GOVERNMENT UNION DRONES WILL FIGHT AGAINST YOUR INTERESTS TO THE END

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Posted on 1st February 2013 by Administrator in Economy |Politics |Social Issues

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Only corrupt politician hacks that slither through the State House in Harrisburg could possibly oppose the privitazation of the State monopoly on liquor sales in Pennsylvania. Governor Corbett is again taking on the government union drones that are ruining the finances of the state. Fast Eddie Rendell did nothing about this outrage in his 8 years as governor, because he and his Democratic cronies are bought and sold by the unions. Pennsylvanians are stuck with a Prohibition era system of State owned and operated liquor stores. You cannot buy alcohol anywhere but State stores and Beer distributors. It’s a monopoly that drives prices sky high, reduces selection, increases the inconvenience for every person in PA, and pays for the gold plated pensions of 3,500 retail union government drones. This antiquated, inefficient, expensive joke of a system is kept in place by corrupt politicians to benefit 3,500 drones at the expense of the 12.7 million Pennsylvanians who are plagued by high prices and limited selection.

Corbett’s plan would end the monopoly, allow alcohol to be sold at grocery stores, Costco, and anyone willing to pay for a new license. Prices would plummet, as free market competition would work its magic. The selection and convenience for customers would increase dramatically. And it would raise $1 billion of revenue for the schools. And here is why I despise government unions. The school systems across the state are being destroyed by the pension payouts to the union teacher gold plated funds put into place and not funded by prior administrations. These same government union workers will fight Corbett’s plan to privatize the State stores, even though the money raised will go towards the school budgets. Theses unions don’t care about students or taxpayers. They only care about getting as much out of the taxpayer as they can and funneling money to politicians who protect their interests.

Polls show there is overwhelming support for privatizing the state stores. So what will the politicians do? They will ignore the will of the people and vote against Corbett’s plan. Remember TARP? Over 90% of Americans were against it. What did the politicians do?

 

Reactions mixed to liquor store privatization plan

By Stacy Wescoe

There was mixed reaction today to Gov. Tom Corbett’s announcement that he would pursue the privatization of the state’s liquor stores.

“The governor presented a compelling, comprehensive plan today, as have other lawmakers who support sweeping changes to the manner in which alcohol is sold and distributed in the commonwealth,” Pennsylvania Chamber President Gene Barr said. “It is long past time for the state to get out of the liquor business; it is not a core function of state government. We believe a responsible private system would better improve the buying experience for customers by promoting competitive pricing and increased convenience, while continuing to generate revenue for the commonwealth.”

The proposal would provide opportunities for numerous outlets – from “big box” stores to convenience stores – to sell alcohol, while giving new options to restaurants, hotels and taverns, said Barr.

He said Pennsylvania Chamber members support privatization efforts, and stressed that Pennsylvania residents also overwhelmingly support changes to the current system beyond privatization of liquor sales.

The proposal also received backing from the Citizen’s Alliance of Pennsylvania.

“Our ‘state store’ system is a relic of the Prohibition. The current system is wasteful, inefficient, and inconvenient. Its time (if it ever had one) is long gone,” said Alliance Executive Director Leo Knepper.

Meanwhile another group, the Keystone Research Center encouraged Gov. Corbett to abandon the proposal to dramatically increase the number of retail outlets for beer, wine and spirits in the state.

“The proposal could cost the commonwealth revenue that won’t be invested in education, health services and a stronger economy,” said Stephen Herzenberg, Ph.D., an economist and executive director of KRC. “It will also radically increase alcohol accessibility and the resulting social costs.”

The union representing Pennsylvania liquor store workers, the United Food and Commercial Workers, opposes the plan as well, saying it would eliminate the jobs of 3,500 members of UFCW Local 1776 and Local 23. It called for the modernization of the stores versus privatization.

