PROGRESSIVES HATE GOVERNMENT OF, BY AND FOR THE PEOPLE

 

One by one the constructs of the Constitution meant to guarantee that the government would remain responsive to the will of the people are being set aside. The fundamental principle of our form of government is under attack by those who would subjugate us to rule by a progressive minority. Liberal politicians have been nominating activist judges to the bench at every level in the Judicial Branch for years. The same activist judges have read broad powers into the wording of the preamble of the Constitution in a successful effort to change the meaning of the document. The words, promote the general welfare, have been so broadly interpreted that virtually none of the limitations placed on the federal government by the Constitution are still intact. Every remaining vestige of the Tenth Amendment not wrecked by the courts reading of the general welfare clause has been swept away using an all encompassing gift of federal control through regulation of interstate commerce.

America is a patchwork quilt created by the efforts of her citizens. We can see success demonstrated by individuals running their own businesses of every description any time we care to look. We can also see evidence of failure in the street gangs and drug culture. The country is not perfect but it is better at giving people the opportunity to elevate themselves out of poverty than any other form of government ever created by man. The basic notion that we are secure in our persons, houses, papers and effects is opposed to the view of every progressive who believes government has the right to determine the “greater good” when private property rights conflict with public theft. The Constitution is filled with protections for the individual against usurpations of our unalienable rights, as set forth in the Declaration of Independence, by the government. These protections are under attack everyday by the same progressive politicians who seek to control us to their own ends. We are being disarmed of our legal protections by unelected bureaucrats writing regulations enforced by government attorneys who fight us with taxpayer dollars. Thousands of pages of new regulations are promulgated every year in an unending effort to control the wealth and productivity of America’s economy by a small minority who see themselves as the intellectual elite. Picture for yourself a politician who could believe he has both the right and the authority to determine how large a soft drink we can consume and our right to keep and bear arms. That person is a progressive, we can all put a name on the face but the name doesn’t really matter, progressives are interchangeable because they are unified in their single minded drive to destroy government by the people.

The progressives want us disarmed of any effective means to resist their will and absolute mastery over us. The separation of powers, first, second, fourth, and tenth amendments are being nullified by people so conceited that they grant themselves rights that they deny the rest of us based on their certain knowledge of their own infallibility. The argument is the same one employed by every despot in history to justify totalitarian government.

The one thing the progressives can’t control is the reason that they will ultimately fail in their quest to destroy our self governance. We Americans have grown up for generations accustomed to our freedoms; we will fight our oppressors with the tools the founders gave us. The day of reckoning is coming for those who would enslave us. We will not be subjects. The progressives have enjoyed considerable success by slowly eroding freedom at a pace that fails to cause alarm. The sixties and seventies generation of progressives got infected with the desire to have it all now and their move to rapidly transform the country has given rise to the patriotic counter current they fear so much.

THE BENGHAZI COVERUP STENCH KEEPS GETTING STRONGER

 

The administration and Congressional leadership counted on news editors and voters both getting fatigued with the Benghazi story before any real political damage was done. The revelation that the U.S. government facilitated the transfer of $500 million worth of weapons to al-Qaeda-linked militants is truly terrible; the deaths of many people including four Americans connected with it should require accountability of those responsible in Washington and Libya. The weapons that entered Libya originated in the UAE and came through our armed forces blockading the land and sea approaches to Libya. We know now that John McCain and other members of Congress urged the President to allow Qatar’s plan for arming the Libyan rebels in an attempt to oust the Qaddafi regime. Our government sought to leave no paperwork trail leading back to itself as it encouraged Qatar and the UAE’s arming of the al-Qaeda affiliated rebels. Giving arms to a terrorist group or supporting them in any way is expressly prohibited by 18 U.S. Code 2339A and 18 U.S. Code 2339B. The Federal Arms Export Control Act also makes it illegal for the government to provide arms to any country determined by the Secretary of State to have “repeatedly provided support for acts of terrorism.” State department reports from 2007 and 2008 clearly state, some bearing Christopher Stevens signature, that members of these militia’s were intent on the destruction of America and any group supported by our country such as the Qaddafi regime. Is it any wonder why the administration and congressmen didn’t want a paper trail leading back to them in view of the illegality of their actions? A June 2010 report compiled by the Combat Terrorism Center at West point as well as other State Department reports finds that the largest number of foreign fighters confronting our forces in Iraq came from Libya and specifically named the LIFG. The same LIFG our administration was funneling weapons to in Benghazi! The State Department hired the “February 17^th Martyr’s Brigade to defend our diplomatic mission in Benghazi even as they proudly displayed the al-Qaeda flag on their Facebook page. Leaving the defense of the diplomatic mission in such hands calls into question the motives of those in charge of our State Department. A sad reality is that the whole Libyan war and the deaths of our people could have been avoided. Muammar Gaddafi had offered to abdicate peacefully and turn over power which would have avoided the bloodshed. For some reason Gaddafi’s offer was rejected by our government and it is high time we learn exactly what the reason was.

In June after the Benghazi attack foreign press sources surfaced an al-Qaeda website posting by Dhu-al-Bajadin, a known al-Qaeda weapons expert, saying the Benghazi attack plan was based on an abduction and exchange of high level prisoners. The same month three independent translations of the Arabic being spoken in videos shot at the time of the attack include the sentence “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot, Dr. Morsi sent us.” The Arabic dialect being spoken was Egyptian and not indigenous to Libya. Remember Morsi said during his campaign for the office of Egyptian President that he would have the blind sheik home by year end. On June 26^th several Arabic websites quoted an intelligence report, first printed in a Kuwaiti paper, which stated that interrogation of prisoners arrested at the time of the Benghazi attack pointed to Morsi and several Egyptian and Saudi businessmen as the financiers of the attack.

The next important evidence about the attack surfaced in a report by the Turkish news agency Anatolia. The text of the report included testimony of Saad Al-Shater, son of the detained Muslim Brotherhood leader Khairat Al-Shater. The younger Al-Shater insists that his father is in position of documents so incriminating to the President that if revealed it would land Mr. Obama in prison. The evidence strongly suggests that the death of ambassador Stevens was the result of a kidnapping gone wrong for the purpose of trading Stevens for the blind sheik.

The refusal of numerous requests for additional security by Stevens leading up to the attack coupled with the stand down of rescue forces also suggests that Stevens kidnapping and eventual exchange for the blind sheik, Omar Abdel-Rahman, might have been what the white house wanted and hoped to use for political gain. Retired admiral James Lyons says that U.S. claims that it lacked the resources to mount a counterattack in time to save lives is false. “I’m going to tell you that that is not true,” he said “We had a 130 man unit of forces at Sigonella (AFB in Italy). They were ready to go.”

