Tag: government

blackmail and bribery

Government habitually works on a basis of personal relationships and a system of reciprocal favors. Basically, blackmail and bribery support an orderly process, widely known “as a good thing” of compromises and consensus, “a reasonable agreement on which both sides can agree . . .” Then, they add exemptions.

Even city councils pass ordinances with no exemptions, then allow local governmental units to excel at the granting of exemptions.

Any policy, regulation or law riddled with exemptions is designed to be ignored or broken.

Its underlying purposes are (1) to reward friends or those who are in a position to do favors, and (b) to demonstrate their power to control and/or deny opportunities for those they see as incapable of doing them harm.

Exemptions are arranged in secret meetings with insiders; developers, industries and other large or inside endeavors. Each meeting is generally conducted in an alternation of blackmail and bribery. Taxpayers are stuck with the bill for each exchange . . .

Earlier this year, the Paris Texas Chamber of Commerce vented about how the weeds and wild grasses of 2021 and 2022 were still standing all over Paris, and the new crops of 2023 were doing well, despite ordinances that existed against such things, even how high they could grow . . .

We’re not happy to report that three years of crops are still standing in several places. Or, that as the crops were growing, our local city government grew an assistant city manager and a deputy city manager to help the city manager to grow more government at a compounded 3.5-percent annual clip; which in ten years adds an estimated 40-percent increase to the taxpayer’s cost for bad government.

Ask yourself: What did Paris need most, weeds cut or a larger city administration?

Now it is what it is, and excuses and misinformation and blaming “the other guy” doesn’t change the changeable process. But government, of all kinds, must have exemptions from its own rules, polices, and public utterances or the exchange of blackmail and bribery won’t work.

 

Government is fertilized by thinking that government is good.

Government claims its purpose is to make our lives better.

Government’s purpose is to grow.

Or there wouldn’t be exemptions.

The very last thing every government wants is a way for the ordinary citizens to improve their lives economically – Oh, right!

We do or once did have the Constitutional guarantee of equal economic opportunity; whereby, each of us had an opportunity to improve our lives economically. But as voters, we allowed those we elected to ignore the Constitution by telling us that only government can make our lives better.

Its the Big Lie.

So, Blackmail and bribery

The only way you can rise above poverty is by acquiring property (assets). But our national banking policy is “cash-flow loans only” – and has been since the early 1980s, when our government outlawed asset-based lending.

When the acquisition of private property (ownership of assets) is no longer available, you’re limited on how you can economically improve your life.

Crooks in big financial institutions and the national swamp, using lobbyists, paid for the exchange from a Private Enterprise System to State Capitalism, the partnership between Big Business and Big Government. One minor reason for outlawing asset-based lending was to provide a way to launder the $150-billion a day cash-flow of illegal drug money, which the government now uses as an excuse to keep tabs on individuals doing $600-and-up transactions in a bank. It also provides those in Nutland, D. C., who keep tabs of such things, a secret list of millions and millions of people, all categorized by income, location, and occupation.

We’ve allowed the con-artists, snake oil salesmen, magic bean promoters, shysters, liars and advocates of Big Government to remove equal economic opportunity from our Constitution, which also effectively removed equal treatment under the law.

Of course, that same bunch of no-goodniks removed many of the Constitution’s constructs and mandates, including the three independent branches of government; one-man, one vote: limiting central government power; each state a separate nation; borders must be protected; privacy in our homes and papers; crimes punished; etc.

They claim our Constitution (a system of lawful principles to live by), is just parchment; a piece of paper where words were written down as an experiment . . .

 

Today, self-responsibility and accountability are just words –

Like the Second Amendment, principles are basically gone: Today, IF you try to defend yourself against a gang of armed thugs, you are the domestic terrorist.

We’re told:

  • to close down businesses and to wear a mask
  • you, as a parent, have no right to determine how or what you want your children taught in school
  • “equal outcomes” are more important than Equal Justice
  • support of Constitutional constructs cannot be posted on social media
  • illegals are legal
  • you MUST choose movies, music, and books and your friends based on equity, inclusion, and diversity
  • be ‘nice’ to individuals you wouldn’t go with to a dogfight or allow in your home

As they campaign for more government, totalitarians are dividing the nation, as seen in a corrupt U. S. Department of Justice carrying out blackmail and bribery, while claiming additional exemptions from principles and values.

That we’re also told to allow, just as we’re being told a lot of other things that rate high in stupidity and falsehoods.

                                                                                        return to      Paris Texas Chamber of Commerce

 

              Affordable Housing                             and                               Fish or Cut Bait                                   or                                   The Community’s Condition

The Nation’s Largest Employer has over 22-Million employees –

Elected and appointed local, district, regional, state and national office-holders, can, IF all 22-million wish, express concepts and ideas and take actions that support and approve and help create laws on issues and things that they hate or love.

The following is the result of word games. For instance, civil servants are not the same as government employees, an example being that military employees are not considered as government employees, which distorts – (no, lies about) – federal employment.

(grey)  Local government employees
(yellow)  State government employees
(Blue)  Federal government employees
(The blip up in hiring at the Federal level every 10 years is for the United States census)

But do these officials have the right – moral or legal – to do or say things that do NOT reflect the same promises and commitments they expressed to the voters who elected them and pay for the positions they occupy?

IF they do or are doing so, shouldn’t voters be able to remove them from office? They lied to get the position they hold; thereby, violating their Oath of Office.

