakota, they will move into communities that have entry level starter homes. Increasingly the type of people who will live in the Lakota district are home owners without children in the district. And those people won’t be voting in favor of more taxes, especially for a school district that has no idea how to balance their budget.
Instead of playing things straight the Lakota administration attempted to use even more deceit to sneak the vote in favor of a new levy through once all the residents had gone home for the evening. The Enquirer had the article already written. All they had to do was wait for everyone to leave so there wouldn’t be any public record of any comments against them at the meeting. The attendance was light, as most of the residents at Lakota gave up a long time ago in believing that the school board has any control over the their finances, and the behavior of Lakota on June 24th, 2013 makes it clear why. The Lakota school board with their superintendent and other administrators cannot be trusted with little things, let alone, millions of dollars more just so they can avoid the hard decisions of laying-off their employees to match the declining student enrollment. And it is for that reason more than any other that the Lakota school system should be defunded to the maximum amount possible. Lakota as an organization is built on deceit, and are at best complicit of gross distortion of the facts in order to serve the whims of their teacher union and their employees who make a quarter million dollars a year for playing loose with the truth, and squeezing the community of its every last dime.
The cute picture of the little boy shown is of my grandson. That photo means more to me than just a sentimental moment of time captured by a gifted photographer at 9 months of age. Within that picture there were many contributors to the photograph, my daughter of course made the little boy with her husband, my wife made the white blanket by hand, and my other daughter took the picture in the back yard of the home that she owns with her husband. Virtually everyone in my immediate family played a part in that photograph. My imprint of course is that I put the gift of adventure in all those individuals, which is represented by the stack of books off to the side. That is what families are supposed to do and be for each other as the benefactors are little children like my grandson dressed in his little hat awaiting the tools of cognition to be put before his mind so that he too can live a life of adventure, discovering for himself all the potentialities that come from breathing air, and living life.
As another 4th of July came and went, I thought about my little grandson. When people wonder why I do some of the things I do, the first answer is because I want to. I enjoy fighting; debating, and philosophizing—pretty much in that order. But there is always a sub-plot in the back of my mind which drives me with purpose. When I was raising my children, it was fighting to make sure they tasted enough freedom and independent thought that they could grow up and live good lives. I have been successful in that. Now, it is the generation that comes after which I focus upon.
I have been an inspiration to many young people for many, many years. I still associate with many of those grown adults who looked as children toward someone to teach them how to be good people, how to face their fears, and live righteously. I have always offered myself in that role, even when I too was younger than they were. But there comes a benefit in living, surviving, and arriving at a time when not only you think you know more than everybody else, but you are sure of it. You know it because the reality around you has proven it time and time again. You don’t realize it because the intention is to be haughty, arrogant, or considered a God among men, but you just are because nobody else is trying.
Every child is born with the opportunity to become anything. Even children who are not genetically gifted or otherwise healthy have more potential in their minds than most living adults. For them their stories are not yet written and it makes me sad to see so many young children who don’t have adults to pour thoughts into their minds, to give them the ability to think on their own as young adults, and finally as grown adults. Most children the age of my grandson are doomed to a life of failure not because they lack any ability, but because they lack people in their lives that can help them develop into fully realized human beings.
My grandson will not have to worry about that. He has so many people in his life with very interesting traits of their own, that he has no choice but to pick up on those unique attributes while he forms his own character which is already evident. Looking at him it reminds me of what the 4th of July is all about. It’s why we fight to keep our country free so that little boys like my grandson can have the right to think and develop freely on their own, to bring their own unique gifts to the world. Someday, my grandson might decide that the bullwhip is not for him, but he will make that choice on his own, after he has had exposure to it and filled his mind with the value it brings to him through practice, and a bond with me, his grandmother, his aunt and uncle, and his mom and dad.