A CANADIAN SOLUTION TO THE GUN PROBLEM

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Posted on 30th December 2012 by Administrator in Economy |Politics |Social Issues

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Here’s a Canadian with a biting sense of humor. She reveals the left wingers for what they are.

Ban Schools, Not Guns

I blame the Burning Schoolhouse.

Canadians are perversely proud that our  most popular backyard firework is unavailable in the United States. More  like a science-fair volcano than a proper pyrotechnic, the homely Burning  Schoolhouse merely spews a two-foot flame that lasts half a minute if  you’re lucky.

But every May  Two-Four for generations, Canadian kids have cherished those measly 30  sacred seconds, indulging in socially sanctioned fantasies of third-degree  carnage.

You won’t hear this from Michael Moore, but modern school shootings are a  Canadian invention, too, and I don’t just mean 1989’s “Montreal  Massacre.” Despite the absence of a so-called “gun culture,” we spawned the  first Adam Lanzas back in the  mid-1970s, getting a twenty-plus-year head start on Columbine.

“It’s obvious that the way to end school shootings is to  forget about the ‘shootings’ part and focus on the first word instead.”

Don’t be fooled by those low body counts circa 1975. Look at the number of  wounded, too. In both instances—unlike most American school shootings in  the 1970s—those Canucks were would-be spree killers, targeting more than  just a hated teacher or classmate.

I’m only kidding about blaming a tacky once-a-year firecracker display, but  in the wake of Sandy Hook, would-be reformers are deadly serious. From the gun  grabbers to those who want to lock up loonies, they’re all foolishly looking for  a solution through the wrong end of the telescope.

It’s obvious that the way to end school shootings is to forget about the “shootings” part and focus on the first word instead.

We need to abolish schools.

A survey of popular culture indicates that attitudes about compulsory public  education have drastically devolved. Children have always hated school, but the  Our Gang kids only “played hooky” from class, they didn’t shoot it up. The “juvies” in Blackboard Jungle (1955) just smash up some classical-music  records and manhandle a teacher (who probably liked it).

The sea change dates back to—you’ll never guess—1968, when Lindsay Anderson’s  film …if climaxed with an armed student rebellion at an English  public school.

A multitude of Tom Brown-turns-John Brown fiction pieces followed. “School’s  been blown to pieces,” Alice Cooper growled triumphantly in 1972. Then came Massacre at Central High (1976), Rock ‘n’ Roll High School  (1979), and the ingenious satire Heathers (1988). School in countless American films is  depicted as a  conformist concentration camp with a marching band.

Today, two multi-million-dollar entertainment franchises, Twilight  and The Hunger Games, revolve around teens fighting each other to the  death—but God forbid gun-phobic, video-game-banning suburban moms question their own reading habits, right?

No, I’m not blaming pop culture, either. Movies and music reflect the  zeitgeist as much as they influence it; attempting to guess exactly when they do which is as easy as guessing which wire to snip  when defusing a bomb.

Some trace our troubles to the outlawing of school prayer. I’ll grant those  well-meaning folks points for getting their dates right, since those  Supreme Court decisions came down in 1963 and 1964.

But prayer wasn’t the only thing swept aside, as Latin-literate older readers  don’t need me to tell them.

 

Here’s  a former substitute teacher:

I then made it my business, when finding an older teacher, to ask if  education had been “dumbed  down.”…Algebra teachers informed me that every year they were forced to  eliminate problem sets that previous years had mastered. English teachers who  once taught Shakespeare and Dante were now reduced to leading seniors through  Orwell’s Animal Farm….

We could do much worse than Animal Farm. The trouble is, most  teachers imply that the  pigs on two legs are right-wingers. Not coincidentally, former  Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers (see “1968,” above) is now  revered as a pedagogical guru even  by the president.

Camille  Paglia is aghast that her college freshmen don’t know who Adam and Eve and  Moses are, and haven’t even the sense to pretend to be embarrassed about it.

So the conclusion is clear:

The easier we made school for kids, turning classrooms into  laboratories of compulsory leftist  social engineering, the more kids hated it—some to the point of  homicide.

