If California Really Wanted To Be Business Friendly, They'd Start Walking Their Talk..

Not long ago, I learned that one of the largest corporations in the state where I'm at had received the Governor of Texas for a special meeting. The TX governor came to try to recruit them to move their corporate headquarters. Many people in the area were quite angry at this whole episode, but then again, these same folks that live in the area and in a primarily blue state probably also voted for the Democrats in office.

Most of these Democrats are somewhat anti-business, even those that claim not to be. They just have never walked their talk. They say they love the business community, but what they really love is taxing the crap out of it for their pet projects and social services. Back when I was running my company, we decided we weren't going to manufacture our equipment here the state, instead, we contracted with a company in Arizona to do that for us. We also decided to move our training to Nevada, as it didn't make sense to have employees in the state, as it is so unfriendly to businesses.

There was a rather troubling piece in the Ventura County Star Newspaper on March 19, 2013 titled; "Business Burden May Ease - Bill Passing Assembly Cuts Registration Time," by Timm Herdt which stated that "Responding to a backlog that has forced startup businesses to wait 65-days to receive the necessary paperwork to open their doors in California the Assembly approved without dissent a measure to appropriate $2 million to pay for overtime and temporary help for the secretary of state."

Can you imagine waiting over two months just to sign up your company and register it to do business, to get your paperwork in order for sales tax, incorporate, or to hire employees? That's crazy, especially when our state needs jobs, and we are paying huge amounts of money in unemployment benefits. If people can't start new businesses and they can't hire anyone or they can even register to get the thing going then how on earth are they supposed to help us reduce the unemployment rate?

Suffice to say, not only is California driving away jobs they aren't allowing any new jobs to come forth at any reasonable rate, even as the economy starts to return to normal. In that particular article I cited above, one could ask why is the paperwork is so difficult that they have to hire people and pay them overtime or even higher temporary help to help shuffle that paperwork through faster. If the paperwork is so simple that a temporary employee can do it, then why can't the current employees get it done faster without having to train brand-new temporary employees to do it?

In essence what I'm saying is why are things so complicated - why is there so much bureaucracy and red tape? Why is it so difficult for a business to get started - a business which will pay taxes and provide for the tax base and reduce the unemployment lines? It makes no sense whatsoever. For those in Sacramento, or even those in Washington DC to claim they are business friendly, well, all I can say is they should walk their talk, reduce regulations, and let's get America back to work, and get down to business.

We have a problem in America, and I guarantee you it's not the business community, it's the bureaucracy. We must hold those in office accountable, and at the next possible election we need to dismiss every single Democrat politician at every single level of government. I just don't see any other way, there's just one story of insanity after another, and they still can't figure out what's going on, even when it's right in front of their face, on the front of the newspapers they read every day, written by their best friends in are left-leaning media. Please consider all this and think on it.

The Democrats Have Been Involved In Academia At All Levels for Far Too Long..

Interestingly enough, I would say most of the people in academia are Democrats. If you look at the teachers unions, they are mostly filled with Democrats, and most of the teachers vote a Democrat ticket. Most of the college professors are downright socialists at least in their philosophical views, and I'm sure you've heard stories where a conservative student who didn't keep their mouths shut was sure to get poor grades. That's the rule, not the exception from what I understand, and from all the people I've talked to. Okay so let's talk about this more than shall we?

Right now we have a Democrat administration, and the former Czar of Education in the Obama Administration came from Chicago, and that shouldn't surprise anyone. When presidents come into power they generally have some legislative and government bureaucratic experience, and they hire people they know and bring them on board because they feel they can trust them. Unfortunately, the Chicago schools haven't exactly batted a 1000, they've had all sorts of problems over the years. Chicago was one of the cities that had terrible test scores for reading, writing, and arithmetic. For years they graduated high school students that couldn't read or write.

After all of the talk and work on education, after all the Teleprompter speeches we listened to, and all the promises we were told, I ask; how are our schools doing? The reality is that more teachers have been laid off during the Obama Administration than during all the years of GW Bush. There was a rather telling piece in the Wall Street Journal on March 22, 2013 titled; "Chicago Moves to Close 11% of Elementary Schools in Fall," by Stephanie Banchero and Caroline Porter. The total number of schools to close is 53 elementary schools.

