NEW OR RECENT POST

The Grand  &  the Visitor’s Tax:

Closing out 2022, the City of Paris has not completed the restoration promised for the Grand Theater over a decade ago; click the links below for verification; to see what the Paris Texas Chamber was warning about years ago . City council members, past and present, have wasted and are wasting a half-million dollars of the taxpayer’s money, creating a decade-plus long money-pit.

In the meantime,  since 2008, city leaders who have made the worst possible decisions for Paris, have downplayed and cussed the Paris Texas Chamber of Commerce for confronting  wrong decisions and actions, which have been and are detrimental to the equal economic progress of local families who want to improve their lives economically.

While the city demands perfection of others in meeting their demands, it ignores its own obligations and responsibilities. Simply because it cannot meet or carry-out its own actions and promises, it should not force others to waste decades of time and money in their efforts to restore their downtown properties: Think of the First National Bank and the Rodgers-Wade buildings.

Our local organizations, who claim to do community and economic development, refuse to consider any approach that would require a transparent examination of fairness – or their own bias. And really dislike others doing so . . .

To even try and excuse the result of this Grand Theater project should require one to examine their own bias and knowledge – and sanity.

 

If interested, here are a few links (and the years they were posted on our website):

aint_it_grand (from 2010)

 

at_the_grand (from 2012)

 

grand_things__paris_texas (from 2013)

For over three years, The Paris News (and it’s parent company) repeatedly asked subscribers to urge their elected U. S. officials to vote “yes” to subsidize newspapers.

You’ve read that correctly.

Two (2) bills that later died in Congress called for government funding of newspapers:  The Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, was buried in the 2,135-page tax-and-spending bill (in Section 138516).  It gave a refundable tax credit based on a newspaper’s total wages; thereby, subsidizing the ownership’s profit.

The credit could have been used for tax reduction of $25,000 for up to 1,500 employees the first year; decreasing to $15,000 per employee after the first year. All in all, allowing $1.67 billion in tax credit over ten years.

The Paris News claimed it would help small local newspapers survive.

Gannett, one of the nation’s largest newspaper chains (employing over 4,000 journalists at USA Today, and such local papers as The Arizona Republic and Detroit Free Press), would gain as much as $127.5 million over five years, called the effort “a good shot in the arm.”

The chain never specified how the money would be used, but it’s very likely that this “small” newspaper would find a way, as would other major news outlets.

In 2016, Forbes Magazine reported that 15 Billionaires owned most of the nation’s news media companies.

When a leftist haven, such as Harvard, warns that American media is no longer a traditional national information highway, self-regulated to prevent government intervention over the news and to ensure a free press, we can no longer claim ignorance of what has and is going on: We have to include stupidity.

The Supreme Court ruled in the 1930’s that whatever government subsidizes it can control (by regulation). Today, our government is subsidizing – controlling – everything.

The real enclaves of socialist thought are in our schools, colleges, legislative halls, courts, and the national news media.

They’ve done a wonderful job of selling citizens on the glories of human misery and enslavement. Around 42% of us are willing to try it (or are too ignorant to know or too stupid to understand what’s going on); and the socialism – a push for party dictatorship or whatever it is – has divided our nation.

We have been seduced, piously begged to meet in the middle, to compromise on issues – to completely forget principles – and “come together for the common good.”

By setting aside principles of proven value, in order to accept issues of dubious value, what have we accepted? When good is mixed with evil, what remains – after all the good is gone? 

We’ve met in the middle too many years too many times on too many issues; otherwise, how could we be over $30 Trillion in debt?

As with the “national” media, the Paris News folks have, like parrots, mindlessly regurgitated every socialist issue they’ve been sent by the Associated Press, USA Today, Reuters, and the left-wing Texas Tribune; then, they’ve shown their own confusion on the “Voices” editorial page. They’ve – it – has echoed the babbling calls of the emotionally disturbed and mentally deranged – about “extremists, domestic terrorists, white racists, Uncle Toms, and other deplorables” – in general, those who believe in Constitutional government – while complaining about a loss of readership.

In recent national elections, Paris and Lamar County voted for candidates who promised to vote for limiting government’s reach by an almost 2 to 1 margin.

Yet, the Paris News, like the nation’s media, wants to blame those who value a respect for the principles of the Ten Commandments and the Bill of Rights – the first Ten Amendments to the Constitution – as the reason for its demise.

And feels entitled to demand those whom it belittles and insults to give it money?

It seems they are unable to make a logical connection, but want to change the nation’s Constitution. They never, however, have a replacement for it.