Abolishing the public-education system has no downside. A  few million obese, incompetent, corrupt, vicious teachers and parasitical  bureaucrats will finally be fired.

The conservative establishment’s dream of abolishing the Department of  Education will come true.

Homeschooling  is superior anyhow. Mothers will be able to do it because the taxes skimmed  off the top of their salaries will no longer be needed to prop up said  department.

Real and imaginary social problems such as chickenhawk  teachers, anti-gay “bullying,” pro-gay sex education, the drugging  of “hyperactive” boys, busing, high-school football concussions, and girls  dressing like prostitutes for the prom will vanish.

Decades hence, our offspring will listen in disbelief when we tell them we  used to pay billions of dollars to warehouse children in “gun-free zones” overseen by morons; that 21st-century kids were groomed for 19th-century jobs  and came out functionally illiterate but experts nonetheless on the subjects of  Kwanzaa, “safe” sex, and something called global warming.

Then every Gen-X grandparent will pat the shocked little rug rat on the head  and say reassuringly, “Our  love is God; let’s go get a slushie.”

http://takimag.com/article/ban_schools_not_guns_kathy_shaidle/print#ixzz2GYej0x7z

COULD IT HAPPEN HERE?

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Posted on 15th March 2012 by Administrator in Economy |Politics |Social Issues

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Below is a passage from Doug Casey’s Street Fighting Man article from a few years ago. He describes how America could go down the same path as Nazi Germany. The video below describes how the Germans were led down that path. Do you see any similarities?

Emigrants and Sociopaths

Americans no longer appear to be a special breed. Of course absolutely every nation likes to think it’s a special, better breed – the Chinese, the Japanese, the British, the French, the Germans, absolutely everybody. It’s a stupid but universal conceit, like the one putting God (presumably Yahweh) on their side during a war.

I used to fancy Americans actually could be a cut above simply because they’re all the progeny of emigrants, and there are at least three reasons emigrants tend to be the “best” kind of people — at least from the point of view of someone who values freedom. First, emigrants tend to be more enterprising than their neighbors at home, willing to leave everything they have to pursue opportunity. Second, they tend to be harder working, since they know they’ll get nothing they don’t earn from strangers in a new land. Third, they tend to be anti-political, since political elites and conditions are usually what caused them to emigrate in the first place. Whether these things are because of a genetic predisposition or whether it’s simply a cultural artifact within some families and groups, or both, I think it’s a fact.

From the founding of the country, America has always had a strong emigrant ethos, and that’s one of the things that has made it different and better. But all things degrade and revert to the mean with the passage of time. The country is now a fugitive from entropy.

Another reason for taking a pessimistic view is that — notwithstanding the point I made above — there’s no reason not to believe there’s a fairly uniform distribution of sociopaths across time and space, including in America today. All countries, in all eras, have them — but in good times, they stay under their rocks. Who would have guessed that the Germans of the last century, who had much more than their share of writers, composers, philosophers, scientists, plain middle-class shopkeepers, and a well-educated, orderly population would have bred the Nazis? The Turks in the ’20s, the Russians in the ’20s and ’30s, the Chinese in the ’50s and ’60s, the Serbs in the ’90s, the Rwandans It would be easy to recount dozens of recent examples of perfectly ordinary countries that have gone bonkers. The fact is that your neighbor or your mailman, who pets his dog, hugs his kids, and plays softball on the weekends, might exhibit a much less appealing, indeed an appalling, side when social conditions change.

You’ve, of course, heard of the Milgram experiment, wherein researchers asked members of the public to torture subjects with electric shocks, all the way up to what they believed were lethal levels. Most of them did it, after being assured that it was “alright” and “necessary” by men in authority.