The fight for freedom is more than just a token message created by the Tea Party movement to hijack elected offices and become tomorrow’s tyrants through the desk of a bureaucrat. For me it is sincere, I believe in the things I say here with every cell in my body and beat of my heart. I believe in it for myself, and the joy it brings me in seeing the lights of freedom igniting in another human being, like the innocent eyes of my grandson, as it was captured so eloquently in the photograph my daughter took. I will teach his young mind in a way that was only available to my own daughters, but with the self-assuredness of having experience, to be a legend among mankind. When most people say they want their children and grandchildren to grow up to be lawyers, doctors, or God forbid—politicians, I frown at all those types of jobs. All of them are less than what I want for my grandson. I want for him to be a living legend, a character of such charisma, determination, and moral aptitude that there has never been another like him. Such a goal is a lofty one, but it’s what I will contribute to his mind with all our future time together. I can see the sparkle in his eye already, and soon, he will begin to take the form of a character unlike the world has ever seen.
And it will come from individuals like my daughter—his mother and her vast creativity, his aunt—my other daughter and her photographic genius and forward thinking vision, my two son-in-laws, one a former MMA fighter, the other a bullwhip champion in his own right, and my wife who reads hundreds of books a year, makes blankets for every member of our extended family, and is willing to spend countless hours on the floor playing with children. Then of course there are my contributions–in a few years I’ll have him jumping through walls of fire, cracking whips faster than lightning, crawling through caves that a snake couldn’t fit through and facing life with a fearlessness that every young man dreams of. Ladies and gentlemen viewing that picture—you are seeing a future legend that will know an unlimited life free of any shackles created by deficient human minds.
As I watched the fireworks on the 4th of July in 2013, that is what I thought of. And I will venture to make it so.
I love the 4th of July and frequent displays of patriotism that is displayed on America’s unique holiday celebrating freedom. But I am weary at the same time of such festivities because I know what’s coming. Ladies and gentlemen reading these words right now, the perils that faced the founders of America pale in comparison to the challenges of our current time. There is a reason that for the last 10 days or so I have provided many articles showing readers what America looked like before the implementation of The New Deal which was essentially socialism in its design long supported by progressives disguising their love of European communism, and the grand climax of The Great Society which became possible due to the 1964 election of the most liberal congress in American history with the exception of the one in 1938. Those elections were purchased from a gullible American public with deceit, and now the bills for those errors are coming due in our current time. America is about to hit a brick wall, and for anybody to survive, they need to understand that America was a great country before those terrible programs, and they need to understand that for America to survive for future 4th of July holidays the fight of our lives is currently before us. The video below sums up the problem in the simplest way possible.
At the end of May of 2013 the Social Security and Medicare Board of Trustees published a little known report that was generally ignored by the media, because in it was a very kind warning that by 2026, which is in essence only a decade away, those programs run out of money. They cannot be sustained without raising taxes and taxes cannot be raised without crippling the American way of life. We are at an impasse that cannot be avoided and there is no compromise with that fiscal cliff. It is a fact of reality that nobody wants to look at. Politicians are terrified of it, and the public does not wish to face the summary of their years of neglect in American politics where they paid attention to everything but one of the most important parts of their society—their government. So below is a portion of the report along with a link that will take you dear reader to the more specific information. I suggest you read this carefully and pass it along to a friend. It is important to understand the severity of the problem.
A SUMMARY OF THE 2013 ANNUAL REPORTS
Social Security and Medicare Boards of Trustees
Published 5/31/2013
A MESSAGE TO THE PUBLIC:
Each year the Trustees of the Social Security and Medicare trust funds report on the current and projected financial status of the two programs. This message summarizes the 2013 Annual Reports.
Neither Medicare nor Social Security can sustain projected long-run programs in full under currently scheduled financing, and legislative changes are necessary to avoid disruptive consequences for beneficiaries and taxpayers. If lawmakers take action sooner rather than later, more options and more time will be available to phase in changes so that the public has adequate time to prepare. Earlier action will also help elected officials minimize adverse impacts on vulnerable populations, including lower-income workers and people already dependent on program benefits.
Social Security and Medicare together accounted for 38 percent of federal expenditures in fiscal year 2012. Both programs will experience cost growth substantially in excess of GDP growth through the mid-2030s due to rapid population aging caused by the large baby-boom generation entering retirement and lower-birth-rate generations entering employment and, in the case of Medicare, to growth in expenditures per beneficiary exceeding growth in per capita GDP. In later years, projected costs expressed as a share of GDP trend up slowly for Medicare and are relatively flat for Social Security, reflecting very gradual population aging caused by increasing longevity and slower growth in per-beneficiary health care costs.