Does the Paris News know that government “Diversity Officers” – controllers of the spoken and written word – are now placed in federal agencies and in the military?

Does the Paris News know that “Diversity Offices” are already in corporations not part of the Big Business-Big Government socialists cronyism, to make sure they do not run afoul of speech and thought requirements of the federal government?

Sound familiar? It should. Russian KGB Officers with the same responsibilities were in every USSR military, government, industrial and business entity.

Today’s wake-up call is the media’s socialist bias: It’s very close to being our homegrown equivalent of Pravda or China’s Xinhua News Agency.

Yet, while claiming to serve the community, it repeatedly condemns a majority of the community voters.

The Paris Texas Chamber received an email from a Razorback fan, in which he was giving kudos to the Gold Hogvillain of Rodgers, Arkansas for the following, which should be a required preface on every piece of local, state, or national “pending” legislation:

No cause, ever, in the history of all mankind, has produced more cold-blooded tyrants, more slaughtered innocents, and more orphans than socialism with power. It surpassed, exponentially, all other systems of production in turning out the dead. The bodies are all around us. And here is the problem: No one talks about them. No one honors them. No one does penance for them. No one has committed suicide for having been an apologist for those who did this to them. No one pays for them. No one is hunted down to account for them. It is exactly what Solzhenitsyn foresaw in The Gulag Archipelago: “No, no one would have to answer. No one would be looked into.”

  Until that happens, there is no “after socialism.“  

All local government is ideology

At its core, ideology is identity . . .

Too often, local governments – those we elect – end up listening to and carrying out  recommendations of staff bureaucrats, which raises some interesting observations:

For decades we’ve been “educated” to believe that local elections are not partisan, so no party affiliations are disclosed, as party labels might sway voters.

So the potential for local government officials to sway elections in their party’s favor seems obvious.

Special interest groups that put government interests ahead of taxpayers have long held sway over local elections. They want them to be officially declared nonpartisan – because party labels will sway voters.

Any faux outrage over partisanship entering local government elections is hilariously hypocritical.

Some of the indignation comes from those who routinely accuse others of being partisan because of their policy beliefs, their ideology. But they insist that their positions are not partisan.

Partisanship may most often be associated with party identity but, at its very core, it’s ideology

We all have an ideology – a collection of beliefs and ideas – but some people criticize someone with whom they disagree as an “ideologue ’… just as they apply a negative connotation to ‘partisan’ while extolling their own partisan ideology by claiming that they ‘just follow the science/experts.’

But cooperation between elected officials belonging to different parties is more likely to assure more transparency and better government.

The absence of party labels confuses voters; a voter who must choose from among a group of candidates whom he or she knows nothing about will have no meaningful basis in casting a ballot.

Today, local government is political.

Affable, cheerful, sincere, political-partisans that we elect are given the authority and responsibility to spend our dollars wisely, to make decisions that benefit each citizen equally, and to assure that our schools are teaching the values of limited government and equal economic opportunity in a society that requires personal accountability.

Unfortunately, those we elected have failed us for decades.We have allowed their political identity to hide behind a ‘nonpartisan’ facade.

They’ve listen to and allowed the “good government” professionals – the city managers, school administrators and the political opportunistic – those who benefit personally and professionally – to lead the process of setting the policies and making key decisions they want . . .

The reason we elect so many of the partisans is because they’re nice people; they mean well. Some just fail to understand, however, that the first part of their job is to ride herd on those whom we pay to carry out the policies to meet goals that benefit all of the community.

Too many of these seats are conceded to those who are part of the crowd who believe government is good and there should be more of it. It’s why Texas has the second-highest local debt nationally, and the 4th highest property tax rates in the nation.

Governmental staffs and the professional educationalists want these problems ignored.

When its for “the children” and “community” or “economic” development, there is no end that these partisans see to the use of taxpayer’s money.

When most of us think of government, we think of civil government with its various laws and controls.But local government is, like all government, ideology.

But in the most basic of terms, there are essentially two kinds of government – internal and external. Internal government or self-government is the most important and always shapes the nature of external government.

Self-government comes from the heart and the conscience, one’s character, motives, affections, and convictions of life. Self-government affects everything in a person’s life – the way one relates to his fellowman – his speech – his aspirations – his conduct – his hopes – his future.

Every sphere of civil local government is a reflection of this internal sphere.

Shouldn’t we ask ourselves why government keeps expanding?

In fact, the more self-government the people possess, the less external forms of government are actually needed.

No government can be good – or just – unless its citizenry and rulers have learned to govern themselves.

Paris Texas seems to fear what kind of town it needs to be . . .

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