For the second time in a month allegations that a Lakota West High School teacher conducted improper contact with a student surfaced. The Enquirer deserves credit for the story as they reviewed the personnel records of Lakota and discovered Robert E. Supinger, a former long-term substitute teacher at the Butler County high school had allegedly kissed a student and took her to meet his parents while he was employed by the Lakota school district.
The important thing to understand about this case is the date of the offense. Lakota did not reveal the details which were happening in parallel to the George Merk case. The impropriety occurred during the 2011/2012 school year and was finally resolved in December of 2012 by the Ohio Department of Education. The Merk offenses occurred during March of 2012 right after the much publicized cuts to the staff in February of 2012 because of the failed levy in 2011.
It appears that the teaching culture at the Lakota school system is one of excessive sexual preoccupation. The amount of sexually related offenses is not a coincidence, but comes from the day-to-day management of their occupational affairs. As Robert E. Supinger was only 25 years old, he was still nearly a decade older than the girl he was parading around to his parents as an employee of the Lakota school system, which shows extremely bad judgment. That begs the question of why Supinger was teaching high school level kids, and who made that decision. Wouldn’t it be more appropriate for Supinger to learn the teaching profession as a substitute in the middle schools where the children are much younger? Wouldn’t it make sense to have teachers who are “older” instructing high school aged children?
It can be speculated forever why so many public school teachers seem to be obsessed with sex involving their students. Yet the worst part of this case is that Lakota has had two sexually related scandals which they attempted to conceal, and were only revealed because The Enquirer did some digging to discover the information. It should be clear now why Lakota cut a deal with No Lakota Levy to delay a school levy attempt in 2012. When Channel 19 called me to do a story in June of 2012 I thought the timing was odd and Lakota seemed awfully eager to make such a deal. Now the timing makes more sense. Robert Supinger had just gotten into trouble with inappropriate conduct with one of his students and the district wanted to put time and distance between them and their next levy attempt once the Ohio Department of Education had finished their investigations. Lakota had two sex scandals happen close together and they wanted to suppress the story. If The Enquirer had not dug through the public records, the tax paying public would have no knowledge of these offenses and parents would have absolutely no idea what kinds of employees Lakota was employing. They’d be forced to take the school’s word for it, which is of course is misleading 100% of the time.
Parents assume when they send their children to school that the teachers aren’t going to attempt to engage in sex with the children no matter what the age of the teachers. Teachers are supposed to “teach” not “date” the students. Lakota stated regarding Robert Supinger that they had terminated the employee immediately, yet they didn’t publish the results in the flowery newsletter that the school sends home with the kids advertising the need for more money for those same teachers. When I went to Homearama this year and browsed through the booth that Lakota had set up at the home building show the school did not reveal how their human resources team had taken evasive action to discharge sexual predators from their classrooms in order to protect the children of the “community.” If The Enquirer had not dug through the public records the public wouldn’t have any idea that Robert Supinger had even been disciplined for anything. The case would have been swept under the rug like so many other stories that are related to public education.
The question is obvious—how many teachers at Lakota are engaged in sexual enterprises with the students of their classrooms? And how many such stories are being suppressed by the public relations machine the Lakota administration spends so much tax money on? The answer is becoming known little by little as diligent reporters discover what many disheartened parents have attempted to break open for years, that Lakota may be a good school with an excellent rating, it may have a good football team, and may actually prepare students for a life in college. But that preparation may not be academic. It would appear by the behavior of Lakota schools that their teachers are overly sexual in their focus and intent to prepare students for the next college party, instead of a competitive workplace that expects good conduct and at least the illusion of sexual restraint. Lakota acts as though their management conduct is acceptable and maybe it is for the Zombies of Lakota who vote continuously for school levies to pay for teachers who simply want to seduce tax payer’s children with flights of fantasy in their classrooms. But for me, and many other people who are voting NO on the upcoming fall school levy, these employees are not worth the money. If we wanted this kind of behavior at Lakota we’d simply recruit the teachers from a whore house.
Two of my earliest writing influences were Sol Stein whom I took a direct computer class with in the early days of the internet in the mid 1990s and the Science Fiction writer Linda Nagata. Both writers helped me work on the craft of writing leading to The Symposium of Justice in 2004 and Tail of the Dragon in 2012. During that time with Linda where she lived in Hawaii and I in Ohio I would mail her copies of my work in hard copy form back then—she’d mark them up and send them back with comments. That went on for a while and at the end I had digested so much science fiction that I felt it had spilled over into my own writing interests. I read all the books she recommended which tended to be Hugo and Nebula award winners and I read religiously the “Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy” so that I could take her advice and similar career path toward the realm of writing. To learn science fiction and fantasy writing better I read a book she recommended called Hatrack River by Orson Scott Card and soon felt I was drowning in the genre. As much as I enjoyed those types of works, my interest was in politics and philosophy to a much greater extent than I had imagined, and I found myself trying to go into a different direction than what Linda did. I had to find my own path through the forest, and I wanted nothing to do with the paved road that she had taken which required winning Nebula and Hugo awards. The more I thought about it, the less I was interested in appeasing a panel of judges who oversaw those award panels.