We will not know the truth about the Benghazi cover-up until the administration leaves office. Too many powerful people in D.C. stand to lose if the facts come out. To answer Mrs. Clinton as to what difference at this point it makes, honor and justice for those needlessly killed in service of their country in Libya does not have a statute of limitations. At best Hillary was tragically incompetent to hold the office of Secretary of State and at worst she is criminally complicit in the kidnapping and murder of Ambassador Stevens, Glen Doherty, Sean Smith and Tyrone Woods.

 

                THE GREATER GOOD ACCORDING TO WHOM?

 

Why is it that it always seems to come out in the end, some liberal wag spouts off to justify taking private property as “serving the greater good” when in fact they are just rationalizing some self serving scheme? I’m sure that the same kind of logic could have been used to justify the actions of any feudal lord or slave master from history. The whole notion that we as citizens should be secure in our persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated etc. is contrary to the liberal’s progressive mind. The framers of the Constitution fresh off the battle for independence came together and defined private property and ones right to it. They stated clearly that your property constituted not only your possessions but also included the ownership of your work product. It is one of the most important driving forces behind the exponential growth of the American economy. The Soviet Union and other communist nations never figured out that people would work harder to succeed if they got to keep the rewards of their work. I have seen firsthand the worker apathy that is the long term result in former communist countries. We as a nation took a fresh approach; the land could belong to the common man and could, as his possession, be handed down to his family. The rapid development of rail and freeway systems made eminent domain taking of private property seem less “wrong” as rail and roads needed to go through for the good of all. Once the veil of private property rights had been pierced it became easier and easier to justify taking private property in the name of doing the greater good. I was reading an article last week about a farm that had been taken from the owner by a local town council using eminent domain in the hope of attracting a big box store. It turns out that some of the same town council had prior knowledge of the big box company’s decision not to locate on the property and used the opportunity to buy the land from the town for little or nothing after the deal fell through. Amazingly the new owners had the plans for a new development ready to go at the time of the acquisition and tried to contend in court that it had only been a contingency plan. The court intervened in the plan and stopped the development. The land sits empty to this day as the court failed to restore ownership to the deeded landowner.

There are an endless stream of Federal, State and local elected or appointed officials ready to determine what constitutes the “greater good” for the rest of us. I believe the standard of proof should be difficult in the extreme and that fair compensation should be determined as a multiple of market value. The system of determining fair compensation as it stands is a bad joke. Much of the time the value of the “fair” compensation is arrived at by the same people that are benefitting from the theft of the personal property.

I for one find that any time I hear someone say that it is necessary for the “greater good” I want to scream, according to whom? Who is it that decides which choice serves the greater good? If liberals are involved you can bet it will involve taking private property and making it public at best and serving their own selfish interests at worst.

DID YOU KNOW THAT DHS COULD IGNORE THE 4^TH AMENDMENT

 

This post should serve as a serious warning to liberals who look the other way as the administration re-writes the Constitution whenever it wants. I remember all the media consternation relative to potential Constitutional rights violations when the Patriot Act and the National Defense Authorization Act were passed during the Bush years. Where is all the outrage now that the darkest of their predictions about the laws are actually happening? The Department of Homeland Security has defined its border search 4^th amendment exemption to extend 100 miles inland from the borders and to include a similar radius around functional equivalents of the border. Let me make that crystal clear to everyone. The area that they claim to have no 4^th amendment restriction in covers the private homes of 197 million citizens and that is before we get clarification on what they mean by “border or its functional equivalent.” There are now numerous cases of the FBI contacting the DHS when they want to conduct a warrantless search without probable cause and Homeland Security has obliged. If as the DHS claims, all international airports are the functional equivalent of a border then the entire nation is now a Constitution free zone. When the DHS was asked to justify the constitutionality of the warrantless searches they responded by saying, “We conclude that imposing a requirement that officers have reasonable suspicion in order to conduct a border search of an electronic device would be operationally harmful without concomitant civil rights/civil liberties benefits.” Now that they have introduced the concept of “border or its functional equivalent” we can only conclude that the agency or any other agency they deem fit to include can search any electronic device without a warrant even if it is in your home. The creeping destruction of our Constitutional rights in the name of national security is astonishing. Three years after a complaint was filed about the illegal searches the DHS responded in a memo saying, “we will do as we please like it or not.”

The concept of a Constitution-free zone covering most of the country was challenged in a law suit brought by the ACLU in 2008. The court stopped short of forbidding the random DHS check points and the CRS stated in part, “Agents who perform a search outside direct border stops must show reasonable suspicion putting their actions closer to the scope of the 4^th amendment.” I want you to know that that makes me feel so much better. We can find solace in the fact that the courts are willing to let the agency make up their own rules as they go in light of the internal investigation they did that found all of their actions to be constitutional.

Over the weekend at the Bundy ranch the BLM felt confident in their right to confine citizens to First Amendment zones that the BLM defined the limits of. The EPA regularly violates the takings clause of the Fifth Amendment by compelling owners of private property to vacate use of said property without compensation. Hell, your doctor can ask you questions courtesy of the Affordable Care Act and if, in his opinion, your answer is not appropriate he can suspend your Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms. I am warning the liberal readers again, your ox will be gored by this lawlessness soon enough and it will be too late to stop it. The absolute Constitutional prohibition against conscription of the National Guard for foreign wars has been violated by every President since FDR including your favorite, Richard Nixon. That particular provision of the Constitution has been trampled on so many time that we don’t even notice any more. We have a President and Attorney General that violate their oaths of office every time they elect not to enforce existing laws they disagree with and then have the temerity to demand we comply with The ACA because it is the law of the land. I don't have the space here to go into Tenth Amendment violations.

NOT ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL AND THAT IS JUST THE WAY IT IS

 

The founders put forth the notion that all men are created equal in the sense that they are all endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness etc. Men and women have utilized their personal talents and determination to better their existence in spite of the best efforts of the ruling classes throughout all of our history. Marx and Engels go to great length to describe the struggles of the proletariat against the oppression of the Bourgeoisie in the Communist Manifesto as they sought to design a system of self government which would assure nearly equal outcomes for all citizens. The driving themes of today’s progressive movement are based on equal outcomes. The progressive tax code was originally designed to penalize higher income earners more than low income earners in an attempt to level out wealth accumulation. We hear slogans decrying income inequality and promoting redistribution of wealth but if any well historically read Capitalist draws a parallel to Marx’s philosophy we are shouted down and branded as greedy or racist.

I just re-read the online progressive manifesto from the ThinkProgress website. The site proclaims that people have the right to an economically secure life, freedom of speech and religion, freedom from undue interference from government while bearing the responsibility for putting the public interest above our own. The piece concludes with the statement; “We want growing businesses producing the world’s best products and services. We want an economy that works for everyone, not just the few. We want all nations to uphold the universal human rights and work together to solve common challenges. This is what a progressive America looks like.”