A baseline fact is that they were not employed to act as social directors, guiding the community citizens thru the throes of progressive socialism, which they see as progress thru the fog of an unique version of history or just an inability to see cause and effect.

Voters have allowed every level of government to create too many platforms to serve government’s cause . . . 

Today, according to the U. S. Department of Labor, manufacturing employment is down to about 16-million workers. This is a loss of over 2-million jobs in this category since 2000, while government jobs increased over 6-million in the same time period – making it the nation’s largest employer. 

But in addition to the city, state and national government employees there are millions of other elected and appointed office holders  Seldom ever considered, examples are such as those employed in special taxing districts (the Visitor’s group and the PEDC, Lamar County Water District, etc., and a multitude of other tax districts); plus, staffs of numerous government-funded research centers, foundations, think tanks, and various other organizations; plus millions of school and college administrators, teachers and instructors.

Its likely that most employees in the list do not view themselves as office holders but, basically (as with any government office or office holder), they occupy offices that work to inform, educate, direct, promote, publicize, and affect and / or effect public issues, events, and/or a public cause or purpose.

Examining recent decades of voting records, it seems most Paris and Lamar County citizens will vote for or appoint any idiot who claims to love America and wave the flag while promising a “free” government handout or to “make our children safe.” But the same voters will remove their hats (if wearing one) and place a hand over their heart when that flag comes by and, when the national anthem is sung, they’ll join in (at least, on the words they can remember).

Whether the voters are yellow-dog Democrats with standards that haven’t made the change to those of their new “woke” party or an old time Republican who still treasures his or her “I Like Ike” button, they’re not stupid. They just have a real low threshold for electing or appointing self-promoters who cannot or will not walk their talk.

Or, maybe, we only hear what we want to hear and read what we want to read and see what we want to see.

That, however, only proves that we’re semi-members of the human race, which also seems to be a worldwide tendency, except in those totalitarian countries where there is no choice on what to see or read or hear.

Neither Paris, nor Lamar County, is an enclave of socialist thought, regardless of certain characteristics we sometimes demonstrate or read in the paper.

That’s where the fun and the cussing starts. 

But there’s nothing funny about the growing socialist mess Paris and the nation are in––

 

                     return to  Paris Texas Chamber of Commerce

 

 

This is one of the Big Myths: That each of us be deeply and forever in debt to the state or the sponsoring organization carrying out the process. They dogmatically believe that each of us owes these secular creators everlasting thanks and offerings – and they scold everyone who refuses to accept such an open-ended claim.

Nearly all schemes for uplifting society fail because the originators make the error of thinking that society is a manufactured thing, which can be altered by changing the process of how things are done. Most people see social order, economic growth, education and prosperity as being unobtainable unless engineered into existence – usually, by the government or the organization sponsoring a scheme for progress. This is one of the Big Myths.

 These believers demand that each of us be deeply and forever in debt to the state or the sponsoring organization carrying out the process. They dogmatically believe that each of us owes these secular creators everlasting thanks and offerings – and they scold everyone who refuses to accept such an open-ended claim. 

This is the Big Myth: To complain about paying taxes – and, worse, to actively oppose or reject the manufactured process – is selfishly resisting to give what is owed by each of us puny beneficiaries for the state’s or secular creator’s beneficence, magnificence, and grace. 

Another Big Myth is that government carries out the will of the people as long as its top officials are chosen by majority rule. This niave faith in majoritarian democracy is a mistake because there is, in fact, no “will of the people.” 

If, as individuals, we each have a sentient mind with our own hopes, fears, dreams and preferences, how do we become “the people” – as politicians like to refer to us? 

“The people” is not a sentient creature with a mind and hopes, fears, dreams and preferences. Naturally, individuals can come together to make a group, but this does not transform the group of people into a giant individual equivalent to each of the flesh-and-blood men, women, and children who make up or comprise the group. It doesn’t mean that two or more individuals cannot agree upon an objective and goals to pursue together. 

For centuries, individuals have pooled their resources to create communities, build roads and highways, and organized ways to defend ourselves (or even to attack others). But all this is a form of democratic decision-making, a “best means” way for registering the preferences of each individual in a way that results in an acceptable collective decision. 

But this reality does not mean that the results of the democratic decision-making process reveal that “the people” have a will that is in any way similar to the will that is possessed and exercised by each individual. All that even the best collective decision-making process does is to discover a compromise outcome that is acceptable to each member of the group. 

Supposing that the results of majority rule express the will of this collective creature – creates the false and dangerous impression that if any individual objects to a majority-rule outcome, this individual is attempting to elevate his paltry self over a will not only as real as his own but also greater because it is that of many individuals. But, again, “the People” is not a being with a mind or a will. It follows that no method of collective decision-making, not even the most ideal form of democracy, reveals the People’s will.

That which is unreal cannot be revealed. 

And the most pernicious of all Big Myths is that the economy and society – or, at least, any economy that is productive, and any society that is good – are the conscious creation of the state or the collective control that leads to enslavement and human misery. 

Society is not a manufactured process that can be controlled and managed. 

It is a living entity, comprised of sentient individuals each with his or her own mind and preferences and fears and hopes. And for too long, the reality is that Paris has treated citizens as its resource.

The Paris leadership should remember that community growth will come from Paris being a resource for its citizens.

                   return to Paris Texas Chamber of Commerce