At the same time all this was going on one of my nephews whom spent a great deal of his childhood in my care was urging me heavily to read Orson Scott Card’s treasured Ender’s Game series starting of course with the first book, aptly named. He declared to me that Ender’s Game was the best book he had ever read and that I would love it. I had no doubt that he was correct, but I knew Orson Scott Card from Hatrack River and wasn’t crazy about combining alternate history and fantasy together in that book. But worse than that Orson Scott Card reminded me of Linda as he was a winner of the Hugo and Nebula awards which was a path I had decided not to take. So I told my nephew that I would read the novel when I got around to it.
It took around 15 years but upon hearing that Harrison Ford was staring in the upcoming 2013 movie version of Ender’s Game I thought I should finally get around to reading the book before I saw the film. I had written a few novels of my own and had picked a rather difficult path through the forest on a road of my own making that was well established, so I could easily now put behind me my reservations about letting those early writing influences contaminate my thoughts with their strong presence. I bought the novel on my way to Florida to begin reading at the beach while on vacation, but more pressingly I wanted my nephew who lives near our vacation destination to know that I was physically reading the book after promising him I would for over a decade.
I started reading the book toward the end of my vacation and it took me a bit to get passed the much studied writing techniques that were so familiar to me from my writing instruction with Linda. But after I let myself get into the story and drop away all the rules of plot, paragraph structure, and character development, I found myself enjoying the novel the way my nephew knew I would. As many who follow me daily on my blog know I have put a major emphasis on the failures of societies that become philosophically committed to collectivism, especially lately. The reason is that many of the modern political problems that defame the world currently have their root cause in social collectivism. Once I learned that collectivism was the villain of our age I have been able to apply it to virtually every problem not because once learned the mind sees it everywhere by default, but because it is the cause of most human problems. Ender’s Game is essentially about two societies that are colliding, an insect oriented species that uses collectivism as a military weapon to destroy their enemies and a society on earth that has attempted to duplicate the methods of the insect species to beat them. Ironically, only one very promising student in world history figured out a strategy that would give earth a chance to destroy the alien threat and that is the young child Ender Wiggin trained from a 6-year-old boy to become a general of the International Fleet against their interstellar enemy.
The novel explored themes of sacrifice, honor, and individual integrity in ways that were more philosophy than science fiction. Upon closing the book I felt I had read a remarkable story from Orson Scott Card which explains why there are 14 books in the series written from 1985 to 2013. Now I understand why they are so popular. If I had read them back when my nephew had first mentioned Ender’s Game I might have saved myself a lot of headache in working out my own explorations into the folly’s of collectivism. Orson Scott Card certainly did a wonderful job of arriving at many very interesting conclusions that are without question deeply inspired from the Cold War of the Reagan years.
If the movie comes close to how excellent the novel was it should be quite a treat during the Holiday Season of 2013. I’m glad that my nephew was so persistent in trying to get my attention with the novel because it was well worth my time. My July has been an unusually busy month, so it took me a few weeks to get through it not because the pacing was slow, but rather I took my time to absorb it like a fine wine, which is exactly what I thought as I closed the book. I had thought about many of the problems presented in Ender’s Game from much more terrestrial angles, so it was a real pleasure to read them in the context of a heavy science fiction story that has much more to offer any serious reader than just spontaneous entertainment. Ender’s Game is an important work for our times that belongs right alongside Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon.
It may seem unfair to public schools to measure the behavior of their teachers off so many cases of bad conduct. But they bring the scrutiny on themselves. Every couple of years most public schools constantly ask for tax increases promising that by spending the extra money communities will make themselves stronger by being able to employee better teachers. Then school districts hire public relations staff at tax payer expense to spin the school’s position in favor of maintaining high public approval so that levies can be passed when schools desire the money. So when bad things happen which cannot be controlled by media handlers, the tax payers have a right to know, and to cast their disapproval in the direction of public education. That is what has just happened in the Northwest School District.
A grand jury indicted science teacher 36-year-old Julie Hautzenroeder on two counts of sexual battery. According to court documents, Hautzenroeder engaged in oral sex with one boy and intercourse with another between April 26 and May 15 of 2013. Both teens were students at the school, and one boy was a 10th-grader. Parents who know the teen said the case also involved marijuana smoking, Hautzenroeder was escorted from the school in early May and placed on leave before the end of the school year. She had been employed by Northwest Schools since July 2006.
Sex, or sexual misconduct by teachers at this point is well-known and appears to be normal in public education. Just a few short weeks ago Lakota had a case that finally became known to the public after a year of debate. Lakota West High School math teacher George C. Merk was placed on a 45 day license suspension beginning over the summer months because he had inappropriate sexually related text messages with his students. CLICK HERE FOR REVIEW. It is no surprise that Julie Hautzenroeder desired to use her position of authority to fulfill sexual fantasies with her students using marijuana smoking and various degrees of sex. These teachers know that unless they do something really outrageous and get caught doing it; their teacher’s union will protect them so they don’t worry too much about behaving in a positive fashion. In the case of Merk he was suspended over the summer when teachers were off anyway–so much for punishment. With Hautzenroeder it took a grand jury for the teacher to be removed from the job as she had been on paid leave since the scandal first broke on May 15. It literally takes getting caught red-handed with massive evidence to lose a job as a teacher because the unions are so strong. There is simply no telling how much of this sex is going on as the behavior appears to be rampant—which is why schools require public relations staff to control the scandals from public scrutiny.