Social Security
Social Security’s Disability Insurance (DI) program satisfies neither the Trustees’ long-range test of close actuarial balance nor their short-range test of financial adequacy and faces the most immediate financing shortfall of any of the separate trust funds. DI Trust Fund reserves expressed as a percent of annual cost (the trust fund ratio) declined to 85 percent at the beginning of 2013, and the Trustees project trust fund depletion in 2016, the same year projected in the last Trustees Report. DI cost has exceeded non-interest income since 2005, and the trust fund ratio has declined since peaking in 2003. While legislation is needed to address all of Social Security’s financial imbalances, the need has become most urgent with respect to the program’s DI component. Lawmakers need to act soon to avoid reduced payments to DI beneficiaries three years from now.
Social Security’s total expenditures have exceeded non-interest income of its combined trust funds since 2010, and the Trustees estimate that Social Security cost will exceed non-interest income throughout the 75-year projection period. The deficit of non-interest income relative to cost was about $49 billion in 2010, $45 billion in 2011, and $55 billion in 2012. The Trustees project that this cash-flow deficit will average about $75 billion between 2013 and 2018 before rising steeply as income growth slows to the sustainable trend rate after the economic recovery is complete and the number of beneficiaries continues to grow at a substantially faster rate than the number of covered workers. Redemption of trust fund asset reserves by the General Fund of the Treasury will provide the resources needed to offset Social Security’s annual aggregate cash-flow deficits. Since the cash-flow deficit will be less than interest earnings through 2020, reserves of the combined trust funds measured in current dollars will continue to grow, but not by enough to prevent the ratio of reserves to one year’s projected cost (the combined trust fund ratio) from declining. (This ratio peaked in 2008, declined through 2012, and is expected to decline steadily in future years.) After 2020, Treasury will redeem trust fund asset reserves to the extent that program cost exceeds tax revenue and interest earnings until depletion of total trust fund reserves in 2033, the same year projected in last year’s Trustees Report. Thereafter, tax income would be sufficient to pay about three-quarters of scheduled benefits through 2087.
A temporary reduction in the Social Security payroll tax rate in 2011 and 2012 reduced payroll tax revenues by an estimated $222 billion in total. The legislation establishing the payroll tax reduction also provided for transfers from the General Fund to the trust funds in order to “replicate to the extent possible” payments that would have occurred if the payroll tax reduction had not been enacted. Those General Fund reimbursements amounted to about 15 percent of the program’s non-interest income in 2011 and 2012. The temporary payroll tax reduction expired at the end of 2012.
Under current projections, the annual cost of Social Security benefits expressed as a share of workers’ taxable earnings will grow rapidly from 11.3 percent in 2007, the last pre-recession year, to roughly 17.0 percent in 2037, and will then decline slightly before slowly increasing after 2050. Cost displays a slightly different pattern when expressed as a share of GDP. Program cost equaled 4.2 percent of GDP in 2007, the last pre-recession year, and the Trustees project that cost will increase to 6.2 percent of GDP for 2036, then decline to about 6.0 percent of GDP by 2050, and thereafter rise slowly reaching 6.2 percent by 2087.
The projected 75-year actuarial deficit for the combined Old-Age and Survivors Insurance and Disability Insurance (OASDI) Trust Funds is 2.72 percent of taxable payroll, up from 2.67 percent projected in last year’s report. This deficit amounts to 21 percent of program non-interest income or 17 percent of program cost. A 0.06 percentage point increase in the OASDI actuarial deficit would have been expected if nothing had changed other than the one-year extension of the valuation period to 2087. The effects of recently enacted legislation, updated demographic data, updated economic data and assumptions further worsened the actuarial deficit, but these effects were completely offset by the favorable effects of updated programmatic data and improved methodologies.
While the combined OASDI program fails the long-range test of close actuarial balance, it does satisfy the test for short-range (ten-year) financial adequacy. The Trustees project that the combined trust fund asset reserves at the beginning of each year will exceed that year’s projected cost through 2027.