The framers knew better than to trust this nation to the better nature of those in government. The Constitution was designed to prohibit government from unduly interfering in our lives. They went so far as to say that it is prohibited from having influence on our personal lives except for the enumerated powers. No system of government has provided upward mobility and guaranteed you your rights to your own work product as well as ours. For progressives to proclaim that they want growing businesses producing the world’s best products and services even as the progressives in our government shamelessly tax and regulate American business into insolvency is impossible to reconcile. The number one tactic in the progressives fight against income inequality is to take the fruits of productive labor away from the producers and give it to those who do not. If you fancy yourself a progressive I ask you if the current tax code with its 16826 pages of special interest tax exemptions works for you. Is the lowest labor participation rate since the depression and 1.9% growth in GDP what you mean when you say you want an economy that works for everyone and not just the few? Are you really willing to overlook the lawlessness of this administration just because the President is half black? He and his administration trample the freedom of speech you claim to covet and intimidate all those whose opinions differ from theirs with the full power of the IRS, EPA, BLM, NSA and FBI. You need to face reality just as the founders did, you cannot trust the future of the nation to the better nature of elected officials, they may not have a better nature. The Constitution has checks and balances built in with limited power for the federal government so that the imperial nature of our elected officials cannot be used against us. Look around all of you idealistic self proclaimed progressive’s, this is what the real progressive America looks like. We are a nation in decline because of the progressive agenda of Clinton, Bush and Obama where there are few jobs and little hope of a better future!

                     IS THE GOAL A POST INDUSTRIAL AMERICA?

 

If one can step back from the headlines and advertising campaigns far enough to look at the big picture it is possible to see why private business leaders are so unwilling to invest capital. The latest business periodicals claim somewhere between one and three trillion dollars in private capital is sitting idle in Americas businesses today. I personally believe that the number is much higher because small business owners are holding on to their cash reserves instead of investing them for the same reasons as the large corporations. The capital that is not being used in small businesses is hard to measure and as such tends to be overlooked. We know that small businesses are responsible for most of the job creation in this country contrary to what the government would have you believe. The anemic job creation numbers during this so called recovery give us a fairly good picture of the outlook of small business owners. I can tell you from personal experience that owning a small business means waking up everyday facing a lot of uncertainty. The multipronged assault that is being waged by our government on business using taxes and regulations add to the uncertainty causing many entrepreneurs to adopt a cautious cash strategy.

Not all of us are smart enough to see the threats and take the safe approach. Maybe I should rephrase that and just say some of us, including myself, are dumb optimists who go forward with our research and development as if the perilous regulatory environment didn’t exist. We have been designing and building industrial assembly lines for 31 years in our small business. The 2008 crash virtually destroyed our customers and forced them to cancel all capital projects, the very projects we needed to survive. We cut 94% of our workforce and managed to limp along for two years before we came to the conclusion that our market was not going to recover soon enough to save us. The other owners and I pooled what was left of our financial and fixed assets and went to work trying to find a market where we could survive and grow. Oil exploration and food production looked like good candidates as the demand tends to stay high for those commodities. The last three years of all out effort by the core group in our company have resulted in the successful launch of a new product line in farming. So successful in fact that we grew our labor force back up to 39 employees and realized that we needed to expand our facility and hire 38 more people.

With the exception of the IRS I think we have gotten the unwanted attention of just about every federal, state and local agency that exists. The gauntlet of regulations, fees and penalties have become so daunting that our management team just withdrew our permit application and decided not to pursue the expansion in our county or even state. The deck is so stacked against business today it is necessary to ask oneself if the goal of our government is to create a post industrial society out of America. Any one of 800 species listed as threatened or endangered can be used as a weapon by the environmentalist crowd to take away private property rights while the EPA stands ready to crush your efforts using the clean air and water acts. I am not saying that I favor pollution mind you but regulating all of our industry out of business and into foreign countries is a bit short sighted. I have worked overseas for many years and I know that other countries do not hold the environment in the same high regard that we do. We have a great product with real market demand and no way to get through the maze of regulations so that we can supply the demand. One public official went so far as to tell me that I should get my products built in China and import them. I pointed out that it would cost American jobs if I did and he replied that I was just a dinosaur who didn’t understand that we weren’t a country of lunch buckets anymore! I’m almost 60, I guess I should probably just stop trying to run my business but like I said earlier I’m just not that bright and I am tired of looking around and seeing all of the abandoned industrial sites in this country. The politically correct crowd has managed to shape public opinion to the point where profit is considered to be bad and welfare checks are good. People who protest the waste fraud and abuse in government are labeled “domestic terrorists” while mass murderers from Fort Hood and Boston are considered victims lashing out at their oppressor, America. I don’t know what a post industrial America looks like but I know Americans are going to need to learn to live without all the modern goodies, security and freedoms once our industrial foundation is gone.

MR OBAMA JUST DO THESE EIGHT THINGS TO DEFEAT PUTIN

 

1)      Ban their use of coal and other fossil fuels and make them exist on green energy. Remember when the President was campaigning for the office and he said “you can build a coal fired power plant but we will bankrupt you if you run it.” Remember when the Democratic House and Senate failed to pass the Presidents Cap and Trade legislation. The EPA has been implementing regulations based on the law even though it didn’t pass. Remember how we invested in all those “Solyndra” type green energy companies that failed and then promoted the failed Chevy Volt. What about the restrictions on all oil exploration on public lands and the obstruction of the Keystone Pipeline construction, do you remember those? The infuriating adherence to the man made global warming fraud that has been so completely debunked must also be part of our grand plan. Get the international community to force the Russian auto makers to live by our café mileage standards.

2)      Mandate that all Russians go on Obamacare or pay a tax. We know that it will cause their healthcare costs to skyrocket and cause doctor shortages. It would surly cause unrest in the populace as well as create distrust of their government and all those rich 1%ers. Putin would fall in popularity as fast as you have and even his loyal backers would start to leave him, which would weaken his hold on power for sure. I don’t see a down side for us here Mr. President; we could even send Sebelius over as an adviser to guarantee their failure. Make sure she takes some disks with pirated copies of the website software on them as added insurance.

3)      Prohibit all drilling on Russian public land or export of natural gas. We have first hand evidence of the damaging effects that this will have on their whole economy and it would have the secondary benefit of crippling those bothersome Western Europeans. We would have a perfect opportunity to move in on the market if you let our gas producers export it. Good for us and bad for them, what could be better?

4)      Get the UN to mandate Russian businesses work under EPA regulations. I’m sure that our environmental scientists can find enough endangered species to stop all of Russia’s exploitation of natural resources. They have lots of vodka which presents a great opportunity to force them to burn it for fuel and piss off tons of Russian people. I bet it would drive up the price of food and fuel just like it did here. They would never be able to keep warm in their climate once the EPA closes their gas and coal fired power houses.

5)      RE-define their full time work week to 30 hours to cripple their industrial production. Oh wait, we better not do that, the Russians don’t work that much now. On second thought we should just limit the Polish and Chech workers to thirty hours a week. Most of the productive work is done by them anyway.  