But here’s the worst of it. It was only November of 2012 that the same school district Julie worked for was going for a 4.95-mill five year emergency operating levy to generate $7.3 million annually. During the levy campaign the school declared to the community that the tax payers were paying for quality schools that would bring quality to their community—the same nonsense that is uttered in every public school district. But what is never discussed is that a majority of the money raised was going directly to teacher salary. When the levy was passed, the superintended posted the following on their Facebook page celebrating their win at the ballot box.
A note from the NWLSD Superintendent:
We won! Or more accurately, congratulations- you won! This victory was all about our community members taking a stand and saying: We not do want any more cuts. We want to maintain the wide array of outstanding programs that we offer to our students.
We want our students and staff to be able to work together without fearing the loss of programs and jobs. We want our community to be proud of the programs that can offer in our schools.
I am sure that a lot more will said about this levy victory, but for today we only need to do two things. First, we need to thank all the staff, students, parents, community members and businesses who helped pass the levy…… then we need to celebrate- this was a decisive victory for our community, our students and our staff.
Within five months of that election victory Rick Glatfelter had one of his employees bringing students to her home for oral sex, standard sex, and pot smoking. Glatfelter obviously had no control of the school employees off the Colerain property yet the arrangements were made at his school by his employee with students he was responsible for and he obviously has failed to maintain a high standard of conduct that the community he proclaimed to represent can be proud of. Without question the superintendent will declare that he did what he could with Julie Hautzenroeder as the union had his hands tied. As soon as he could he removed her from class, but the damage had already been done. The events leading up to the sex at her house, the in-class flirting, the whispers from the other teachers, the gossip of the other students were not acted upon because the union has management’s hands tied into inaction.
All management at public schools can do is throw more money at teachers like Julie Hautzenroeder and hope that everyone behaves. If somebody gets caught, then public relations specialists can bail out the district as Lakota attempted to do with the Merk case which finally came out a year too late. In all reality nothing will happen to Merk—he’ll be teaching at the start of the 2013/2014 school year in spite of his bad behavior and without question Hautzenroder thought she’d skate along with the same disregard for her job that showed incredible arrogance and disrespect for her employers, the tax payers of Northwest Schools. Her way of thanking the voters for approving the recent school levy was to sleep with their children and get stoned.
With the reckless attitude displayed in public schools by the employees at all levels, it is amazing that they have the audacity to even use such language as “quality,” “community,” and “excellence” when describing the services they offer to the community. Any gutter trash of a human being can do what Julie Hautzenroeder did. But the public schools have no way of removing such parasites off their payroll once they are hired leaving the question to ask, why didn’t Rick Glatfelter say as much during the levy attempt of 2012? Well, the answer is that he was hired for one thing at Northwest Schools, and that was to pass a tax increase, which he did. That was why he was able to sleep well that night of the election. Most superintendents in Ohio are former teachers themselves and they know of many situations like the Julie Hautzenroeder case. Their job is to run cover for the unions to protect their former profession from public scrutiny while finding new ways to wrestle from the community the money needed to pay the outrageous wages demanded by collective bargaining contracts. At the time Julie lost her job she was making right around $50,000 a year only working at the district since 2006. With payroll so high and the union so strong the only management that Glatfelter could perform is to throw more money into the community pot so that the teachers good and bad alike could pillage from it like ravenous wolves upon the taste of blood. Once the money was secured, and the teachers could relax a bit on their public image campaigns during the levy periods, they were back at doing what they enjoyed doing best—surrendering their sexual urges to logic in drug induced indictments against the community that employs them with a secret smile on their faces daring anybody to confront their illicit behavior which is much more known than anybody will dare admit.
I appreciate all the offers to visit with various groups who read here often, but impossibly time cannot be split to occupy more than one place at a time. My summer has been an excessively busy one, especially July which began in Central Florida and ended in Greenville, Ohio at the Annual Annie Oakley Festival of 2013. At the Fairlawn this year the crowd at the back of the room was larger as more children from our group of Wild West practitioners were coming of age, and were sitting at the tables with their parents. CLICK HERE TO REVIEW LAST YEAR. Many of my opinions about politics, education and life in general come from spending over a decade with my Wild West friends who are the closest thing to knowing the real Annie Oakley and Buffalo Bill that there is in the world. There is typically more talent at the back of the room at the Fairlawn Steak House each year during the last weekend of July at the climax of the Annie Oakley festivities than entire cities produce. There are artists, authors, musicians, knife throwers, professional Wild West acts, master whip handlers, photographers, World Record holders, television producers, newspaper journalists, magicians, and comedy actors who all converge that one time of year to visit the steak house as the sun runs for night in the land that God blessed, with Darke Country, Ohio where American flags are as common as farm houses painted white. Click the videos below to witness some of the key events. This year I put up entire sections of unedited video of the contests so that people who might consider coming next year can see exactly how things were done.
The group is amazing, so of course the children that are produced by such people are noticeably more bright-eyed, happy and willing to learn anything they can from the adults. Like any tight-nit group everyone is kind to each other’s children who directly benefit by having access to so many unique personalities to teach them. This is particularly the case with the children of Kirk and Melodie Bass whose children radiate a brilliance that is put out in most kids by the time they are seven years old by more conventional parents. They are lucky to have parents who spend so much effort making their children’s lives unique as one of the only remaining knife throwing acts in the country with Bass Blades.