Medicare
The Trustees project that the Medicare Hospital Insurance (HI) Trust Fund will be the next to face depletion after the DI Trust Fund. The projected date of HI Trust Fund depletion is 2026, two years later than projected in last year’s report, at which time dedicated revenues would be sufficient to pay 87 percent of HI cost. The Trustees project that the share of HI cost that can be financed with HI dedicated revenues will decline slowly to 71 percent in 2047, and then rise slowly until it reaches 73 percent in 2087. As it has since 2008, the HI Trust Fund will pay out more in hospital benefits and other expenditures than it receives in income in all years until reserve depletion.
The projected HI Trust Fund’s long-term actuarial imbalance is smaller than that of the combined Social Security trust funds under the assumptions employed in this report.
The estimated 75-year actuarial deficit in the HI Trust Fund is 1.11 percent of taxable payroll, down from 1.35 percent projected in last year’s report. The HI fund again fails the test of short-range financial adequacy, as its trust fund ratio is already below 100 percent and is expected to decline continuously until reserve depletion in 2026. The fund also continues to fail the long-range test of close actuarial balance. The HI 75-year actuarial imbalance amounts to 29 percent of tax receipts or 23 percent of program cost.
The modest improvement in the outlook for HI long-term finances is principally due to: (i) lower projected spending for most HI service categories especially for skilled nursing facilities to reflect lower-than-expected spending in 2012 and other recent data; (ii) lower projected Medicare Advantage program costs that reflect recent data suggesting that certain provisions of the Affordable Care Act will reduce growth in these costs by more than was previously projected; and (iii) a refinement in projection methods that reduces assumed per beneficiary cost growth during the transition period between the short-range projections and the long-range projections. Partially offsetting these favorable changes to the projections are somewhat lower projected levels of tax income that reflect lower-than-expected tax income in 2012.
The Trustees project that Part B of Supplementary Medical Insurance (SMI), which pays doctors’ bills and other outpatient expenses, and Part D of SMI, which provides access to prescription drug coverage, will remain adequately financed into the indefinite future because current law automatically provides financing each year to meet the next year’s expected costs. However, the aging population and rising health care costs cause SMI projected costs to grow steadily from 2.0 percent of GDP in 2012 to approximately 3.3 percent of GDP in 2035, and then more slowly to 4.0 percent of GDP by 2087. General revenues will finance roughly three-quarters of these costs, and premiums paid by beneficiaries almost all of the remaining quarter. SMI also receives a small amount of financing from special payments by States and from fees on manufacturers and importers of brand-name prescription drugs. Projected costs for Part B assume an almost 25-percent reduction in Medicare payment rates for physician services will be implemented in 2014 as required by current law, which is highly unlikely.
The Trustees project that total Medicare cost (including both HI and SMI expenditures) will grow from approximately 3.6 percent of GDP in 2012 to 5.6 percent of GDP by 2035, and will increase gradually thereafter to about 6.5 percent of GDP by 2087.
The drawdown of Social Security and HI Trust Fund reserves and the general revenue transfers into SMI will result in mounting pressure on the Federal budget. In fact, pressure is already evident. For the seventh consecutive year, the Social Security Act requires that the Trustees issue a “Medicare funding warning” because projected non-dedicated sources of revenues primarily general revenues are expected to continue to account for more than 45 percent of Medicare’s outlays in 2013, a threshold breached for the first time in fiscal year 2010.
Conclusion
Lawmakers should address the financial challenges facing Social Security and Medicare as soon as possible. Taking action sooner rather than later will leave more options and more time available to phase in changes so that the public has adequate time to prepare.
Read the rest complete with charts and diagrams at the following link:
To understand how we got into this mess it is also important to study The Great Society policies which culminated in the 1960s by Lyndon Johnson, and was the work of Democrats from the 1930s as a progressive platform rooted in global communism. Even though it is long, it is important to read. Some reading this have actually supported The Great Society and are currently avoiding dealing with the errors of their past by praying to some finance God that relief will magically appear. It will not. It is important to understand the problem, and then work to remove all these elements from our society so that we may save it. In previous documents I have shown how America used to be, and can be again. Those who support The Great Society look at such times as antiquated and a step backwards. In a way they are right, I do wish to step back in time—to a time before the socialist imposition of The New Deal, and The Great Society. I don’t want to pay for them. I don’t want to deal with people who are addicted to those government services, and I want to steer away from the collapse of those programs in 2026.