6)      Raise the minimum wage so that they can’t employ so many people. The number of people on government subsistence would grow putting unsustainable pressure on their economy. If it works as well there as it does here most of their young people will be unable to get jobs and drift into drugs and crime. If we help the Mexican drug cartels transport their product to Russia and throw in cheap video games and salty snacks their economy will never recover.

7)      Bring sanctions against them for human rights violations unless they agree to pay government workers for overtime. Before you know it private workers will demand equal pay and eventually form collective bargaining unions capable of helping their industry like they do for ours.

8)      Demand that the Russian Government pay Welfare benefits to illegal aliens and unwilling workers. We can even supply the illegal aliens if they don’t have enough of their own. Just think of the debt it would create and the lessons it would teach to the next generation.

The plan is proven and your administration is experienced at its implementation Mr. President. I submit that the plan will work and even though I copied the list from an internet joke.  It really isn’t that funny is it?

THE LAWLESS HARRY REID DARES TO CALL AMERICANS TERRORISTS

 

I can just hear the honorable Harry Reid circa 1775 claiming that all of the lawless traitors, soon to be founding fathers, must abide by the rule of the kings laws. Outlaws must be held accountable to the rule of law and the His Britannic Majesties sovereign right to 100% of the colonies products and profits. Where would we be today if the founders of this country had listened to the pompous British governors of the colonies when they said the very same kind of things meant to subjugate the colonists to the king’s authority? The Senators arguments today on the television are just as dumb as they would have been in 1775. The citizens who flocked to the Bundy ranch to protest the unlawful actions of the BLM did not fire a shot or detonate a bomb. No one was killed Mr. Reid! The citizens should not have been called domestic terrorists for exercising their rights and the way you used your position to say that they are terrorists diminishes the truly awful acts committed by real terrorists. When lawless, self serving men like Harry Reid are in charge of making the laws that they exempt themselves from, why should American citizens be held to a higher standard. We have a ruling class of politicians in Washington D. C. that flaunt the very laws we are told to obey, do they really believe that the country will not rise up against the tyranny and violation of our Constitutional rights? The President and the Attorney General have taken it upon themselves to decide which laws to enforce and which to ignore. Harry Reid is as dirty and dishonest as any politician in Washington. Nevada, would you please put this imbecile out of the counties misery! Harry has done so much damage to the country through his own lawless behavior and the shameless abuse of his position as Senate majority leader it is well past time for him to be impeached. I wonder what the framers of our Constitution would say today if they knew a single senator who won reelection by a few thousand votes in Nevada would have the ability to totally control the agenda of the one body of government designed to foster debate, the branch of government built to guarantee that every state could be given equal say without regard to population. What would they say about the same solitary senator calling American citizens who dared to exercise their first amendment rights, terrorists? I believe that the “one nation under god” founders of this country who dared to pledge their lives, sacred honor and fortunes to the notion that they could form a more perfect union would be dismayed by the autocratic actions of this man. I don’t know the details of the Bundy property dispute well enough to draw any absolute conclusions but I do know that a majority of the citizens of this country are fed up with the federal regulatory machine grinding out endless new restrictions on our rights as citizens. The administration better wake up and mend their ways or they will learn just how much iceberg is hiding below the tip that showed itself in the Nevada desert. Americans are slow to action but once roused to the fight, they fight to win. We all know the Constitution is the real law of the land not the endless stream of government overreach that passes for laws today in the activist judicial system. Remember Harry, the 18^th amendment was the law of the land once upon a time and the citizens changed that and now the 21^st stands as law. If misguided amendments to the Constitution can be thrown out so can your federal statutes. Every day you make the second amendment more important.

RIGHT TO WORK LAWS AND REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT

 

I had occasion recently in a meeting with a state employee, tasked with promoting economic growth, to inquire about the status of “right to work” legislation. Not surprisingly, as we were in a deep blue state, she informed me that the states labor laws were very much a sacred cow where no change was in the works. I next asked if she felt that our state government was in fact a representative government and if it is should it not represent the people. Her answer was definite and declarative, she said and “Our state government is representative and it does represent the people.” With that preamble those of you who know me or regularly read this blog can imagine how easily I was able to deconstruct her assertion. I pointed out that only 6.6% of the private workforce in the state is unionized and that only 36% of the public workforce is unionized. The percentage of the entire workforce when taken together that is unionized is only 11.3%. I asked her again, if she didn’t want to reconsider her answer under the circumstances. She seemed taken aback so I took the opportunity to offer that any government that represented 11.3% of the people to the detriment of almost 89% of the population is hardly representative. Every way that one tries to characterize a government that caters to such a small fraction of the population is repulsive to the average liberal and conjures up, in their mind, republican administrations not democratic ones. The meeting we were sitting in was taking place at her request to try to persuade our company to build our new tractor assembly plant in her state. I informed her that we would not consider doing so because of the states lack of right to work laws. She then asked me how I thought it was fair to suggest that the state outlaw collective bargaining. It is almost painful to attempt to have a substantive discussion with someone so unacquainted with the facts. It was probably pointless in retrospect to try to educate her but that didn’t stop me from trying. I explained that right to work laws do not stop or limit collective bargaining and that they just restrict unions from being able to forcibly unionize employees who wish to opt out. The laws also prohibit the unions from collecting dues from those employees that do not join the union. Her response was just as memorable as it was wrong. She said that I couldn’t be correct and that no law could force someone to join a union if they didn’t want to.

The fact is that unemployment is lower and job growth is greater in states with right to work laws. The average wage for a given job is lower in these states so companies that are trying to compete with foreign competitors are naturally inclined to locate there. The last state to pass right to work legislation is Michigan, the home of the collective bargaining movement in America. Michigan has seen the damage done to their economy by so many years of union influence and decided to change their laws. I wonder if we all need to go through the hell that Detroit and the rest of Michigan has before making the changes in our state statutes. When Wisconsin changed their laws over to “right to work” 40% of the union workforce left the unions. The inescapable conclusion was that 4 out of 10 workers were paying union dues against their will. Collective bargaining is legal in states with right to work laws but coerced union membership is not and that is why big labor fights so hard against the trend. I believe that forcing someone to join a union as a condition of employment in this day and age in America is appalling.