My whip making friend David Crain was back again with his wife and little girl who started off the bull whip speed and accuracy competition this year, which really took some guts exhibiting a confidence that was unusual and only comes from parents who deeply care. David made special whips for my grandson which were given to him upon his birth. David’s little girl was hitting targets out of her daddy’s hand as a 5-year-old and now she started the speed and accuracy competition against the best whip crackers in the world with the exception of a couple of people who couldn’t come out due to paying gigs elsewhere in the country.
Lash Luke was back too, and his act was more polished after another year of diligent work as his entire family came to Darke County to cheer him on from Alabama. At dinner he had the wonderful opportunity to sit across from Chris Camp and hear stories that will ultimately become his fate as the next generation of whip cracker. Last year the little girl who was the official Miss Annie Oakley for the city of Greenville was after Luke knowing a good thing when she saw it. But since last year, the long distance between them geographically made a relationship nearly impossible and she found a new romantic interest. But she wasn’t fooling anybody as she came back again and like one of Luke’s first groupies hung out in the back of the spectator stands waiting for the show to be over so she could speak to her old flame once again. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire, and there is still a fire in her eyes that burns for Luke. But what young woman wouldn’t like a young man who can play music with bull whips and crack poker dice off of the top of his own head with them. As I told Luke after the evening shows that we were heading over to the Fairlawn to eat, I could see in her eyes the carefully concealed truth that she would be a part of his life for many years.
Years ago Gery Deer who produces the whole Annie Oakley Western Showcase, singing, playing the piano for the group The Brothers and Company, doing whip acts, performing magic with his friend Professor Karns, all while doing production work for Channel 2, freelance writing, and various other activities gave my wife a special bull whip pendent that she wore at this event. It’s a very unique item that only Gery has been able to provide from the only indoor bull whip instruction studio in existence in Jamestown, Ohio. Gery gave it to my wife while we were producing one of our various projects together. The bull whip for all of us represents creative power and is the source of our focus which is the reason for the pendent. The bull whip is all that’s left of an era in classic American art and we hold to it ruthlessly.
In the competitions I missed a cup during the Speed and Accuracy portion which put me in second place behind Chris Camp who won that event. I did better on the Speed Switch and Bull Whip fast draw. The key to these kinds of things is to actually slow down and not get ahead of yourself which I was able to do once I settled into the events. With Lash Luke’s third place timing on the Speed and Accuracy I suspect that he will really be pushing for first place next year along with a host of young talent that is up and coming including a young man from North Carolina who came to the Western Showcase with his mother. This year he sat in the audience and watched after receiving a couple of brand new stock whips from David Crain, but in the near future he will likely be out there with Luke ushering in a new generation.
And that is what pleases me most. As Gery and I finished up our meals the kids were running around the Fairlawn enjoying themselves immensely. In that dining room were most of the people the kids cared about, and they enjoyed the stimulating environment provided by these excessively creative individuals. The children were unhindered by the kind of social norms most children have to contend with, and it showed clearly. In the past I’ve reported about my trips to Annie Oakley with reverence for the “old days” dying in a dimly lit future but in the eyes of the young I saw new generations rising to the challenge to keep the Wild West Arts of America’s past from disappearing into a void of modern scrutiny. I saw at the Fairlawn in 2013 the start of a new generation that holds the hope of America in their hands, and am confident that the task will not be fruitless.
When it was time to leave, President of VietnamTrương Tấn Sang, reportedly offered Obama a gift as the American President was visiting recently — a copy of a letter sent by Ho Chi Minh to Harry Truman. Obama stated “we discussed the fact that Ho Chi Minh was actually inspired by the U.S. Declaration of Independence and Constitution, and the words of Thomas Jefferson. Ho Chi Minh talked about his interest in cooperation with the United States. President Sang indicated that even if it’s 67 years later, it’s good that we’re still making progress.” I have told some of this story before. Review by Clicking Here. Of course Obama neglected to tell the rest of the story which he no doubt already knew but used this conversation with Sang to attempt to quell the newly fueled Tea Party movement which has gained momentum in the wake of the many Obama scandals with an obvious attempt to misdirect the current offensive. Read more at the source article at The Blaze.
In 1911, working as the cook’s helper on a ship, Nguyễn Ái Quốc (later known as Ho Chi Man) traveled to the United States. From 1912–13, he lived in New York (Harlem) and Boston, where he worked as a baker at the Parker House Hotel. Among a series of menial jobs, he claimed to have worked for a wealthy family in Brooklyn between 1917–18, and for General Motors as a line manager. It is believed that, while in the United States, he made contact with Korean nationalists, an experience that developed his political outlook.[7]As a young man Nguyễn had a problem, he wanted to get the French colonies out of his homeland of Vietnam and he wanted to learn from America by taking on odd jobs so he could perform the task. The French had colonized Vietnam in much the way that England had occupied America so the future communist leader of Vietnam wanted to learn how to remove them using America as his revolutionary model.
At various points between 1913 and 1919, Nguyễn lived in West Ealing, and later in Crouch End, Hornsey. He reportedly worked as either a chef or dish washer [reports vary] at the Drayton Court Hotel in West Ealing.[8] It is claimed that Nguyễn trained as a pastry chef under Auguste Escoffier at the Carlton Hotel in the Haymarket, Westminster, but there is no evidence to support this.[7][9] However, the wall of New Zealand House, home of the New Zealand High Commission, which now stands on the site of the Carlton Hotel, displays a blue plaque, stating that Nguyễn worked there in 1913 as a waiter. Nguyễn was also employed as a pastry boy on the Newhaven-Dieppe ferry route in 1913.[10] He was quite an adventurer stopping at nothing to learn all he could about the West so he could free his country from French occupation.