The problem arises when a society becomes highly politicized. In normal times, a sociopath stays under the radar. Perhaps he’ll commit a common crime when he thinks he can get away with it, but social mores keep him reined in. However, once the government changes its emphasis from protecting citizens from force to initiating it with laws and taxes, those social mores break down. Peer pressure and moral opprobrium, the forces that keep a healthy society orderly and together, are replaced by regulation enforced by cops funded by taxes. And sociopaths start coming out of the woodwork and are drawn to the State, where they can get licensed and paid to do what they’ve always wanted to do. It’s very simple, really. There are two ways people can relate to each other: voluntarily or coercively. The government is pure coercion, and sociopaths are drawn to its power and force.

After a certain point, a critical mass is reached. The sociopaths who are naturally drawn to government start to dominate it. They reset the social mores of the country they control. And it’s game over. I suspect we’re approaching that point.



WHY DON’T THEY TAX THE AIR WE BREATHE

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Posted on 2nd June 2011 by Administrator in Economy |Politics |Social Issues

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The population of Philadelphia was 2.1 million in 1950 when the total US population was 151 million. In 2010 the population of the US was 308 million, a 104% increase. In 2010 the population of Phila had fallen by 29% to 1.5 million. The story below is an example of why this has happened. Liberal tax and spend union Democrats have had complete control of Phila since 1950. The city is controlled by unions. The politicians are corrupt. Their solution to every issue is to increase taxes.

The Phila school district is an absolute clusterfuck. Over 50% of the kids drop out. The other 50% graduate high school with a 3rd grade education. This is after spending $12,000 per student per year. The teachers suck. The school administrators are corrupt and incompetent. The schools resemble prisons. In other words, it’s a huge success story.

The school district is $100 million short because the state of PA is bankrupt and told the city to fuck off. The brilliant Mayor Nutter put on his thinking hat and came up with another property tax increase, a FREAKING SODA TAX, and higher parking meter charges. The liberal social do-gooders immediately cheered at the soda tax as they declared it would make Philadelphians healthier. Have they seen the people of West Philadelphia?

 

Do these douchebags realize the idiocy of their position? Nutter wants to raise more tax revenue. The do-gooders want people to drink less soda. Something doesn’t connect.

Nutter raised property taxes by 10% last year and 16% the year before, in the midst of a depression. This guy should run for president. The criminal politicians who run Phila never propose spending cuts, decreases in the golden union benefits, outsourcing functions like trash pickup, firing worthless school administrators, firing lousy teachers, closing terrible schools, or anything resembling running the city like a business.

This city is in a downward spiral. The 2020 Census will show a population of 1.3 million as 200,000 more people come to their senses and get out of this shithole. I bet the residents of the 30 Blocks of Squalor are happy their SNAP cards will help them buy their five more expensive 2 Liter bottles of Mountain Dew.

New property, soda taxes to fund cash-strapped schools?

June 01, 2011|By Troy Graham, INQUIRER STAFF WRITER

With time running out to raise about $100 million for city schools, Mayor Nutter proposed in private meetings Wednesday to raise property taxes, resurrect the long-dead soda tax and increase prices at parking meters and kiosks.

Council members, who largely were opposed to raising taxes last week when School District officials first asked for $75 to $110 million in city money, were just as cool Wednesday to Nutter’s specific plans.

A property tax increase, several members noted, would come on the heels of last year’s 10 percent increase – and that hike, while unpopular, was a compromise after they shot down Nutter’s previous attempt to create a soda tax.

Nutter acknowledged that he had “a lot of work to do” to convince at least nine Council members to pass whatever combination the administration ultimately endorsed – and just two weeks until the scheduled summer recess.

“We have a very limited time frame here,” the mayor said. “But there is enough time to accomplish these very important goals . . . What it requires is leadership, political will and the committment to get things done.”

Nutter and School District officials, facing a $629 million budget gap, have described terrible consequences if the money isn’t raised.

District officials have said they would be forced to make cuts to full-day kindergarten, transportation services, alternative schools and to increase class sizes.