The Great Society was a set of domestic programs in the United States announced by President Lyndon B. Johnson at Ohio University and subsequently promoted by him and fellow Democrats in Congress in the 1960s. Two main goals of the Great Society social reforms were the elimination of poverty and racial injustice. New major spending programs that addressed education, medical care, urban problems, and transportation were launched during this period. The Great Society in scope and sweep resembled the New Deal domestic agenda of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Some Great Society proposals were stalled initiatives from John F. Kennedy‘s New Frontier. Johnson’s success depended on his skills of persuasion, coupled with the Democraticlandslide in the 1964 election that brought in many new liberals to Congress, making the House of Representatives in 1965 the most liberal House since 1938.[1]
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 assured minority registration and voting. It suspended use of literacy or other voter-qualification tests that had sometimes served to keep African-Americans off voting lists and provided for federal court lawsuits to stop discriminatory poll taxes. It also reinforced the Civil Rights Act of 1964[10] by authorizing the appointment of federal voting examiners in areas that did not meet voter-participation requirements. The Immigration and Nationality Services Act of 1965 abolished the national-origin quotas in immigration law. The Civil Rights Act of 1968 banned housing discrimination and extended constitutional protections to Native Americans on reservations.
The most ambitious and controversial part of the Great Society was its initiative to end poverty. The Kennedy Administration had been contemplating a federal effort against poverty. Johnson, who, as a teacher had observed extreme poverty in Texas among Mexican-Americans, launched an “unconditional war on poverty” in the first months of his presidency with the goal of eliminating hunger and deprivation from American life. The centerpiece of the War on Poverty was the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, which created an Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) to oversee a variety of community-based antipoverty programs.
Federal funds were provided for special education schemes in slum areas, including help in paying for books and transport, while financial aid was also provided for slum clearances and rebuilding city areas. In addition, the Appalachian Regional Development Act of 1965 created jobs in one of the most impoverished regions of the country.[citation needed] The Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 provided various schemes in which young people from poor homes could receive job training and higher education.[15]
The OEO reflected a fragile consensus among policymakers that the best way to deal with poverty was not simply to raise the incomes of the poor but to help them better themselves through education, job training, and community development. Central to its mission was the idea of “community action“, the participation of the poor in framing and administering the programs designed to help them.
Programs
The War on Poverty began with a $1 billion appropriation in 1964 and spent another $2 billion in the following two years. It spawned dozens of programs, among them the Job Corps, whose purpose was to help disadvantaged youth develop marketable skills; the Neighborhood Youth Corps, established to give poor urban youths work experience and to encourage them to stay in school; Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA), a domestic version of the Peace Corps, which placed concerned citizens with community-based agencies to work towards empowerment of the poor; the Model Cities Program for urban redevelopment; Upward Bound, which assisted poor high school students entering college; legal services for the poor; and the Food Stamp Act of 1964 (which expanded the federal food stamp program).[16]
Programs included the Community Action Program, which initiated local Community Action Agencies charged with helping the poor become self-sufficient; and Project Head Start, which offered preschool education for poor children. In addition, funding was provided for the establishment of community health centers to expand access to health care,[17] while major amendments were made to Social Security in 1965 and 1967 which significantly increased benefits, expanded coverage, and established new programs to combat poverty and raise living standards.[18] In addition, average AFDC payments were 35% higher in 1968 than in 1960, but remained insufficient and uneven.[19]
Education
The most important educational component of the Great Society was the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, designed by Commissioner of Education Francis Keppel. It was signed into law on April 11, 1965, less than three months after it was introduced. It ended a long-standing political taboo by providing significant federal aid to public education, initially allotting more than $1 billion to help schools purchase materials and start special education programs to schools with a high concentration of low-income children. The Act established Head Start, which had originally been started by the Office of Economic Opportunity as an eight-week summer program, as a permanent program.
The Higher Education Facilities Act of 1963, which was signed into law by Johnson a month after becoming president,[20] authorized several times more college aid within a five-year period than had been appropriated under the Land Grant College in a century. It provided better college libraries, ten to twenty new graduate centers, several new technical institutes, classrooms for several hundred thousand students, and twenty-five to thirty new community colleges a year.[21]
This major piece of legislation was followed by the Higher Education Act of 1965, which increased federal money given to universities, created scholarships and low-interest loans for students, and established a national Teacher Corps to provide teachers to poverty-stricken areas of the United States. The Act also began a transition from federally funded institutional assistance to individual student aid.