From 1919–23, while living in France, Nguyễn began to approach the political path, through his friend and Socialist Party of France comrade Marcel Cachin. Nguyễn claimed to have arrived in Paris from London in 1917, but the French police only had documents of his arrival in June 1919.[7] He joined in a group of Vietnamese nationalists in Paris whose leaders were Phan Chu Trinh and Phan Văn Trường, bearing a new name Nguyễn Ái Quốc (“Nguyễn the Patriot”). But before he contacted any of the radical socialists in France he attempted to gain audience with Woodrow Wilson during the Treaty of Versailles seeking help and advice from The United States as they divided up the world forming The League of Nations. Much to Nguyễn’s distress, Wilson wanted nothing to do with meeting anybody from Vietnam or going against the wishes of his French host, so Nguyễn was abandoned and left to seek political advice elsewhere which is how he came into contact with socialists which he had also met in the streets of Harlem in The United States as the progressive era was coming into full swing. Nguyễn naturally must have thought that socialism was the future of America as they spoke so highly of it during his visits, so he pursued that path as a way to free his nation from French occupation. Citing the language and the spirit of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, Nguyễn, had expected U.S. PresidentWoodrow Wilson to help remove the French colonial rule from Vietnam and ensure the formation of a new, nationalist government. The future ruler had no idea that Wilson was trying to undo the Constitution, not preserve it with his own academic overthrow. Since he was unable to obtain consideration at Versailles, the failure further radicalized Nguyễn, making him a symbol of the anti-colonial movement at home in Vietnam.[12] That is the part of the story Obama conveniently left out in his meeting with President of VietnamTrương Tấn Sang.
In 1920, as a representative in the Congress of Tours of Socialist Party of France, Quốc voted for the Third International and became a founding member of the Parti Communiste Français (FCP). Taking a position in the Colonial Committee of PCF, he tried to attract his comrades’ attention towards people in French colonies including Indochina, but his efforts were often unsuccessful. In this period he learned to write journal articles and short stories as well as running his Vietnamese nationalist group. In May 1922, Nguyễn wrote an article for a French magazine criticizing the use of English words by French sportswriters.[13] The article implores Prime Minister Raymond Poincaré to outlaw such Franglais as le manager, le round and le knock-out. While living in Paris, he reportedly had a relationship with a dressmaker named Marie Brière.[13]
The rest is history and within four decades The United State found itself attempting to defend their French ally in a war that was started because the Vietnamese people wanted independence from colonial rule in their country. Nobody had listened to General Claire Chennault after World War II regarding the spread of communism across China so the mismanagement of the American government through many errors had placed themselves in a Catch 22 with Vietnam. If they abandoned the French, they would have had to admit their mistake during the Treaty of Versailles and allowed the spread of communism across the entire Asian continent, funded by the Russians—America’s Cold War enemy. All Ho Chi Minh wanted was to do to the French what America had done to the English in their own revolution. Yet the help and support of freedom wasn’t there—instead, Ho Chi Minh ran into the statist progressive Woodrow Wilson who did not care about the individual rights of the Vietnamese, only the expansion of European dominance, which was the result of the Treaty of Versailles. Wilson had been bitten by the seduction of communism that was flowing through-out the world because of Karl Marx, leaving Ho Chi Minh to seek refuge from with the communists in Europe. Either way, revolutionaries by design only had communism to form their thoughts which was the strategy of communist expansion during the progressive era.
Obama hoped that nobody would know anything about the real story of Ho Chi Minh so that he could deconstruct the resistance to communism most Americans have due to the rhetoric of the Cold War. Nothing politicians do at the level of Obama is an accident, and the meeting with modern Vietnamese leaders highlighting the similarities between communist led Ho Chi Minh and the Founding Fathers is a deliberate attack on the beliefs of most modern Americans who have little knowledge of history, particularly of the Vietnam War. But the story is not that Ho Chi Minh was a communist who learned his behavior from the Founding Fathers, but was a revolutionary who was inspired by America—and even sought our help, but was turned away and miss managed by Woodrow Wilson at a crucial time in world history. Ho Chi Minh was ultimately a creation of Woodrow Wilson and the failure of the progressives—which is not the truth that Obama will tell under any circumstances—even though he knows better. Like most modern politicians with statist tendencies, they will lie and manipulate any fact to achieve their ends, and in the case of Ho Chi Minh, this is exactly what President Obama was trying to do.
After the interview I did with Matt Clark featuring the life of Walt Disney and more specifically, American Exceptionalism there was of course some upset listeners, as there always is. Listen to that broadcast by CLICKING HERE. The term “American Excepitonalism” 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 a quality of life that is unmatched anywhere. Americans on the world stage have been told by virtually every government that as one of the youngest countries they need to respect their elders and yield to the social philosophies of older cultures and disregard their own. This kind of mentality inspired Barack Obama upon his presidential election to go on his famous bowing around the world tour apologizing to the countries of Europe and elsewhere for American arrogance that had been displayed over the last couple of centuries. Americans were told by progressive activists that The United States was not a good country and that we should all be paralyzed by guilt for the slavery that caused the Civil War, and that somehow all the good things in America were to be erased due to civil rights violations.
