Author: parischamber

 

 

Change is an inconstant constant thing.

There are older neighborhoods where weeds and wild grasses brag that they’ve had a wonderful time for years living a seasonal life without fear of being mowed. Some are 20-years old. Some even older. The termites, who can trace their family histories back for over a hundred generations, are living high on the hog in most neighborhoods. Businesses are opening and businesses are closing, but vacant buildings are winning. Littering is inconsiderate, but constant, as so many people are really good at it. Littering, and taking a great deal of pride in knowing how not to drive are tied at second place as Paris’ greatest pleasure. In a really close third place is dodging chuckholes in city streets. But far away in first place is the trouble with transparency or the lack of it.

Its difficult to keep up with all that’s going on.

Transparency is the one thing in Paris that is not inconstant.

Transparency, one week a year – sunshine week – is written and spoke about in reverend tones and the media brags about reporting all that’s fit to print or report. The media uses its own “what is fit filter” to shine the spotlight of transparency on “what is fit” –

Its this “what is fit” that cause people to grow old before their time in Paris, or want to move somewhere else in time – or at least, slap their Grandmaw.  But the Texas Tribune is all over the state and is really thriving among all the locals, and where it steps intelligence dies.

And you cannot move out of Texas, because all the people moving in have the highways blocked with their versions of what is fair and progressive in the crime-filled streets from the cities and states they’re fleeing. The only thing not left behind is the stupidity.  Most are bringing that commodity with them . . .

Transparency in Paris . . . .

. . . . which sounds like a song (but sounds better then it is) leaves a lot to desire.

We’re told the City of Paris is promoting progress for the city’s welfare by subsidizing every snake oil proposal that comes along, including the giving of land and money, building streets, rental properties, installing utilities, and joining hands in private-public partnerships with unknown private entities, all singing Kumbaya, backed up by a fiddle and 111 git’tars — one of which sounds like it might be in tune —

To some of us less-enlightened, who are forced into giving our public tax dollars to private entities, think this iawfully unethical, if not semi-illegal —  even under democratic socialism.

Even if it is legal, its still awful: Despite years of co-mingling funds, which is a locally-accepted practice (even if the IRS frowns on it). No public-collecting governmental unit should be giving public funds to private entities, regardless of what some judge has ruled. Until the Texas Economic Development Act of 1981, municipalities were limited to giving “like or kind” site locations and improvements – but not allowed to offer various incentives, including cash grants, to any private endeavor.

Just about everything that Paris does is so worded that those who are supposed to be the watchdogs against government corruption think it is a great idea.

The Paris Economic Development Corporation (PEDC) has never met a promoter it could refuse to hand out incentives and cash money, and brag about what a great deal it is for the taxpayers who are footing the bill. But you never hear the downside of things. For instance, the PEDC claimed that it was responsible for getting 200 of 280 jobs to Paris, and those jobs are good for a billion dollars over a ten year period. But, somehow, taxpayers were never told that during the time when the PEDC claimed it was getting those jobs, Campbell Soup announced the elimination of 300 jobs; and the loss of jobs at Sara Lee, Turner Industries, etc. Nor, was there ever a hint of what the lost of those jobs cost Paris – or even the dollar amount from years of giving incentives and tax abatement to the Campbell Company.

Its all meat – and no potatoes … and that ain’t right … like green tomatoes –

Other industrial plants have closed, changed hands, and businesses come and businesses go. But there’s never any info on the economic loss associated with a business or industry closing.

Its all Happy Talk. Sorta’ like the general, hopeful, talk about how the City of Paris is growing, when it’s the Lamar County area that’s doing it.

Repeating ourselves, again (because it can’t be said too often):

              the trouble with transparency is the lack of it.

 

 

                                                                                                            return to    Paris Texas Chamber

Typically, a master planned community (mpc). . .

 . . . . is on a large plot of land where a developer offers an array of amenities, including golf courses, restaurants, shops, miles of hiking trails, parks, community events, and more;  just about everything you need within a community. The Forestbrook Estates – a City of Paris local partner – claims to be a MPC.

Whether or not it is, as claimed, a mpc, the smell of the selling sizzle covers up the fact that local taxpayers, who have paid the bills for years, are now on the hook for an estimated $20 million to cover the developer’s cost.

Why?

 

There’s no guarantee it will pay . . . .

. . . and $20 million is over one-third of the current city budget. IF its such a good deal, why do the developers need the Paris taxpayers to guarantee them a profit?

The major draw of a master planned community is that you can walk from your home to the gym, shoot a round of golf, grab a drink at the clubhouse, play at the park, take your kids to school, all available for residents and are kept up-to-date by funds collected by a homeowners association (HOA). 

IF there’s no HOA, will taxpayers – who seems to be stuck paying for everything else – be stuck with maintaining the streets, hauling off trash, repairing water and sewer leaks, and other such day-by-day expenses? And surprising us all by getting rid of litter?