Some critics on Council have questioned whether the district has adequately trimmed the fat from its budget, or eliminated programs less effective than full-day kindergarten.

They have described the district’s targeting of such essential services for cuts as a kind of blackmail.

“They’re fearmongering,” said Councilman Bill Green. “Until they stop engaging in that kind of behavior, I see no reason to be supportive of their efforts.”

The district’s cash request also comes on the heels of questions about its financial stewardship – city Controller Alan Butkovitz called for more oversight and auditing power Wednesday after finding what he called “serious financial errors” in the district’s books.

“It’s pretty dire here. This is a very tough situation,” said Minority Leader Brian O’Neill. “I don’t think anybody has any confidence in the School District’s budgeting and finance, their accountability.”

Nutter met in the morning with about a dozen education advocates, presenting his plans and asking for their support. He then met with Council Leadership in President Anna C. Verna’s office.

Abrogation of Responsibility in the Social Contract

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Posted on 4th December 2010 by Reverse Engineer in Economy

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The recent expiration of the Extended Bennies for the Unemployed and the various arguments revolving around the FSA and the Social Welfare State that exists in most Western Industrialized countries has led me to muse on the problem of impoverization of societies. Many societies since the advent of Agriculture have had the problem of impoverished people, though it has become more acute here since the Age of Oil.

In the early years after the development of Agriculture, the problem of Impoverishment was resolved through Slavery. If you had no property and no power in the society, if you were to continue Living you became the Property of someone else, Beholden to that individual for your daily sustenance. Your existence was at his behest, you had no rights, you existed only to serve the Master. If you weren’t productive, if you were disobedient, the Master could punish you or take your life, with no legal repercussions for this.

However, even Slave Owners had some moral responsibility toward treating their slaves decently. Really nasty ones tended to have more problems with Slave Revolts, and being the slaves lived relatively nearby, they might occasionally cause you some problems if you were a particularly nasty Master. Even the Bible suggests that Masters should treat their Slaves well, just as they should be good stewards of their Cattle and their Lands. There is still some RESPONSIBILITY in the system.

With the advent of Industrialization and the Capitalist system, responsibility for the workers and for the Environment was completely lost. The monetary system provided a degree of separation between the Owners and the Slaves. No longer was the well being of any individual connected to that of another, even through direct ownership of a human life. The impoverishment of a given individual could be blamed on that individual, rather than his mistreatment at the hands of his owner.

As the Ag paradigm gave way to the Industrial paradigm in the 18th and 19th centuries, the inevitable impoverishment of the lowest classes of society led to many social problems. Beggars, Workhouses, an explosion of Prisons for Debtors as well as Criminals, which really were all essentially one in the same thing. This defined the world Charles Dickens lived in when he wrote novels like a Tale of Two Cities and Oliver Twist. It was an extremely unstable society, and for the entire period from the mid 1700s at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution with the advent of the Coal fired Steam Engine right through to the Second World War in the Age of Oil, Industrial Society was constantly engaged in one sort of war or another. The French and American Revolutions, the Napoleonic Wars in Europe, the Civil War here in the FSofA, these were all part and parcel of the same running battle, which ebbed and flowed in tandem with the monetary cycle of Capitalism as it progressed forward through the Industrial Age. Through all that time period, NO solution was ever found to the problem of the Have Nots that both the Ag paradigm and the Industrial paradigm create as a result of manufactured scarcity stemming from the Ownership of Property and the Means of Production. The simple fact of the matter is that as long as you have a very large society and allow some folks to become very Rich, this necessitates other folks becoming very Poor. It’s a Zero Sum Game for any society, but at least in the Ag Society there was still some responsibility taken for the Slaves by the Slave Owners. In Industrial Society, NO RESPONSIBILITY was taken, at least not until Otto Von Bismark developed the incipient Welfare State, and until the Bureau of Indian Affairs created a similar dependent population amongst the surviving aboriginals of the NA continent.