Well, the types of people who utter such nonsense are the enemies of America. They forget that America willingly freed its slaves, which the King of England had started in the colonies, and under the American Constitution, slavery was abolished—a move that happened nowhere else in the world. To this very day there is still slavery in Africa, all through the Middle-East and spanning along the northern shores of the Indian Ocean. Women’s rights in the same region are equally appalling. Only in America were such rights granted to women without destroying the economy. Capitalism gave men, women, and children options that exist no place else anywhere in the world and freedom for all races, shapes and sizes of people more equally than any other country—so what is there to apologize for?
Americans have been taught by their government that The United States gained everything it achieved by consuming too many resources, and stepping on the rights of others across the world. Such claims are equivalent to jealous classmates who swear that America cheated because they cannot fathom how it accomplished such wonderful attributes competitively. It is in those types of people who find the term “American Exceptionalism” an offensive term, and it was those who were angry at Matt and me for even discussing it on his radio show. After the broadcast there was a comment from a guy named Ben Cowan who said:
(American Exceptionalism) “a neocon made up term. American experience is the real name, the founders were never arrogant or braggadocios about this country.”
–Ben Cowan
Matt’s response to Ben I thought was very kind, and as a radio personality he gets those types of comments all the time—and his answers are usually very diplomatic. However, in this case I’d like to answer Ben in my own way as the terms he used in his comment deserve scrutiny. A Neocon by definition is a conservative who supposedly disliked the social freedom of the 1960s. A neoconservative equals someone who became conservative as a reaction to the social freedom of the 1960s and 1970s. The term braggadocios are considered empty boasting and swaggering self-aggrandizement. Since I fully support the term “American Exceptionalism” then this means that by Ben’s comment that I am a neocon that is practicing braggadocios—and that I shouldn’t do so because the Founding Fathers didn’t perform the behavior. But Ben is wrong and here’s why. The Founding Fathers at the start of the American Experiment of 1776 did not boast because their philosophical theories were unproven at the time. However, in 2013 the aspects of their philosophy that worked can be seen in the many attributes described at the beginning of this article. The benefits to capitalism and the American Experience produced a unique type of person that had only been contemplated by philosopher fantasies prior to The Declaration of Independence. Unlike 1773 to 1782 there is now a history to show how such a small country was able to have such a major impact on the world without having kings or queens to take the credit for such productive output. Life in virtually every facet is better in America because of the philosophy of personal independence that is much larger than the “American Experience.” The type of person that is produced under such a system of government is what is meant by “American Exceptionalism.” The example that Matt and I discussed was Walt Disney, a man who could have only been produced under the American style of government focused on self-reliance, creative enterprise, and a focus on the greater good by impacting the individual at the level of their imagination. The proof of American Exceptionalism is in the track record of success by individuals in America directly compared to individuals in other countries, such as China, India, Spain, Russia or anywhere else. No country has produced individuals like Walt Disney so Uncle Walt is an example of American Exceptionalism, the same kind of exceptionalism that invented airplanes, electricity, and the telephone. The same county that walked on the moon and set the standard for space flight, is the same country where even the poor are comparatively wealthy when compared to the villages of Africa, India, and Southeast Asia. That is something to be proud of which must be termed American Excpetionalism.
When those who find such terms inconvenient or even uncomfortably true based on their personal philosophies, try to refute such truthful statements as to point out American Exceptionalism they must use an anti-concept to attempt to remove such definitions so that there is no standard to measure against the failures of other belief systems. This is what Ben Cowen did when he attempted to put Matt and me on the defensive with name calling such as neocon and braggadocios. The automatic reaction might be to say, “No we’re not,” then spend the rest of the conversation attempting to prove that we are not neocons or braggadocios. While it’s true that I find the social freedoms of the 1960s and 1970s despicable it is not enough to call my thoughts those of a neocon which somehow refers my beliefs into the realm of radicalism. In the interview with Matt, we had spent one hour talking about Walt Disney and our love of a period well before the 1960s that we relish. That period would be called “classic American” not a neocon. The radicalism is only in reference to the severe psychological differences that are the result of the destructive period referenced during the Hippie Era. People who use the neocon term are those who fear losing the social gains made during the 1960s which violate the type of classic America I honor. The only radicalism present is the accepted period of the 1960s version of America as opposed to the 1920s when Presidents like Calvin Coolidge were burning the midnight oil doing America’s business and Walt Disney was trying to get his company off the ground.