                     DEMOCRATS CAN SURE SPOT RACISM

 

I would like to know what the test is that Democrats use to determine if a person’s beliefs and comments are racially motivated. They seem to possess an uncanny ability to ferret out racism where most of us would miss it and dismiss other seemingly obvious racism as just thoughtful commentary. Any and all references to requiring photo voter I.D. by conservatives are immediately and broadly recognized as racist at their core while claims of voter fraud are dismissed as ridiculous. Every challenge to the President’s policies is attacked for being racially motivated without the content of the challenge even being considered. If we allow the economy and our national safety to be jeopardized by bad foreign and domestic policies because the Democrats and their lapdog press cry racism we are in real trouble as a nation. The Attorney General spoke at a conference put on by the hyper racist Al Sharpton this week and indicated that the treatment he had received by Congress was due to the color of his skin, this from the same man who has politicized the Justice Department and caused every issue there to be viewed from a racial perspective. Remember when he declared that there was no such thing as black on white racism and failed to prosecute the New Black Panthers who were caught intimidating voters in Philadelphia. Attorney General Holder seems to believe that all of us including Congress have no right to question him about his actions because he is Black. The actions of Mr. Holder including his gun running scheme called Fast and Furious and subsequent cover-up of the facts should not be above Congressional oversight because of his skin tone.  Isn’t it interesting how only liberal blacks enjoy this immunity. Congressman Allen West, Dr. Ben Carson and Herman Cain get savaged by their liberal opponents and the press while all the usual race discrimination hawks remain absolutely silent. Over the weekend Hank Aaron became the latest black celebrity to equate opposition to Obama’s agenda with racism and the TEA Party as the new KKK. Excuse me Mr. Aaron but you have no right to brand millions of Americans with that filthy disgusting label because they object to the waste of their tax dollars. I have personally attended several TEA Party events and seen proud colored, Asian, American Indian and Hispanic Americans in the crowd, there was even a significant number of self proclaimed LGBT citizens at one rally. Lloyd Marcus has a very good article on the way liberals have weaponized the charge of racism against all who oppose Obama’s progressive agenda. He details how he has been characterized as a “stupid self-loathing n*****” for not voting for Obama. The attempts by the media to silence black conservatives show how politically motivated and shallow the claims of racism are.

The simple fact is that America elected and reelected a black President and there are not enough black citizens to do that without a very large number of white Americans forgetting to be the racists that they are at heart. Figure it out; it’s not that hard to do, many Americans are opposed to the President’s agenda without caring what color he is. We oppose Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Hillary and Allen Grayson for the same reason that we oppose the President, we think that their big government socialist policies are bad for the country.

                          REBELLIONS HAVE STARTED OVER LESS

 

 

Start with the fact that all the major polls show 70% of Americans now think that the country is going in the wrong direction and follow that with the 40% approval rating of the administration. Most Americans now feel like sticking their thumb in Uncle Sam’s eye because of intrusive self important politicians and the regulatory mountain they have spawned. The country has grown weary of being told how big a soft drink we can buy and what a school lunch menu must contain on the one hand and what our health insurance must include on the other. Progressive politicians always reserve enlightened and intellectual status for themselves so that they can proclaim all of their social engineering experiments are “for our own good whether we are smart enough to know it or not.” If, you see, we were among the enlightened we would not question their judgment in the determination of what course of action represents the greater good. I have grown to love the way the truth gets uploaded onto the internet in the form of cell phone videos and well documented research that constantly puts the lie to big government spin and the liberal press who repeat it. The failed domestic agenda and ridiculous international fumbling of the current administration are evident to conservatives and liberals alike; we understand that the facts demonstrate something quite different than enlightened intellectual leadership. Americans sent a majority opposition to the House of Representatives in 2010 and 2012 in hopes of curbing the runaway spending and regulation but got instead an imperial President with the will to govern by decree who uses the slur of “do nothing Congress” as justification. Progressive politicians have loaded the courts with activist judges and put an outright criminal in charge of the Justice Department in an attempt to control Americans and press on with their agenda without interference. One U. S. attorney was so effective at blocking legal challenges to Senator Obama’s eligibility for higher office that she was rewarded with a place on the Supreme Court. I have no knowledge of the truth about the matter and I do not seek to take a position here but it is clear that due process was denied to those who brought the legal complaints.

The attention of the 24 hour news creatures was drawn earlier this week to a little known part of Nevada where the Federal Government had a rancher surrounded by overwhelming numbers of federal agents with equally overwhelming fire power. Attempts by the feds to control the news by restricting access to the site with an FAA “no fly zone” and traffic barricades failed to stop a citizen militia from descending on the scene and filming the actions of the federal officers. The authorities next tried to herd all of the protestors into what they called “first amendment areas” for their own good which of course didn’t work on a bunch of independent minded citizens who knew that the first amendment cannot be confined to an area. The government came prepared with two cover stories to justify the abuse of their authority; first was that the cattle were encroaching on the habitat of the endangered desert tortoise and the second was about unpaid grazing fees by the rancher. The truth about the government killing hundreds of the tortoises in the last few months and the government’s desire to rid the land of cattle to make room for a Chinese company’s solar project came out on the internet. This revelation was quickly followed by information about Harry Reid and his family’s financial involvement with the Chinese in the project. The State of Nevada said that the rancher was current on his taxes and fees weakening the other cover story especially once it came to light that 52 other ranches had been put out of business by the Feds in the same area.

The nation is sick and tired of Chicago style politics where the power of government agencies like the IRS is brought to bear on citizens who dare to assert their Constitutional Rights. It didn’t take long for the highly charged and very public spectacle to prompt references to Waco and Ruby Ridge. The huge display of government force confronted by angry armed citizens was the last thing that the progressives wanted in this election year. The abrupt end to the standoff appeared at hand when the Feds cited safety concerns for both their troops and the public and called off the roundup. Tensions flared again as the citizen militia followed the troops to the impound area demanding the return of the ranchers cattle.

The job and economy killing social agenda of this progressive administration is starting to boil over into confrontations. The government was, for just a moment, fearful of the people yesterday as they should have been since they were elected. Americans individually fear this imperial government but it would not take much to coalesce these scared individuals into a determined and defiant militia. Every attempt that the progressives make to control the content of the internet and edit the second amendment should be recognized for what it really is, the enslavement of “we the people.”

              FOLLOW THE MONEY IN THE NEVADA SHOWDOWN

 

The Federal Government has run 52 private ranchers out of business in the county around the Bundy ranch. The only one left is now under siege by the Federal Bureau of Land Management. The overwhelming display of force is reminiscent of Federal police actions at Waco and Ruby Ridge. The Federal authorities sought and got a warrant for their actions based on provisions in the endangered species act. It is their position that one particular species of desert tortoise is at risk because of the Bundy’s cattle grazing on the lands where the tortoise lives. If we look deeper into the issue we find that the senior Senator from Nevada and current Senate majority leader was instrumental in getting the tortoise’s habitat map redrawn to include the now disputed area and exclude the land of his largest political donor, Harvey Whittemore. News reports of the BLM euthanizing hundreds of the same tortoise specie in recent months have now been confirmed. Remember when fish and wildlife personnel were caught on film destroying tens of thousands of salmon returning to hatcheries even as they were claiming statistics showing critically low return rates. The first nation’s members only escaped Federal prosecution for filming the criminal acts because of their heritage. It seems to me that killing tortoises so that low population numbers can be used to justify this outrage is like an echo of the fish killing that justified the revocation of the commercial fishing permits and dam destruction during the Clinton administration.