In other words, nothing is changing Chicago it's only gotten worse. You remember the teacher strike? Apparently not only did the Obama Administration and his former Chief of Staff not keep their word on education to all of us, they didn't even keep their word to their own teacher's union voters in the Chicagoland schools. Suffice it to say, it looks as if the Democrats who have been involved in running academia at all levels for far too long have run it into the ground. Today, we have students graduating from the universities with degrees in hand, and they can't find a job.

The fallout rate currently on student loans, those loans that are past 90 days do is now 35%. That's a scary thought considering there are now $1 trillion worth of outstanding student loans. The problem has gotten so far out of hand, but instead our Teleprompter in Chief is running around the country speaking from a podium trying to take away America's guns. Of course, one might reason that if none of these kids are going to graduate high school and thus be unable to read or write in Chicago, then we certainly don't want them on the street with guns do we, one might say?

Might I suggest the problem we have in the country is with socialism, and how dare the people of academia try to tell us how to run this country when they can't even run the educational system without bankrupting their states, the teacher's pension funds, the school systems, our universities, the student loan program, and our country. Remember President Obama hired many Czars from academia to help him run our country. A fine job they've done indeed. Yes, I'm hard on the Democrats, but they've done it to themselves, now it's time they admit their failures, and it's time to let the Republicans run things. Please consider all this and think on it.

If There Is a Devil and If That Devilish Person Lived In the US, He Wouldn't Be a Republican

 

I found it quite interesting that when President Bush was in office that many of the left-leaning neoliberals called him the devil, and even likened him to Adolf Hitler. That was totally uncalled for, and not only was it mean-spirited and demeaning to the Oval Office, it was a far cry from the truth. There were not very many similarities between the leader of Nazi Germany back in the day, and President Bush (G.W. Bush) but the Democrats tried to make the correlation, and they used all sorts of fancy words, and hacked journalism pieces to try to make it seem as if there were similarities.

Make no mistake that Adolf Hitler was a socialist, and road into power under the Labor Party. He was a nationalist socialist who made himself king. The world will never be the same because of that man, and as I watch the changes here the United States I hate to think that as we lean closer towards socialism we see similar strategies, and many more similarities than we ever would have thought to attribute to G.W. Bush. Suffice it to say, if there is actually a devil, and I'm not one to fall for any of that religious superstitious nonsense, but if there was, and if that person lived in the United States, he could only be a Democrat Socialist.

When we look at other socialist leaders, we also see similarities. Consider if you will the former Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and the current leader of Argentina. The Socialists work very hard to control the message, to curtail the media, to hijack the economy, and to promise the people they are one with them, all the while they destroy the economy, currency, and borrow up a storm. When the country can no longer survive without filing for bankruptcy, they renege on their loan payments, and continue to promise more to the working man, to the poor, but in the end, it's always the same. Whether the country has anything left to go to war at that point is another story.

Still, by that time they've already gone to war with half of their population, and as they run out of other people's money to spend, promising the poor more and more as they take from those who have garnered wealth, it is the middle class which is destroyed, and all the gains of the country plundered. I can think of no greater evil onto human societies and civilizations than that of socialism. So let's set the record straight a free-market thinker such as G.W. Bush is about the furthest thing from a tyrannical socialist dictator, but on the other hand a Democrat Socialist busy hijacking industry, and spending money they don't have, promising people things they cannot deliver, and taking away their rights as they move their ball forward towards their own agenda is nothing short of evil Machiavellian character.

An Ageing Killjoy?..

Just one of the things the Frenchman in me has never been able to understand about the English is how such a pragmatic, no-nonsense people, masters of understatement, and so mistrustful of words beyond two syllables in length could have so systematically incorporated into their daily vocabulary such a vast array of hyperbolic adjectives (frequently reinforced by ' absolutely' or 'utterly') to qualify what barely emerges from the mundane.

Last week, for example, I had lunch with a friend in an English pub. The waitress, a breezy, not unattractive young lady brought us the menu, came back five minutes later, took down our order, and then departed after gratifying us with a sweet smile and a mystifying 'Wonderful!' If, by this, she wished to compliment us on our choice of fare, I have yet to understand what she could have found so extraordinarily remarkable about steak and kidney pie, peas and chips.

And only last week I was having a friendly chat with my next-door neighbour who'd recently taken the wife and kids on a Sunday outing to Blackpool, of all places. As we'd had rain at home for most of that day, I asked him if they'd had a spot there, too.