As for being a braggadocios, I say why not? When an NFL player scores a touchdown, they celebrate, when a basketball player hits a deep three pointer, or slam dunks over an opposing player, they celebrate. When a NASCAR driver wins a race they do burn outs in the middle of the track to celebrate their victory. So why would Americans not brag about the cultural aspects of their society that they know are superior, such as the aviation industry, the computer industry, and the entertainment culture. Look how many literary works are produced in The United States compared to other countries. No other country comes close to The United States in thinking production and that is something to celebrate. Of those thinkers nobody took the business of thought to the level of Walt Disney who is an example of American Exceptionalism. It is OK to pump our fists in the air as Americans and be proud of what we are. It is disgraceful to apologize for being too good and American has been. Its time to stop that, the Founding Fathers didn’t brag about their good fortune at the time because they weren’t sure the experiment would work. But now we do know and its time to stop pandering to the type of people represented by Ben Cowan. They are free to think what they want, but not free to dictate our actions with name calling. It’s time to call them names, like apologists, wimps, detriments to the human race and a number of other things I can think of right off-hand that are not fit to write down. But it’s not acceptable to just take what the hippies, the progressive loons; the America haters declare is the new line in the sand of social value. That line has been drawn way too far to the left and its about time to move it radically back to where it should have been all along, in an era represented best by the finest example of American Exceptionalism that is universally known to the entire world – Walt Disney. For anyone who wishes to argue against American Exceptionalism point to an example anywhere in the world of a similar personality born under the flag of socialism, communism, or any form of statism. I am confident that there isn’t one, and nobody reading this will succeed in providing a single example and that is ultimately what people like Ben Cowan are angry at. Calling us neocons, which coming from them is like being awarded a badge of honor, declares that they hate our social position, painting on my face a smile from ear to ear. Ben………..I am braggadocios about this country. So you better get used to it.
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.
The media, collectively from The View, to Ellen, to the CBS Nightly News read from the same Civil Rights sheet music, the same talking points which where practically invented as a work of fiction—yet reported as fact. George Zimmerman was found not guilty even with all the other aspects of the Martin case that were left out such as the drug abuse, the violent Facebook postings, and the social demeanor of the young man just short of his 18th birthday. The media wanted to believe that Martin was just a child going to get a harmless drink and some Skittles from the corner convenience store, not that the kid was an MMA obsessed drug experimenter. Collectively the media projected the same Civil Rights message to the weakened masses which the typical person had little patience to understand. They were caught wanting to trust those media sources because they were simply too busy in their lives not to.
The trouble with collectivism is that there is no individual thought, and the obvious evidence that so many in the media participated openly in the Trayvon Martin conspiracy as an attempt to sacrifice George Zimmerman to the altar of a progressive Civil Rights power grab shows how effective their propaganda machine is over just one court case. Imagine what they can do on a large-scale, when Presidents and their administrations are involved. A glimpse behind the collective façade has been seen with the IRS Hearings, the Benghazi killings, and the unconstitutional appointments that received very little initial reaction from the media until whistleblowers put the issues in front of the worlds’ eyes. The hypocrisy was very obvious, and millions of Americans aren’t sure what to do with the information now that they know they’ve been lied to. The Martin case and the Obama administration are connected not just in casual observation, but in this case Obama and his Justice Department activist Eric Holder personally became involved in a states’ rights issues for the simple attempt of inciting race wars in hopes of grabbing more group based power—with the media at their backs to blow wind into their sails.
To understand how this happens one simply needs to understand what kinds of things are taught in high schools and colleges all across the country, especial liberal arts type courses which often dangle from journalism degrees. Collectivism is taught at these institutions and blind acceptance of memorized information. Individual thought is rejected as critical applications are paid lip service to, but tucked out of sight in all reality. If there are federal grants involved, or federal money of any kind such as Race to the Top, or Common Core instruction, that institution is teaching the desires of the government, and that is statism. When over 90% of all journalists come from colleges particularly with liberal arts degrees, they were all taught the same methods of following orders and sacrificing their individuality to the good of the collective which is why they report the way they do.
Further, the culture on campuses, “the party life” is designed to rob away innocence and individual integrity so that the mind of the campus students can be brought into line with concepts of statism which is taught in the class rooms. Wonder not why the campus presidents do not fret about the hundreds of rapes that occur every day at their colleges because the personal invasion of a woman’s personal space by sexual predators who are also students are part of the design of the campus experience. When a young female journalism major wakes up in a strange apartment without her cloths facing people she has never met before at escapades that occurred the night before, when that young student gets a job at the New York Times, or The Washington Post she will avoid the stories of scandal about disgraced political interns who have been black mailed, or the many prostitutes who men of statist power utilize to allow extortion to move their mouths like marionettes, she will report on environmental concerns and social collectivism instead. The idea of sin will stay in the back of her mind and she will pursue altruistic stories as social redemption might wash away her past, and all the mistakes she made in college. The collectivism is a natural human reaction to individual shame, so statist desire to see individuals shamed so that they can gain control of individual actions in service to the collective is the typical social strategy that is learned in virtually all education institutions where government money is present. That is how it starts. The mistakes in college through drunken orgies are designed to remove individual identity from the participants and therefore critical thought generated from their mind.
Bill Whittle made a compelling case about the Trayvon Martin evidence, and he was right to end his piece contemplating to what extent the same has happened with Barack Obama. In an honest world where the media used the First Amendment to pursue truth, justice, and the American way there wouldn’t be a President Obama in The White House, and the Martin case would not have been reported the way it was—and George Zimmerman most likely would have never had to spend a single day in jail. But the media isn’t honest, and we do have to worry about those types of statist strategies seen in Whittle’s video. The evidence is audacious and the proof is beyond refute. But the behavior continues because most people lack the courage to face the truth, even though it is painful. And for many people their past is laced with the same shame that haunts many journalists—and hampers their decisions from one of individual value instead to collective embrace where judgment is vacant, and sins are revered, in an empire of statism that is protected by the modern gate keepers of the truth.
