Vote For Obama And Stick It To Whitey

It seems the only people who are voting for Obama these days are white liberals and people of color. They all have many detailed and varied reasons to do this: Because he is black.

They don’t even know why they’re voting for the guy and they don’t care. He’s black and he’s sticking it to whitey. Rich, racist, whitey. That’s all they care to know. Even the white liberals want to stick it to whitey.

There is so much we don’t know about Mr. Obama. We can’t see what he’s written in college and we don’t even know if his birth certificate is real. You think the nurse runs into the office and types a certificate as soon as a kid is born? Nope, the doctor first writes the parent’s names and birth information by hand. Where is THAT document? I have mine.

But that doesn't matter. We do know he’s black and that’s good enough for his major voting group: black and hispanic people. Ignorance is bliss.

We have a funny idea of what compassion really is in this country over the last several decades. Is compassion handing out Section 8 rent vouchers, EBT cards and free health care? Or is compassion about having the opportunity to do things on your own? Should government be in the business of carrying liabilities at other’s expense or should they be in the business of diminishing liabilities by providing a level field of play for all to excel and to contribute to a healthy society and a fulfilling life?

It’s clear that Romney has a better grasp of the state of the economy than president Obama. This is because he knows where money actually comes from. Love him or hate him, Mitt Romney is a “money guy”.

All Obama has to fall back on, since he’s made a bad situation so much worse by spending up the deficit, is racial division.

There are still many black people who think that Obama’s failure as a president is because of Whitey. There are black folks who think white people have it in for them to the point of extermination. They hold an innate animosity and distrust towards all white people regardless of ancestry. This is not only unfair, but profoundly racist. This is a racism that many black people are born into. They get if from their folks and the people they grow up with. It is environmental. Now where have I heard that before?

I have a friend who happens to be black. He was being held back in his job and was unable to advance. He felt it was because they were white and he was not. They may have even have made a racial comment but it seems to be a vague reference. He quit and went elsewhere and he’s happier and doing better.

I related a similar experience where I worked. I was also being held back and passed over even for a job I was holding at the time while a candidate for the permanent position. I didn’t get it. There were comments and none too vague. The only thing I couldn’t pin it on was because I was black since I’m not.

I have been told that since I’m not black, I couldn’t possibly understand what it’s like to be put in such a position and my answer was: “Shove it up your ass!” I got jobbed, you got jobbed. WE got jobbed.

The difference is that I can recognize it for what is. One of us is in denial.

I was born in the Boston projects. We got out. I was told that it was because we had the privilege of being white. But other white people did not get out. How’d that privilege work for them? And there were black families that got out too. How does that work? I thought they weren’t privileged? Blow it out your ass!

I’ve just spent the past week in Nashville, TN near the grounds of Vanderbilt University. I saw many young professionals there like doctors and businessmen and they are black. Was whitey holding them back? Oh, I see, whitey WOULD have held them back if they had the chance.

Whitey can’t win this argument. 

Barak Obama has become the most divisive president since Woodrow Wilson. He needs this racial division, he needs the La Razas of this country to rise up and vote for him because he’s black. He needs voter fraud and underhanded election skulldugery because his ideas aren't supported by the majority of Americans still working in this country. Obama needs the liberal media sheep on his side bleeting the party line because he's made so many errors in judgement it's hard to imagine he's still taken seriously.

But most of all Obama needs racial hatred. That will get out the vote for him. He will motivate the growing hispanic masses and established liberal haters to go to the polls for fear of a Great White Satan who will try to unite the country and give it back to their repressive European masters for only Obama knows them like whitey will never know them.

But they’ll be cutting their own throats. There can be no redistribution if there is no wealth. You can’t hand out what you don’t have coming in and the leftist, wealth destroying policies that Obama champions will eventually cause all these giveaways to dry up.

When that happens you won’t be able to blame Congress, the Republicans or Whitey.  

After this, there'll be no one left to blame but themselves.

Obama Offers Only Lip Service In Third Debate

From his tough talk on China to his love for Israel, President Obama will say anything to get re-elected.

But his actions have never reflected his words.

He’s had four years to deliver those tough words to China but he never has.

He hasn’t proven to be the best friend of Israel either, preferring to throw them under the bus in his dogged pursuit of acceptance by the Muslims of the North African nations. He’s had four years to prove his balance in the Middle East and we have yet to see it.