Through the latter stages of the Age of Oil, in most of the Industrialized world there has been enough surplus to buy off the impoverished inside each of these societies, but it has of course come by further impoverishing the rest of the world through this time period. Now as resources become too thin worldwide, its no longer possible to insulate the local impoverished in many industrialized countries, or more accurately it becomes less possible to do that by the day. The cut off of extended UE benefits here in the FSofA is just the beginning of the eviceration of the social welfare state, but with that also comes the evisceration of many of the control and protection mechanisms the State has evolved to maintain control over the population. In Camden, where the crime rate is already massive, the Police force has been cut in half as austerity budgets are put in place. In CA, there is a standing order by the SCOTUS to reduce the Prison population, way overcrowded and too costly to expand anymore. Where will said prisoners go? Out onto the streets of the now vastly expanded world of Charles Dickens.

Similarly, budget cuts in Education will further reduce the ability to warehouse children and discipline them into the kind of drones necessary to run an industrialized society. As anyone who worked in the field of Public Education knows, any semblance of “learning” was lost in these schools long ago and the last 20 years has been spent bloating the administrative end of education in the effort to keep some discipline in the environment. It has of course failed miserably even in that effort.

The end result here of the failure to accept responsibility for the society as a whole by the beneficiaries of that society is the dissolution of the social contract, and the collapse of this sort of society. The result of that is the legitimacy of the State as governor of the society will ultimately fail. The last gasp of such a society is of course is consolidation of the Haves in the society around a military dictatorship such as Rome had in its dying days. Dependent as this military infrastructure is now on the lifeblood of Oil, as the war to control it consumes the resource, this military structure will itself inevitably collapse, although it could take quite some time for that to play itself out. Before it does, the collapse of the social structure which was supported by the thermodynamic energy of oil will result in increasing civil disturbance requiring deployment of soldiers for internal control as well as fighting the external battles for control of the oil resource. Eventually this will over stretch the control ability on both ends, and then this form of organization will itself collapse. Its doubtful that this collapse takes as long as it did for the Roman Empire, which was spread over a few centuries. This one more or less will follow the Peak Oil curve, and likely will play itself out over a single century at the most.

So we return now to the question of what happens in the aftermath of this collapse? The Social Welfare State funded as it was by the Thermodynamic Energy of Oil is clearly in its Death Throes. The society cannot function with millions of people living in abject poverty with no means of making a living “honestly”, nor any support from the State apparatus. The idea that Private Enterprise will spring up magically once the support mechanisms are withdrawn is to say the least, utterly ludicrous. Rather what you will get are individual areas sorting themselves out locally to develop some sort of sustainable local economy. I’m not talking “sustainable” in the long term, just sustainable meaning they don’t devolve into Mad Max and Cannibalism in the near term. The larger the local population is relative to locally available resources of food and water, the more likely that area is to devolve into Mad Max. Read that: The Big Shitties are TOAST.

As noted in my recent thread on the topic of Expats and Escape, its still possible if you have some money and a willingness to relocate to get out of the way of the worst of the near term dislocations. However, generally speaking for most people with typical Job Skills, you won’t be able to find a job in the new location you go to, so you better have enough currently functioning money to set yourself up independently in the neighborhood, until that neighborhood develops its own local economy. I do agree that for the most part Oz and NZ are better places for White Anglos than the Lower 48 of the FSofA. Please migrate there rather than Alaska. LOL.

Wherever you do migrate however, do not expect a free ride through the Zero Point, no place will remain untouched as we wean ourselves off the Jones of our addiction to Oil. All communities that have been connected to the Global Banking system and the Industrialized economy will suffer extreme dislocation. However, with luck in the smaller communities off the beaten path, it won’t be the kind of Mad Max the Big Shitties experience. That will be a Nightmare beyond all the most horrific legends of the Dark Ages. Vlad the Impaler will return, and with him will come the armies of Werewolves, Zombies and Vampires.

Coming Soon to a Theatre Near You.

RE