The Bilingual Education Act of 1968 offered federal aid to local school districts in assisting them to address the needs of children with limited English-speaking ability until it expired in 2002.[22]
In 1966 welfare recipients of all ages received medical care through the Medicaid program. Medicaid was created on July 30, 1965 under Title XIX of the Social Security Act of 1965. Each state administers its own Medicaid program while the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) monitors the state-run programs and establishes requirements for service delivery, quality, funding, and eligibility standards.
Arts and cultural institutions
National endowments for arts and humanities
In September 1965, Johnson signed the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities Act into law, creating both the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities as separate, independent agencies. Lobbying for federally funded arts and humanities support began during the Kennedy Administration. In 1963 three scholarly and educational organizations—the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the Council of Graduate Schools in America, and the United Chapters of Phi Beta Kappa—joined together to establish the National Commission on the Humanities. In June 1964, the commission released a report that suggested that the emphasis placed on science endangered the study of the humanities from elementary schools through postgraduate programs. In order to correct the balance, it recommended “the establishment by the President and the Congress of the United States of a National Humanities Foundation.”[24]
In August 1964, Congressman William S. Moorhead of Pennsylvania proposed legislation to implement the commission’s recommendations. Support from the White House followed in September, when Johnson lent his endorsement during a speech at Brown University. In March 1965, the White House proposed the establishment of a National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities and requested $20 million in start-up funds. The commission’s report had generated other proposals, but the White House’s approach eclipsed them. The administration’s plan, which called for the creation of two separate agencies each advised by a governing body, was the version approved by Congress. Richard Nixon dramatically expanded funding for NEH and NEA.[24]
Public broadcasting
After the First National Conference on Long-Range Financing of Educational Television Stations in December 1964 called for a study of the role of noncommercial education television in society, the Carnegie Corporation agreed to finance the work of a 15-member national commission. Its landmark report, Public Television: A Program for Action, published on January 26, 1967, popularized the phrase “public television” and assisted the legislative campaign for federal aid. The Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, enacted less than 10 months later, chartered the Corporation for Public Broadcasting as a private, non-profit corporation.
The law initiated federal aid through the CPB for the operation, as opposed to the funding of capital facilities, of public broadcasting. The CPB initially collaborated with the pre-existing National Educational Television system, but in 1969 decided to start the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). A public radio study commissioned by the CPB and the Ford Foundation and conducted from 1968–1969 led to the establishment of National Public Radio, a public radio system under the terms of the amended Public Broadcasting Act.
Cultural centers
Two long-planned national cultural and arts facilities received federal funding that would allow for their completion through Great Society legislation. A National Cultural Center, suggested during the Franklin Roosevelt Administration and created by a bipartisan law signed by Dwight Eisenhower, was transformed into the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, a living memorial to the assassinated president. Fundraising for the original cultural center had been poor prior to legislation creating the Kennedy Center, which passed two months after the president’s death and provided $23 million for construction. The Kennedy Center opened in 1971.[25]
In the late 1930s the United States Congress mandated a Smithsonian Institution art museum for the National Mall, and a design by Eliel Saarinen was unveiled in 1939, but plans were shelved during World War II. A 1966 act of Congress established the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden as part of the Smithsonian Institution with a focus on modern art, in contrast to the existing National Art Gallery. The museum was primarily federally funded, although New York financier Joseph Hirshhorn later contributed $1 million toward building construction, which began in 1969. The Hirshhorn opened in 1974.[26]
In 1964, Johnson named Assistant Secretary of Labor Esther Peterson to be the first presidential assistant for consumer affairs.
The Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act of 1965 required packages to carry warning labels. The Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1966 set standards through creation of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The Fair Packaging and Labeling Act requires products identify manufacturer, address, clearly mark quantity and servings. The statute also authorizes HEW and FTC to establish and define voluntary standard sizes. The original would have mandated uniform standards of size and weight for comparison shopping, but the final law only outlawed exaggerated size claims.
