Tag: Paris Texas Chamber

In the world-famous Red River Valley, Paris Texas is an economic sinkhole – and that’s being kind. Thousands of historically-obsolete houses and other buildings – unpainted clapboard, weathered, streaked with age; termite-havens with patchy, wild grasses and a variety of weed-greenery outlining vehicles parked in front yards, and not in clearly defined parking areas, in block after block of narrow, grubby chuck-holed strips of streets – are plain clues to its status as a failed community.

In its core, Paris looks older than its age, rickety and ugly, with a few amenities of polish and glitter.

Another fact is that those in Paris who try and speak the truth are condemned as “mean people”.

Its dangerous to dissent on what the leadership claims – or decides to do or not do. There is a dark heart that can be detected beneath the denials and the claims of progress.

Consider our friends at the visitors and convention council or whatever it or they may call it, who say, publicly, and with a straight face, “Welcome to Paris, a city graced by dozens of beautiful old homes and unique public architecture, creating a charming backdrop for a thriving economy and a contemporary lifestyle.”

Considering the handicaps they work under (some of their own making), they do a very good job of filling visitor spaces for events they sponsor, if not for Paris. They likely see their job as selling Paris, regardless of what they’re saying:

  • Do they actually believe that a few dozens of “beautiful old homes” negate the thousands of ugly old homes?
  • What town is bragging about not having any “unique public architecture”?
  • Three decades of in-city declining population is a “thriving economy”?
  • a “contemporary lifestyle” in a small city that will not consider pursuing a modern public WiFi or MiFi system to benefit all citizens, but will give some real estate developer millions in cash and incentives to build instant slums?

The Paris Texas Chamber is merely using the visitor’s group to point out that, as a community, we can only fool ourselves for so long before being forced to face reality.

Industry will not save us; neither will more subsidized retailers, apartments or residential subdivisions, or outside consultants long on promises but short on results.

A few amenities of polish and glitter only draws attention to the unpainted and falling down.

Community leadership created an economic sinkhole that eats whatever make-up we slap on it. Only by accepting reality can Paris change the future.

We’re burying diamonds in expensive, but cancerous, trash.

Return to the Paris Texas Chamber of Commerce

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.“