He said that he has bet on the American worker but he has chosen the wrong American worker. He continues to support the public unions with his education drive over the private sector American worker. The difference here is that the public sector, government, doesn’t actually produce anything. They don’t make pocket combs.

Obama’s idea of research is backing experimental companies with public funds…and losing. His green companies have not thrived. Quite the opposite really.

I especially liked Obama taking credit for the ending of the Iraq war and coming into office while there were two wars. This is odd to me because the wars haven’t ended. There’s still fighting in both Iraq and Afghanistan and then there was that intervention in Libya, a third war front. Where are the war endings? I don’t see any wars ending. I also have a vague recollection about closing the prison at Gitmo which is still in business.

A policy that seeks to expand government is a policy that will continue to drain the economy with increasing diminished returns. If government takes $ 5 Trillion out of the private sector in the form of taxes, that is $5 Trillion less that the private sector has to spend. If you give that money to the teachers, what will come back? A bunch of educated unemployed people. That’s just dandy!

What you won’t see is the businesses, the goods and the opportunities that weren’t created because of the lack of capital. You won’t see it because it was never created. This is the difference between government and the private sector. The private sector produces goods and generates revenue and government taxes and spends that revenue for its own works. You don’t have a choice and you don’t have a voice in its dispersal. The only money you can control is the money in your pocket, the money you've earned, after the government takes their cut.

President Obama is sticking to his ideology; Government provides, education must be funded and expanded and government picking its pet projects and punishing entities like coal and oil should continue. For his Socialist Vision, the President will go out on his shield but he should go out just the same. His positions are untenable and the country will suffer for his ideology.

Socialism and Redistribution of resources by government in reality has always lacked imagination. It is an unwieldy and cumbersome archaic idea that has already been tried and tried and has failed and failed. How boring to see this all unfold again.

But the President is going to stick to his agenda until some other force; the American people perhaps, can intercede. That’s why he’s in “Say Anything” mode. All he wants is to get back in office to continue his mission of upending the institutions that have made America the world’s largest economy.

And that all depends if you can believe what he says.

Boston Rock Clubs of the 1980s: TT the Bears Place

TT the Bear's Place had it's final shows on the evening of July 25, 2015. They have now closed their doors forever. Whether it's a testament to their location, their business model, for what it was, or sheer luck that they lasted as long as they did when other clubs went out, I don't know.

Located on 10 Brookline St in Central Square just off the corner with Mass Ave, TT the Bears Place or better known as “TT’s” is one of only a select few rock clubs that was part of the Boston original music scene in the 1980s that is still in business. Johnny Ds is another.

Places like the Plough & Stars were open at the time but decidedly NOT rock clubs. Not many rock and roll bars survived for long in the land of “Soda & Lime” which is how I describe Cambridge, which certainly was not a town with a reputation for beer drinkers. You would be better off to open a Tall Man’s clothing shop in Tokyo than a rock club in Cambridge, MA.  

At the time, as I can recall, there was anywhere between 14 to16 original rock and roll venues open at any one time in Boston. Some of these were: Jonathan Swifts, TTs, Jack’s, The Rat, Storyville, The Insquare Men’s Bar, The Channel, Green St. Station in J.P., Club III in Somerville, Bunratty’s, The Paradise, Johnny Ds, Harper’s Ferry, Chet’s Last Call, O’Brians and Ed Burke’s in J.P. There seemed to be no lack of places to play and many of the most popular acts like Til Tuesday, Berlin Airlift, Scruffy the Cat, City Thrills, Robin Lane, The Del Fuegos, The Dogmatics, The Stompers and The Neighborhoods we out playing a couple of nights a week. These bands were tight as anything out there since they were working so much.

Our band, Cool McCool, played TT’s maybe about a dozen times in the 6 years we banged around the Boston music scene. We started on a Tuesday of course but never really worked our way into the place past Thursday. You have to draw in this business and although most shows were well attended, we never could pack the place like they always insisted.

We were part of the RosBury Sound (Roslindale/West Roxbury) group of bands of which ourselves, Uncalled For, Stop Calling Me Frank, The Visigoths and The Infections were the better known and it was always a struggle to get people from that area into Cambridge on, say, a Wednesday for an 11 o’clock set. Hell, it wasn’t like they made it easy for you since it was cheaper to get into the Channel, the beer was more expensive there and they didn’t give you a lot of time to play.

A 45 minute set was the most you were ever going to get and many times you didn’t get that. A 30 minute set was always a looming possibility. You just never knew how many bands were going to show up on your night. And if you couldn’t make the 6 o’clock sound check, you were bumped to the last band to step on stage on a work night but none of this was an uncommon practice on the “New Music” or in other words: “ No Money” scene. Not exactly the stuff of legends.