The Child Safety Act of 1966 prohibited any chemical so dangerous that no warning can make it safe. The Flammable Fabrics Act of 1967 set standards for children’s sleepwear, but not baby blankets.
The Wholesome Meat Act of 1967 required inspection of meat which must meet federal standards. The Truth-in-Lending Act of 1968 required lenders and credit providers to disclose the full cost of finance charges in both dollars and annual percentage rates, on installment loan and sales. The Wholesome Poultry Products Act of 1968 required inspection of poultry which must meet federal standards. The Land Sales Disclosure Act of 1968 provided safeguards against fraudulent practices in the sale of land. The Radiation Safety Act of 1968 provided standards and recalls for defective electronic products.
Environment
Joseph A. Califano, Jr. has suggested that Great Society’s main contribution to the environment was an extension of protections beyond those aimed at the conservation of untouched resources.[28] In a message he transmitted to Congress, President Johnson said:
The air we breathe, our water, our soil and wildlife, are being blighted by poisons and chemicals which are the by-products of technology and industry. The society that receives the rewards of technology, must, as a cooperating whole, take responsibility for [their] control. To deal with these new problems will require a new conservation. We must not only protect the countryside and save it from destruction, we must restore what has been destroyed and salvage the beauty and charm of our cities. Our conservation must be not just the classic conservation of protection [against] development, but a creative conservation of restoration and innovation.
— Special Message to the Congress on Conservation and Restoration of Natural Beauty; February 8, 1965[29]
At the behest of Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall, the Great Society included several new environmental laws to protect air and water. Environmental legislation enacted included:
Clear Air, Water Quality and Clean Water Restoration Acts and Amendments
Amendments made to the 1931 Davis-Bacon Act in 1964 extended the prevailing wage provisions to cover fringe benefits,[30] while several increases were made to the federal minimum wage.[31] In addition, a comprehensive minimum rate hike was signed into law that extended the coverage of the Fair Labor Standards Act to about 9.1 million additional workers.[30]
For those who wish to save America, the government must be removed from public education, from medicine, from science, from labor relations, from retirement financing, and from environmental preservation. For that last many will say it is because of government that America has National Parks and a conservation movement at all. For them I point toward Disney World who took capitalism and converted an environmental marshland in the hot Central Florida region and made it a haven of environmental awareness producing money that was poured into science that no government on earth could duplicate. The Walt Disney property in Florida is better managed than any National Park, and serves the same purpose of preservation of valuable land. Similar examples could be provided to every topic mentioned above and more. But first Americans must dust off their tendency to self-reliance and embrace the past that built such characters and reject the past that paved the way to dependency, the policies of The Great Society.
It is good to enjoy fireworks on The Fourth of July and celebrate a time when America declared its independence. But America through trickery, deceit, and political barbarism is more dependent on foreign forces than ever and the strings to that dependency are in the programs of The New Deal and The Great Society. The fight before us will be much more vicious than in any other time in American history. It will be far from easy. That is why am turning my focus on a period of American history that had touches of true independence whether it was in the films of Douglas Fairbanks, or the various renditions of the Lone Ranger. For me those times are represented by the bullwhip and speak of an American attitude that is rooted in justice constantly pursuing freedom. CLICK HERE TO READ MORE. But it is time to take off the masks of convention, and politeness, or patient understanding then declare that the hands of time need to be reset in America to a time before the destructive programs that a vast majority of citizens in The United States have become accustom to. A failure to take off those masks of politeness will result in the end of American civilization as a fiscal powerhouse. It may continue on as Russia currently does, as an impoverished former superpower crushed by communist ideology, but it will not be the nation that we all know and love today. So the fight that is the responsibility of our times is before us, and simply igniting fireworks off on the 4th of July is not enough. An American revolution that has not yet been given a name is before us now, and will occur on all our watches who read this now. When history views us, they won’t celebrate our polite masks that are worn in society when oppressors wished to imprison us with more entitlement programs which only serve politicians in Washington and their ability to stay in office by selling votes through tax payer resources. It is time to dust off our American individuality and get mean and nasty to those who wish to put shackles about our necks with financial slavery. A failure to do so will actually bring more harm to others than it ever averts.
The Overmanwarrior 