I always find it instructive to look into who might profit from an action when the action itself seems pointless. Clearly the tortoise cover story has little or nothing to do with the Federal agencies war on the ranchers in Nevada so let’s step back and ask who profits from the abuse of authority. One verified report found that the water rights of all of the closed down ranches had been auctioned off to the benefit of political special interests and Reid donors in the gaming community. A report out today finds that Harry Reid’s former top lieutenant, now the director of the BLM, has erased documents off the BLM web site which said that the agency wants Bundy’s cattle off the land the family has grazed for 140 years to make way for solar power stations. Getting back to the money we find that the legal representative of the Chinese firm planning the five billion dollar solar firm is Rory Reid, son of the Senator and also the former chair of the county commission that approved the sale of 9000 acres of land to the firm well below its appraised value. Isn’t it interesting that the BLM is perfectly willing to waive tortoise habitat rules in order to accommodate a solar farm when it is so determined to enforce them against the rancher?

The whole sordid affair has now gotten national media attention and the risk of an armed confrontation is high. The BLM came in with overwhelming force and now crowds of citizen supporters have gathered to protest the tyranny. The news helicopters started to show up like circling vultures making film on the nightly news broadcasts inevitable so the Federal Government in the form of the FAA created a “no fly zone”. The Bundy ranch conflict may be the spark that ignites the confrontation so long sought by the progressives between government agents and the armed public. I hope cooler heads prevail but we need to remember that the people in charge are the same ones that sold guns to the Mexican drug cartels and explosives to Timothy McVey in ill-conceived sting operations. Tyranny is waxing in this country with the full support of the Attorney General and the liberal press. I fear that a lot of patriotic blood may be spilled before the rule of law is restored.

                               CREATORS VS CONTROLLERS

 

In the early 1980’s a handful of people, out of work thanks largely to the intentional misinterpretation of the science surrounding an owl specie, came together to form their own business and a new beginning. Within two years the five original brave souls had diminished down to two of us foolhardy enough to believe that we could, with our limited resources, survive and grow our fledgling company. The past 31 years have been almost equal parts rewarding and tumultuous as our technical expertise and drive to succeed have kept us ahead of all challengers.

It is easy to identify your competitors in the market selling custom design-built industrial production lines. In fact you see the same company names as competitive bidders over and over as the years go by. In the beginning we saw them as hated rivals and often as not patent infringers bent on using our own high tech solutions against us in the market. Time gives perspective and today I view the competition differently. Yes they pulled all of the dirty tricks and some of the offshore companies used government support to unfairly win closely contested contracts. In the end they made us stronger, they forced us to hone our skills and improve our products so that the customers selected us despite the higher capital costs. Now, after three plus decades in business we can clearly see with hindsight that our largest challenges did not come from creative competitors at all, it is crystal clear that every threat to the continued existence of the company came from those attempting to control us through regulation and theft of capital. I have chosen the word theft intentionally when referring to the constant drain on our working capital resources by government agencies through taxes, licenses fees, permit fees, import duties and penalties of every description. One builds, over time, a mental picture of countless legions of faceless bureaucrats continuously writing regulations and tax codes to stifle progress.

If you can create, by the use of your own time and capital, products with market demand and enough margin (profit) to fuel the growth of your business and then save that capital from your own personal desire for money it is infuriating to see most of it stolen though taxation. City, County, State and Federal taxing authorities take half or more of a company’s net earnings every year and use it to fuel their own growth and pay more bureaucrats to control those of us who create. In private business we start every day with the absolute requirement that we must get it right, we must build cost effective and safe products within the limits of the government red tape while withstanding constant inspections from OSHA, DEQ, Federal and State Bureaus of Labor, State and Local Fire Marshals and tax audits. The recent explosion in the size of government and the burdens of new regulations are breathtaking. One agency after another seems to pop up that holds out their hand for a fee to be used to inspect and regulate us. Ayn Rand used to say that government bureaucracies force business to buy and load the guns to be used against them. In my experience the fastest way to infuriate a government employee is to point out that our taxes pay their salaries. My most recent experience, last week, included a State employee chastising me for questioning the legality of her imposition of a $40,000 penalty against us. I pointed out that 18 years ago when the survey team of state contractors came on our property and mapped a wet lands our permission was not asked for nor were we presented with a warrant and that this constituted an illegal search under the fourth amendment. Her response was that the fourth amendment did not apply in this case. Next I proved to her that the area of fill in question was done eleven months prior to the State findings being published which declared the area to be wet lands. She contended that despite the fact that we did the work before it was possible to know that the state was going to declare it a wet land we were still at fault and subject to the penalty. We showed her that all of the work had been done in accordance with valid building permits but it failed to modify her position. She did in fact say that my questioning of her authority might result in her increasing the penalty by a further $97,000 dollars. I was instructed to sign a confession letter she would type for me which would cede to her final authority over the amount of our penalty before she determined what the amount would be. I did not accept her demand for a blank check and we are fighting the ridiculous assertions in her complaint.

I can’t count the number of times some tyrannical bureaucrat has demanded that we waive our legal rights. We don’t waive them, we don’t load the gun for them to shoot us with, and we fight them and sometimes prevail against the tyranny. I say it is a sad reality in our country today that the controllers have the upper hand and government backing in their war against the creators of all the things that the controllers want to improve their quality of life. The wet lands discovered by the trespassing state contractors did in fact exist in 1996 thanks to our neighbor’s failed septic system. The system was repaired and the area dried out before they even published their findings!

         NEITHER SLAVERY NOR INVOLUNTARY SERVITUDE….

 

John Scott of FOX News aired a show titled “Enemies of the State” in which four case studies detailed the war being waged by the Federal Government against private U. S. citizens. The show followed closely on the heels of a breaking news story about the EPA flexing its new regulatory muscle against a Wyoming man who dared to build a fully state permitted pond on his own land. The penalties brought against the property owner include $75,000 per day in fines. The new EPA regulations profess to give complete authority to the EPA over any flowing water that may have a downstream effect on navigable water. If one takes a moment to consider the ramifications of the last sentence you will quickly realize that the agency has just taken water rights authority away from the individual States who have possessed that authority since the country began. The founders of our nation set down a charter of negative rights proscribed to the Federal Government so that the Government would remain; of, for, and by the people. This charter is the document we call the Constitution and it is under assault as never before by the progressive left and their lap dog media. Citizens are increasingly forced to defend their rights in expensive court battles against a foe funded by their own tax dollars. The courts have been stacked with progressive leaning judges and the Department of Justice under Holder is nothing more than the political enforcement wing of the executive branch. If you throw in the startlingly egregious violations of civil rights by the IRS of late it paints a gloomy picture of America’s future. This country was founded on the notion of people having God given inalienable rights and that we have sole ownership over our personal property and our own work product. Sadly the one great lapse in judgment codified into our founding document by the framers was the exclusion of blacks and women from the equal rights protections. The thirteenth and fifteenth amendments corrected the issue of rights based on race and later the nineteenth amendment did the same for women. Every day’s headlines include new stories of gross violations of some citizens Constitutional rights by this administration and their Federal agency thugs. The ATF is a serial offender as is the EPA and the BLM. Today’s example is another attack by the BLM on a Nevada rancher named Cliven Bundy; the stated reason behind the raid and confiscation of the Bundy’s cattle is the protection of the endangered desert tortoise whose numbers in recent months have dwindled due to a BLM euthanizing program. That is correct the BLM has been killing hundreds of the very same species that the round-up on Saturday is claimed to be to protect. In fact like most of the environmental enforcements this one is actually about money. It seems that protecting the poor tortoises is not nearly as important to the BLM if ranchers pay the newly imposed tortoise protection grazing rights fees. So there you have it, the tortoises are too valuable to risk losing unless you kick in enough money for the Feds to look the other way. When protestors flocked to the Bundy ranch the Federal swat team roped off an area and labeled it as the “first amendment zone.” Protestors dispersed over the whole area after first posting a sign of their own inside the roped off area which read “the first amendment is not an area.”