The reported first phase of the nearly 200-acres of the Forestbrook development will consist of 87 of the 471 residential lots. This doesn’t seem to leave much room for playgrounds, schools, gyms, golf, clubhouses, parks, and all the promised related retail and commercial development; plus, the rights-of-way for utilities and streets, drainage, etc. 

The Paris Texas Chamber doesn’t know if a HOA is in the plans, nor do we have the least idea about what the proposed development will actually offer or who are the developers. We do know, however, that the endeavor itself is not as important as the centuries-old concept for selling democratic socialism – a private-public partnership, which is an insult to to the American Idea of self-responsibility and the need for accountability of one’s personal actions.

 

Private-public partnerships are not how you limit government.

IF the City of Paris cannot or will not guarantee every citizens’ debt, why is it guaranteeing the debt of a selected few based on Happy Talk promises and the only collateral being the taxpayer’s guarantee?

Where does the city, and government in general, get the right to pick and choose economic winners?

Its so much the key question that we don’t even understand those individuals who believe that robbing Pete to pay Paul is a good idea – unless they’re Paul.

Do banks even make development loans anymore? If not, why not? IF they can’t make community development loans, why are they needed?  (Community development is economic development, and consumer loans only get people deeper into personal debt.) So, what purpose do banks now fill – other than paying a little bit of interest on CDs in order to loan the  money at a higher interest rate to some government-guaranteed “too big to fail” Big Business? 

Isn’t government basically guaranteeing the success of banks?

Why are taxpayers forced to guarantee some developer’s debt?

 

Forced compliance is destroying the 13th Amendment of the Constitution . . . .

. . . . and the bad decisions keep coming: As the Paris Chamber warned years ago, thanks to idiots in the Texas legislature, anything can now be economic development. 

The City of Paris has extended its partnership with Palma Holdings, LLC; subsidizing “a residential 5 in 5 Housing Infill Development program” that the city calls economic development. Basically, its low-income single-family instant-slum housing offered at an estimated $200,000 sales price. Five or more have been built with no reported sales, but ten more were recently approved for construction.

Unfortunately, a $200,000 home is not affordable for most low-income families, but as taxpayer subsidized Section 8 housing, it can become a long-time profit center for a private developer. 

It all makes some wonder about sanity.     

 

 

The only excuse for the existence of government is the defense of individual rights.

(And before the howls of government lapdogs begin, it is clear that the defense of such rights include protecting and defending individual rights against the cronies and criminals inside and outside our state and national borders.)

The only legal or justifiable reason for government, is the defense of individual rights.

 

The intent of any government should be to serve and protect individuals from those who would do harm to others. The only power that government has is that which it takes from or that is given to it by individuals. It can perform a fair job of protecting everyone, but it cannot guarantee happiness to any one, and should always be prohibited from promising happiness or a special anything to a favored few.

There is nothing that government can do for you that it does not take from you. So, eventually, if its power is unchecked, it will become your turn in the barrel.

When we surrender our rights to government we become a ward of the state. As such, we cheapen the human right to be identified as an individual.

As wards of the state, we become a group of victims needing the guidance of a tool we’ve invented – A construct, based on hopes, wishes, and yearnings, that somehow becomes our superior in intelligence and natural rights and does so with greater values and principles?

The very idea that this invented and constructed thing – a thing without intelligence or an empathy for emotional considerations or a moral standard for reasonable behavior – will voluntarily and freely act in in the best interest of mankind is an unbelievable argument, a stinking mess of illogic from sick minds.

Once given birth, government grows to benefit government. To achieve this end, it divides us into groups of victims which, it claims, must be protected from other groups (that it identifies as more privileged).  But . . .

. . . . privileged is created by special allowances in laws for special reasons to exclusively create advantages or questionable rights for a certain class of people, professions, corporations, etc., that are not allowed for the average individual – as shown in tax laws,  regulations, restrictions, and permissions.

Government over-rides (corrupts) individual rights by inventing “rights”, which it gives to private and public limited liability partnerships, trusts, foundations, corporations, monopolies, and conglomerates. And for “Public Service” in government. All such  entities are non-human; created by humans. They are without empathy or understanding, and unable to comprehend the hidden agenda of either good or evil in the intent of a law that allow them to exist – or of the eventual results.

Yet, in every right or special construct in the paper formation of some law or regulation that benefits a non-human entity, that is not the same as it is for an individual, there is always a way to fleece the individual.

Every government program has a way to fleece the public.

 

Today, under State Capitalism, the partnership between Big Business and Big Government, there is no accountability for, and no limiting of, government’s action.

We, as individuals, create the government we have . . . and we are responsibility for it.

It’s why we have a vote.