'Not at all,' he replied, 'the weather was absolutely superb, and the view from the Tower was simply awesome.'

Now, don't get me wrong. I've got nothing against Blackpool, really. What with that huge amusement park and all those hotdog stands, it's fantas... sorry, it's all right for the kids. But I wouldn't be seen dead there myself. And having been up the real thing in Paris, I've no desire to contemplate the sights from the top of its Tower. What's more, however far you stretch your imagination, the sky couldn't have been as cloud-free as he was trying to make out. After all, the north-west coast of England is not the Côte d'Azur. But, without really knowing why, what I took most exception to was not so much his choice of 'absolutely superb' to qualify what could only have been a fitful sunny presence, but his use of 'simply awesome' to describe the view from Blackpool Tower. Perhaps it was just the straw that broke the camel's back.

Mind you, I am aware that a living language is in constant evolution, and I did ask myself whether the meaning of 'awesome' had weakened over the last couple of decades. So, before making any final judgement, I decided to look it up in my latest edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. And here, to my great satisfaction, what I more than suspected was officially confirmed: that applying a word normally associated with the sublime or grandiose to a stretch of dirty-looking sand and greenish-coloured sea was, in any man's language, pushing things a bit too far.

You know, I'm inclined to think that this propensity to verbal excess is yet another blight which has been blown in from the States, and which is inexorably turning what we are now obliged to call 'British English' into little more than an American dialect. But I'd be the first to admit we can't blame the Yanks for everything. And I can't help thinking that those at the B.B.C can be faulted, too. Why, only the other evening I was watching a passably interesting documentary on some of the more notable beauty spots in and around the British Isles. After three or four minutes, however, I began to be so uncomfortably aware of the stubborn use of 'fantastic' that I resolved to conduct a personal count on the frequency with which it was being pronounced. Before you could say Jack Robinson, between the commentator and the three or four people he interviewed, I'd already reached 20. Hasn't all this got to such a point that if you don't effuse about all or nothing you can even find yourself giving offence?

In contrast to this unbridled Anglo-Saxon enthusiasm for all things great and small, the Gallics seem to paint a far truer picture of how things really are. During my bachelor years when I lived at home, I once invited a French friend to come and stay with us for a few days. Now since Jean-Paul was an English teacher in France his English was above all reproach. I distinctly remember the first family meal we ate together. It was a Sunday lunch and, in order to give him a taste of traditional English fare, Mum had prepared a succulent joint of beef accompanied by three or four vegetables, Yorkshire Pudding and gravy. The speed with which Jean-Paul transferred the generous contents of plate to stomach seemed to indicate that Mum's culinary efforts had not been in vain, and - certainly fishing for compliments - she enquired rather insistently whether he'd enjoyed the meal.

'Yes, it was fine,' he replied.

The fleeting look of disappointment which crossed Mum's face was enough to convince Jean-Paul that somehow he'd not quite said the right thing. But he didn't for the life of him know why. So afterwards, when we were alone together, he asked me whether it wouldn't have been more judicious to use that other four letter word so ubiquitously applied by the English to anything vaguely pleasant. I replied that it would perhaps have been better to use the word 'nice', but not so much because of its meaning, which is more or less the same as 'fine'. For such are the intricate mysteries of the English language that the main advantage of 'nice' is that it can be preceded by 'very'. 'Bien,' retorted Jean-Paul, 'ça y est, je comprends!' I should have said 'It was very nice!' Even though this would have been more acceptable, I retorted, if he had really wanted to play it safe a duo or even a trio of 'verys' would have gone down a treat - though four was going a bit too far. But, I added, if he wanted to avoid this kind of unimaginative repetition, the choice was certainly not lacking, and the use of a single word like 'marvellous', 'fabulous', 'amazing' or 'stunning' would have more than done the trick.

Mind you, my disapproval does admit one exception: I've always sympathized with those who spend their professional lives pretending to be other people - usually larger than life - and I can understand their off-stage inclination to embellish humdrum reality with one or two enthusiastically-chosen words. But now, every Tom, Dick and Harry seems to be at it. I mean, I've no recollections of such generalized verbal extravagance in my, admittedly, dim and distant youth. Or am I just an ageing, backward-looking killjoy who's lost all zest for life?