I grew up wearing primarily military clothing that routinely was unkempt on purpose. My army pants had large holes in the knees from all the crawling around that I did—and still do. My shirts were always un-tucked and I have worn a cowboy hat with that attire since I was in the fifth grade. My reason was that I planned to rebel against the government if they ever drafted me into the military and I wanted to be always in a state of readiness in case I was forced into combat by a statist government. The military was always known for their rigidity with military uniform, and my position was to get used to the uniform without the formality. It was my way of thumbing my nose at statist philosophy. When I was a kid, the drafting of citizens was still on everyone’s mind from the Vietnam era where the government decided that individual citizens could be compelled into service to their country for something politicians called “duty,” and I never planned to participate in that activity. I had many uncles, cousins, and other family members who swore to me that if I were drafted into the army that my rigid independent streak would be broken by the drill sergeants. By the stories they told, there was no choice. You either did what they told you, or you were thrown into the brig for insolence. I had no problem with the danger, with shooting at other people, or having them shoot at me. I found that part very exciting. But I was never going to allow myself to get on a bus, get my head shaved, and have a drill sergeant yell at me for six weeks until I surrendered my individuality to the cause of collective salvation calling it “duty to my country.”
Statist use more frequently now than ever this term “duty” when talking about the military. This is why it has become custom to tell military veterans “thank you for your sacrifice and service” when speaking to them. I do not do that. I have known a lot of people who went into the military, mostly because they couldn’t figure out what they wanted to do with their life, or they wanted money for college. They decided to surrender their individuality in trade for security. In high school a Marine recruiter was heavy after me knowing some of the dangerous escapades that I had been involved in, and the court cases that I had attended. He told me that I would self-destruct in a few years with my attitude and that the Marines would bring discipline to my life that I needed. Of course I didn’t buy into the scam, but some of my friends did, and they were never the same after four years in the military. They came out of the military nice little foot soldiers who followed orders without question as they had learned to participate in life with a sense of duty, instead of thought and the statists of government wanted the world to thank them for it so more people would follow in their wake, without having to impose a government mandated draft.
My idea of military life was the flight group, The Flying Tigers during the early days of World War II. If that was what the military was offering I would have signed up in less than a second just so I could fly planes and participate in danger. CLICK HERE FOR REVIEW. But the whole “yes sir, no sir” thing was not for me and I don’t respect those who give up their individuality to surrender thought to any group behavior—including the military. When I attend events where I see formations, salutes, and blind recital of chants I feel sorry for the participants. Yet I have witnessed that the usual emotion from my peers is envy. They envy the sense of purpose that serving in a group the “duty” defined by a statist government provides them. The government might say that soldiers in Afghanistan have a duty to defend American interests, or that soldiers have a duty to defend the world against failed political policies in the Middle East. That duty means a sacrifice of life, limb, or at a minimum–time from their life based on the definitions of statist politicians. The reasons are never considered, only the act.
The idea of a draft in America during the Vietnam era broke the conscious of many Americans. Many men learned as 18-year-olds that the government can do as it pleases with the individual lives of their citizens, and this mentality carried over to the statist policies which came out of the sixties, the counter-revolutionary movement, the rise of labor union influence, collective bargaining legislation, and many other aspects of idiocy that were sold as a social “duty.” The idea of duty had been driven into these men who were broken from the idealistic kids of the Howdy Doody Show growing up in the 50’s by their drill sergeants without a choice available but from their government to say that their life was owned by the federal government, and that the government was more important than their lives. This has affected this entire generation for the rest of their lives and the children they spawned. Eric Holder and Barack Obama know this and invoke the subconscious memory of America’s sense of “duty” when they speak.
When these draftees came out of the military they were told that it was their “duty” to help the poor. They were told that it was their “duty” to help the middle-class. They were told that it was their “duty” to send their children to public school. They were told that it was their “duty” to vote for Medicaid and to sustain Social Security. They were told that it was their “duty” to raise children who would serve their country with sacrifice and that honor was in paying the ultimate price—death.
Today the word “duty” is thrown around by statists of all ranks. People like Eric Holder use the word “duty” which has been ingrained in most of the population through one of two methods, from a drill sergeant, or a college professor to justify a statist policy against self-defense even if sometimes the best defense is a good offense. By invoking the idea of “duty” Holder attempts to overcome the Bill of Rights of The Constitution which are centered on individuality and slides under the door of the American mind an ideal of collective salvation that is artificially created by statists for statist principles. By creating a social concept of thanking service men not with the money they were paid but with the honor of sacrifice, statists like Obama and Holder who stand opposed to traditional American concepts rooted in pure capitalism can advance their philosophy of collectivism by touching the psychological paralysis that is built into most Americans by the statist system of sacrifice in the name of “duty.”
It is clear to me these discrepancies because I have rejected such a sense of “duty” my entire life, including my childhood. But it is not so clear to people who have had to negotiate in their minds the ideal of a military draft which took away their individual rights for the good of the “state” without question. These same people find themselves unable to understand why they feel disarmed when Eric Holder invokes the concept of “duty” in relation to Florida’s Stand Your Ground law so to build up public consensus against the measure. Resonating in their minds are the drill sergeants from their early years who stripped away all their thoughts, all their childhood memories with six hard weeks of basic training so that the mind of the soldiers thought not as individual Americans, but as cogs in a military machine that did not think, but simply followed orders. When Eric Holder states that it is an American citizen’s “duty” to follow the orders of the state, this is what he means, and why such statements are the roots of tyranny established to advance the causes of the left through carefully selected phrases planted in American minds through statist philosophy.
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.