Come to think of it, I really can’t recall anybody of note playing there beyond an occasional Barrance Whitfield and Pajama Slave Dancers double bill. No, TT the Bear’s Place’s stock and trade seemed to come from beating on Boston’s newest bands to bring a drinking draw since they’d give you a gig to start playing somewhere.  Chet’s was at least a square deal but if Chet wouldn’t book you, the next step on the ladder to the bottom that had its own sound system was TT the Bear’s Place.

We could never figure out where all the money TT’s was fleecing the bands out of was going except perhaps up the noses of management. It was six bucks to get in to see your friends play for 30 minutes and the beers, Bud bottles, were like $2.50 and they hardly paid the bands anything in comparison to the draw. I don’t think we ever walked out of there with anything more than $50.00 for the band with 2 free drinks each. If you said anything they’d just tell you to go play someplace else. Needless to say, I was never a fan of that business model.

Musically it wasn’t a bad place to play. The people were cool, the sound was good, people seemed to enjoy our stuff and we managed to get our underage entourage past the doormen (again) with that old standby, “the Roadie Ruse”. But there were a few things that I remember happened there:

At one show James, our guitar player, was having a hard time keeping the guitar in tune. This sort of thing didn’t happen all the time but there are some days you just don’t hear so well and the tuner isn't helping in a room full of chatting rock & roll fans. Anyway the soundman had enough of that after the second song and left his station, took a running leap up onto the front of the stage, takes James’s guitar, tunes it, hands it back to him without a word and goes back to his business as soundman. Then with a quick look to see if everyone was ready we jump straight into the next song on the setlist like nothing happened.

To this day James does not remember the incident. He was probably more concerned with losing the extra minute since we never seemed to have enough of those when we played TT’s.

Another time we were less than a half hour from the first band going on when a woman at the bar right across from me just straight up, mid-sentence, eyes rolling into the head, over backwards, passes out cold (warning: if you’re going to take “downers” don’t chase them with a shot!). So they call an ambulance but two show up coming from opposite ends of the street (Brookline St. is a one-way), causing a totally messed up traffic jam with the drivers out of the vehicles arguing which one is going to take the lady and delaying anything musical from happening for over an hour. I think we all got 20 minutes that night even though the right amount of bands had shown up. It figures.

After 1990, when I got out of the Boston “Originals” rooms and into the GB circuit, I never set foot in TT’s ever again. To quote James recently about the place: “They weren’t that great but they never totally pissed us off and for the Boston music scene in those days that was good enough.”

As for me, Chet’s, Green Street, The Channel, I miss being at and playing those places. TT’s, I miss not at all.

Obama Doesn’t Understand Business

Each debate paints a more cohesive picture in regard to President Obama's business acumen.

He has none.

It’s clear he doesn’t know the difference between Chapter 7 and Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy code. And neither do many of the people who will vote for him again as president.

The President didn’t “Save” General Motors. General Motors filed Chapter 11, a legal motion to restructure its debt and to reach new agreements with its creditors and contracts with its unions. The only change that occurs is the terms of the company’s debt and so business continues. The company does not get liquidated and disappear. So to say the government saved General Motors is not the truth. What the government did by buying into GM was to save the GM Union from having to take a step back from the crazy money they make and the sumptuous benefits they enjoy. And all at the expense of the people who invested their money in the company. It's the GM shareholders: retirees, town governments and regular people, who got the shaft on their investments when the government voided their stock holdings. This is what the Obama administration did. And General Motors, despite of what you may hear, isn't out of the woods as far as it's solvency is concerned, they still have a flawed business structure which it has yet to address.

President Obama is counting on the American people not to know the difference between Chapters 7 and 11 also.  

But other aspects of the economy and business seem to either elude or just doesn’t have an effect on the President’s policies toward a vibrant economic recovery for the nation.

Regulating business: The cost of doing business in this country is high. There are permits and restrictions on business, some good and some bad but all cost money and contribute to overhead.

And who bears the costs of compliance with all these State and Federal regulations? The businesses themselves, of course. All businesses have to hire their own people to make sure that they are in compliance with all the articles of regulation and tax that they are responsible for.  There is no write-off for these expenditures. They're expenditures.