We are forced by the most feared wing of the Federal Government to work for free in involuntary servitude every fourth day as American citizens. The IRS raids personal financial accounts and commandeers paychecks enforcing their, guilty until proven innocent, tactics while the entire burden of proof falls to the tax payer. We are forced to fund our own legal costs and our oppressors who are secure in their exact knowledge of the meager resources available to us for our own defense. Companies withhold payroll taxes from paychecks which we are allowed to try to recover any over payments from at the end of the year. We have a new burden to carry with our involuntary servitude this year, the healthcare costs of anyone the administration thinks is needy or who might possibly vote Democratic. The revolution is coming and the progressives understand that Admiral Yamamoto was right when he said that no military could defeat the armed American citizens. Is it any wonder why they attack the second amendment above all others.

            IT WAS NEVER ABOUT IMPROVING OUR HEALTHCARE

 

Every time I hear some liberal politician defend Obamacare by saying; “we had to do something about the failing healthcare system in this country and even if it’s not perfect the ACA is a good start”, I want to scream at my TV. The law was crafted to control people’s access to healthcare for political and political fund raising purposes, as the President likes to say, period. Senior citizens cost the government more than healthy young people especially because of the Medicare program. The new law is full of new restrictions for the government to use for denying care to seniors. The panels created by the ACA for the purpose of determining which treatments are cost effective are in fact the famous death panels referred to by Sarah Palin and they cannot be construed in any way as improving healthcare. The $716 billion dollars in Medicare benefit cuts for the purpose of funding the ACA cannot and will not improve healthcare for senior citizens. The Democratic lawmakers defeated every effort by Republicans to add a doctor fix to the legislation before it passed which now guarantees that fewer doctors will accept Medicare patients. The law is built to deny care to the high cost senior patient on the one hand and to also control access healthcare for everyone else on the other. Today we have just learned that when the open enrollment period for Obamacare ended, the law also shut off the opportunity for Americans to purchase private insurance unless the government grants you an exception. You see it is about controlling us by limiting our access to healthcare and granting that care to only those deemed worthy by the executive branch of the Federal Government. The law is riddled with clauses granting sole authority over healthcare access to the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Keep in mind that the HHS Department itself is not covered in the Constitution as one of the enumerated powers granted to the Federal Government. It is therefore expressly denied to the Federal Government and the only reason we are suffering the effects of this legislation today and the continuing oppression of the population courtesy of HHS is the continuous erosion of our Constitutional rights at the hands of the progressives.  

Estimates vary as to the effectiveness of the ACA at getting insurance to those Americans that formerly had no health insurance. Proponents of the law claim that about 1 out of every five people who did not have insurance before the law passed now have health insurance; the laws detractors place the number closer to 1 in 7. I submit that either of the numbers paints a very dark picture of the laws effects. The real increase in premium cost for the average American is 50 to 100% accompanied by larger deductibles and restrictions on our ability to select our own doctors. The administration chastised those of us who challenge the legality and efficacy of the law for trying to deny healthcare to our neighbors when in fact nothing in our history has ever restricted access to healthcare as efficiently as the damn law itself. The question is not why they can’t see the negative impacts of the law but why is it that they don’t care. I believe that it is because the progressives are willing to let Americans suffer the consequences as long as they gain complete control and they can finally end this attempt at government by the people.

                              SYMBOLISM OR SUBSTANCE

 

The President took a “VICYORY LAP” the other day claiming in his latest speech that the doubter’s had to admit now that they were all wrong about the affordable care act. He bragged about all the people who could now, for the first time, afford to buy health insurance. If this isn’t about the clearest case of putting symbolism over substance I don’t know what is.

Mr. President, for a person to afford health insurance they first need to have a paying job or enough savings to pay the premiums. Jacking up the health insurance premiums for most people so that the formerly uninsured can get insurance for little or no cost is not an example of those formerly uninsured people finally being able to afford insurance. They are not affording the insurance, the rest of us are. My wife and I lost our health insurance because of the ACA and now we pay double what we paid before and the deductable is higher also. Sure the plan covers all kinds of things that we did not have covered before but at our age the maternity and child care coverage is stupid. I know that I am paying for health care insurance for others that choose not to pay for it themselves so don’t fling that BS around about how “they” are finally able to afford it. The act is not affordable and does not improve healthcare quality or availability in America; saying so in a speech does not make it so! When the historians write the history of your time in office it is going to be a tale of unfulfilled promise, of a historic opportunity squandered by a self indulgent man who has led a pampered life and thought that riding around in a big jet to make speeches was being Presidential. It’s not Mr. Obama; the office of the President comes with the responsibility of being the President of all the people not just campaign donors and special interest groups. You declared that the recession to be over based on some economist’s technical model and the inflection point on some graph but 90 million people are out of the work force and your declaration of victory is based the unemployment rate dipping to 6.7%. Everyone knows the real unemployment rate is over 14% and getting worse. For all your fancy rhetoric you are still just a pretender to the throne, you have all of the trappings of the office but command none of the respect. You are not respected by our allies or enemies and you cannot even manage to make our enemies fear you even though you command the greatest military the world has ever seen. Respect is earned not elected, you would know that if you had ever been forced to earn your way in life with a real job.

The private sector innovates and spends capital to create jobs and the President Claims credit for saving the economy, please, if you can’t help us at least don’t insult us. The depth of the disaster that our economy is really experiencing is hidden from view like the wizard behind the curtain because the FED prints money and makes the Dow-Jones Industrial Average go up. The DJIA is just another symbol for the press to crow about with no substance behind it. The real value of our savings fades away because of the very real inflation that they tell us doesn’t exist. In an effort to hide the truth about inflation the press lets the government get away with calculating the number without considering food and energy prices. Unless I am mistaken we all eat and use energy and the cost of both have skyrocketed. Gasoline prices at the pump have tripled in the Presidents five years in office and yet they tell us there is no inflation. The only question left to answer about this administration is how much damage they will do to this country before we start fresh and bring back hope and opportunity for all Americans.