The very idea that there are limitations on the  federal government’s executive / administrative branch is all but heresy in today’s political and judicial environments. No limitations exist.

The Supreme Court, the judicial branch, has lost respect from years of ignoring and violating 
Constitutional limitations and the role of the states.  And non-principled rhetorical criticism 
by law firms and law school professors ignore centuries of established common law and limitation 
on government to skillfully argue for destructive decrees. Appointed Justices, more politician 
than supporters of Constitutional mandates and constructs, have supported, and are supporting 
democratic socialism.  And there are no limitations.

And no limitations exist on Congress, the legislative branch. None.

Our founders, who had first-hand experience and hard-earned knowledge knew, as did Ronald Reagan, that “government is not your friend.”

When created, government becomes an entity with a primary objective to survive – to grow, and it feeds on the lies that another project or program need a solution that only a “benevolent government” can provide.

Government creates more government.

Knowing the danger in the nature of all its existing forms, the founders limited the actions of their new government to improving “the general welfare.” The Constitution allows Congress to collect taxes to pay for the general welfare of the United States, but not for the people or the individual states.

As James Madison observed, “If Congress can employ money indefinitely to the general welfare, and are the sole and supreme judges of the general welfare, they may take the care of religion into their Own hands; they may apoint teachers in every state, county, and parish, and pay them out of their public treasury; they may take into their own hands the education of children, establishing in like manner schools throughout the Union; they may assume the provision for the poor; they may undertake the regulation of all roads other than post-roads; in short, every thing, from the highest object of state legislation down to the most minute object of police, would be thrown under the power of Congress; for every object I have mentioned would admit of the application of money, and might be called, if Congress pleased, provisions for the general welfare.”

The Constitution never granted our government power to act in malevolent ways against the natural rights of the individual.

But today, however, government has obviously seized the raw power to do these things – and more – that Madison feared: Taking, annexing, the bounty from one segment of the population to give the illegal funds and / or benefits to another segment, and further dividing the nation by its hostile attitude to individual freedom.

This is plundering in its most basic form (to steal or remove something precious from something, in a way that does not consider moral laws or is more severe than it needs to be).

What is more dangerous, however, is that plundering had its beginning, and is continually permitted, by emotionally-disturbed or mentally-deranged Supreme Court Justices appointed to office by emotionally-disturbed, mentally-deranged, gutless members of the U. S. Senate, who have the power to advise and consent on any action by the executive branch.

When government declares that a particular segment or group of individuals need help, it is saying that the group or its members are either too emotionally, physically, or intellectually incompetent to act in their own interest, Through its copious flow of ‘crocodile tears’ government uses contradictory and often illegal arguments to sell an excuse that our “society” (or some group) is responsible for the circumstances that it has created. It sets groups against group to enhance a perception created by government that they are seen and treated as a subspecies of humanity, and can only survive through the benevolence of government.

Government uses the negative perception it creates to set groups against groups.

Congress has subverted the very foundations of the nature of limited government as established by nation’s founders, The consequences from its action deserves the condemnation of all Americans. Not to do so is to surrender our birthright.

Congress routinely delegates their powers to the executive and judicial branches, so we now live in a nation where literally everything involves a regulation of the federal government.

Never was such power conveyed to Congress as is now given to or assumed by them. On the contrary, it was always clearly that the old Congress was limited to the enumerated powers, and that was explained in general terms.

The founders realized that an all-powerful government – one without unchecked or limited power – is a refuge for scoundrels and plunders, who view the population as its resource and its servants. In creating a new nation, they tried to create a government with only one excuse: The defense of individual rights and the rights of the respective states (whose citizens were risking their own lives).

Government should never be the playground for plunders and crooks of every stripe.

Every action by government should be restricted to protecting every individual from enemies inside and outside our national borders. It should never interfere in our personal lives. Its sole job is to protect them –

There is no other legal or justifiable reason for government.

When the lovers of government and those in government claim that it is there to do what individuals cannot do, they lie. Its why those who know that government’s power must be limited are described as “deplorable” and “garbage” and “terrorists” by the supporters of government.

There is no word or phase too loathsome for the socialists and other totalitarian lovers of the world to use in the fight for conquest over individuality and / or control and management of resources. Truth is the enemy; facts cannot be considered.

There is nothing that government can do for you – or anyone – that it does not take from you.

We, as individuals, create the government we have . . . And deserve.

It is why we have a vote; to hold government accountable.

Every action by government should be restricted to protecting every individual from enemies inside and outside our national borders.

Government should never be the playground for plunders and crooks of every stripe.

But it is . . .

                                              return to     Paris Texas Chamber of Commerce

A reprint & Special Thanks to The Streetscene Newsletter

Links:

Affordable Housing

Regulations, Restrictions and Fees

Plans, Snowflakes and Compromise

The nation’s largest employer . . .