  

              THE FOURTH AMENDMENT DOESN’T APPLY

 

I have had the distinct displeasure of being the subject of a government wetlands violation enforcement action in the past few days. When I posted my blog that chronicled the experience of the Colorado man’s fight with the Federal Government over the Colorado State Government permitted wildlife pond he built on his private property, I did not have any inkling of the bureaucratic storm headed my way. Those familiar with these pages know that I am a shareholder in, and one of the founders of a manufacturing business. The 2008 economic collapse hit our customers very hard and resulted in the cancelation of signed contracts totaling about two years work for our company. Our story mirrors that of many businesses in this country that narrowly escaped complete failure. Our work force dropped from 107 employees down to six. We have pioneered some new products in markets outside of our traditional ones. The new markets are in orchard based agriculture and construction, with moderate success it has become necessary to add to our workforce and increase the size of our facility. A simple building permit application for a 40 ft. by 136 ft. structure resulted in the discovery, by a county planner, of a wetland designation on our property that we were not aware of. We learned that the county building department had notified the State wetlands authorities of the application, as they are required to do, and that the Division of State Lands was opening an enforcement file. It soon became obvious that a gravel parking lot installed seven years ago fell within the borders of an area designated by the State as a wetland. The fully permitted construction of the parking lot that the county planning department had required us to build seven years ago was determined to be a violation by us of State law. The State did not stop there; 18 years ago at the request of the county we built a new road access to our facility to eliminate truck traffic from entering the road in a dangerous location. The new, in 1996, road also fell partly within the boundaries of the hitherto unknown wetland. I called the State enforcement officer and she required me to meet her on the site last Thursday which meant I had to drive nine hours. The on site visit concluded with our having a choice of signing a confession, paying a fine, and funding a seventy five thousand dollar per acre mitigation or contesting her findings which might include an additional 94 thousand dollar fine and notification of the Federal Government wetlands authorities. The officer requested that we sign an affidavit admitting to the wrongdoing and grant a waiver of due process so that they could determine our fines and mitigation without the right to contest their findings. This waiver would need to be signed before the final determination of the costs would be made available to us. With only her off the record opinion of the extent of our costs we had to sign a blank check or she would be compelled to contact the Federal wetlands authorities. We chose option three, we requested that she  give us the contact information of the Federal wetlands authorities so that we could contact them ourselves or that she contact them now herself.

In our meeting with the State wetlands violation enforcement officer I asked her how it was not a violation of our fourth amendment rights guaranteeing against unlawful search and seizure when the State contractors trespassed on our land and took the samples for the wetland survey without our permission. She explained that the Fourth Amendment did not apply as this was not a case of the government “taking our private property”. I attempted not to sound belligerent or condescending when I reminded her that taking was a Fifth Amendment issue and that I had referred to an unlawful search and seizure of private property under the Fourth Amendment. She said that she didn’t think that the Fourth Amendment applied and that her findings were based on a valid State Statute. She further offered that the county building department officials who granted the last building permit had no culpability as the knowledge of and compliance with State regulation is the sole responsibility of the property owner.

We did not sign her affidavit confessing to the violation and in fact have since discovered that most of the “violation” occurred 11 months prior to the State issuing the public notice of their wetlands survey. Once the 1996 road work is recognized as being in place prior to the wetland designation and therefore grandfathered as legal, the remaining 2007 violation is less than 50 cubic yards of fill. The State statute requires that the fill exceed the 50 cubic yards to be a violation. We do not know the final resolution of this issue with the State as yet or the position the Federal Government will take but it is distressing to be put in the position of being guilty until proven innocent. The distress is even more pronounced given that the local county officials whose poor work failed to identify the wetlands existence bear no responsibility.  

              BLUE STATE AND A RED BUSINESS SPELLS DISASTER

 

Oregon has become a deep blue State largely because of the influence of liberal voters in Portland and Eugene. For thirty two years my partners and I have run our industrial machinery business in Corvallis. The disadvantages of doing business in the progressively liberal political environment have become too much for the business to bear. The last six years, since the idiots in Washington D. C. crashed the economy, have been the most difficult in the history of the company. Employment fell from 107 workers to a low water mark of six people. None of the owners have drawn a paycheck for six years. Three years ago it became obvious that the anti-business slant of the Federal Government was not going to allow our traditional business to recover. We, as capitalists, pooled our time and resources and developed two new products aimed at the agricultural machinery market. The hard work and investment have paid off and farmers all over the country are buying our tractors. The success has allowed us to hire back 38 employees and we are in the process of trying to add on to our facility to increase production. The new facility will require an additional 38 employees bringing the total to less than our 2008 employment but still far better than six. Throughout the entire downturn and our struggle to recover none of the unemployed owners of the business filed to draw unemployment compensation, we requested no Federal, State or local assistance. The new level of business activity did get the States attention, not our State of Oregon mind you, but Texas, Wisconsin and South Carolina. These States actively started courting us to build our new tractor assembly plant in their jurisdiction. I approached the economic development people within the State of Oregon and asked if there were job creation incentives available from the State. What we received was a deep blue response. The social engineers in Oregon’s State government offered some tax deferral and possible loan guarantees if we would prove that our new jobs would pay 150% of the prevailing wage. I ask what the prevailing wage is and was told that they defined it as the local union scale wage rate. I explained to the Oregon economic development commission in writing that we compete against all of the foreign tractor manufacturers and that our wages are set by the free market supply and demand not by government legislation, further that we did not see a future for our business to grow in Oregon. To their credit I have been asked to testify before the commission to clarify my position.

Moving on to the local government issues facing our business, we seemed to be welcome at the county development level and started a modest expansion on our existing site to fill demand until our new facility is complete. The county required us to show a signed contract for the new building along with all of the drawings and engineering before we could apply for the building permit. The risk to us given this procedure is that if the permit is denied we will have a very expensive building with no place to erect it. Everything moved along until the permit application was submitted. A series of hurdles have been placed in front of us for which the only solution proposed by the county is further study of the feasibility of our project including delays and more cost in the form of additional permit fees. The problems were not presented to us until after the county had copies of the contract showing we had purchased the new building. I offered my opinion to the head of county planning that they had caused this mess and that it should not be left up to me to pay for cleaning it up. His response to me was that we could do this the easy way or the hard way but that in the end I would be required to comply with the counties demands. I have a meeting today with the county planner, county commissioner, and county economic development staff to inform them that if they do not find a solution to the problem, they have created, that does not include my check book our board of directors is going to cancel the project and move ahead in another jurisdiction. We have the ability to vote with our feet and we are going to do so.

At the end of the day we must go to the market with an economically viable product for our customers. It is apparent from our interaction with the State and local governments that this is not possible where the liberal politicians consider our business to be their piggy bank. The migration of businesses and jobs from blue States to red ones may very well include our company starting later today.