It's not just an issue of good business practices, some of these regulations are out of control like the Americans with Disabilities Act which almost closed every public pool in the state of Massachusetts this Summer before it was put on hold, required all public pools to have a lift to transport disabled people into and out of the pool. A nice idea but so costly that the pools had decided that it was better to just close. The requirement has not gone away, it’s just on hold. There is also the provision in the ADA that requires public buildings to have elevators if there is a second floor. Elevators are very costly to purchase, install and maintain. This is a prohibitive sum in purchase and maintenance costs.

There are also permits, insurance, certification and licensing to starting a business that have become a burden to the point that many businesses cannot become legitimate in the eyes of government and remain thus restricted and under the table.

Then there are the taxes. The Federal tax rate on business runs from 15% to 35%. Then there are the State taxes, local property taxe, taxes on income, sales and even exise taxes on unsold inventory. There are taxes on utility bills, phone bills, shipping and purchasing. Add to that unemployement taxes, workers compensation taxes and the cost of offering a subsidy for health insurance for employees.

All this contributes to a businesses’ “Overhead” or the cost of doing business before they collect a penny in sales.

Currently the climate for American business is bad based on all of the above.

The more overhead, the less profit. The less profit, the less expansion. The less expansion, the less hiring. The less hiring, the less payroll and income taxes that are collected. It is an inevitable downward spiral of Socialism. There is no balance, only eventual failure.

Mitt Romney has proposed to drop some of this overhead. Obama isn’t on board with that right now, he's got a big government to feed.

President Obama believes if the government buys enough Chevy Volts that General Motors will become solvent. He also believes that if the government spends enough money, the economy will turn around. They also believe that by the Federal Reserve purchasing mortgage debt with printed money and deficit spending, that this will help lift up a sagging economy.

Does anybody believe this will happen?

The more taxes and fees go up, the more businesses that will close under the pressure and the less money gets collected. The government; Federal, State and Local have many mouths to feed. If tax revenues fall, these governing bodies will have to start letting some people go.

This they should understand.

With the governments faith in the so called “Green Business” to the tune of handing out hundreds of millions of dollars in support money starting to show real collapse and failure, one can draw the clear conclusion that government interference in the marketplace is never a good idea.

This particular failure falls squarely on the shoulders of the Obama administration.

In order to support business one must know what it takes to run a business and there are few in the current administration that have done that. Secretary of the Treasury Tim Geithner is one and President Obama is another. Vice President Joe Biden is yet another. Together they have zero business experience, being mainly long time bureaucrats, and it shows in their understanding of the country’s economy and business atmosphere. This is not an encouraging scenario.

And here we are. Do you go to the guy who’s had a business for a job or do you go to a guy who’s never had a business and who’s only jobs were on the public payrolls?

So what’s the answer?

Both Republicans and Democrats Complicit in U.S. Decline

Neither side is without blame for the mess we’re in. Both sides voted for the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and both sides continue to support them. Both sides have intervened in the affairs of foreign nations and both sides spend money like sailors on shore leave in their attempts to buy the vote from one group or another.  

George Bush proposed a stimulus package and both the Republicans and Democrats voted for it. The new Democratic administration proposed another stimulus package and  the Democrats and Republicans voted for it and also asked for the funds knowing full well that those funds were adding to the deficit.

Both the Republicans and the Democrats have neglected to mandate balanced budgets or fiscal responsibility based on the financial realities that face every working citizen in this country every goddamned day. They are above such things and are actually exempt from the laws they themselves pass.

Since the advent of Medicare and the Great Society, each administration has been kicking another brick under the pyramid in order to prop up bad policy and to pass the debt for such on to a new generation. There isn’t a whole lot of difference between either party from what recent history reveals. Each change brings more spending on entitlements and increased costs for people who only want to get ahead in this world so they’ll have enough to raise and educate their children and have enough to live comfortably in their retirement years.

The government should have nothing to do with any of that.

But here they are, inside every major system in the country and making a shambles out of it. The public school systems across the nation are shameful in their costs and failure to deliver results on a par with other nations. To them it is all about the lunch programs or teaching diversity whereas in other nations it’s all about math and science. There is nothing in the Constitution that says the Federal Government, the people who are supposed to be providing for our common defense and creating a level playing field for business, should be involved with the day to day minutia of what’s going on in a public school. That’s for the States to provide.  And the result of the Federal Government buying its way into the public school system is increased requests now for them to fix it. Go figure. It's like asking an arsonist for help putting out a fire.

There is also no mandate for the government to be involved in your medical care but there they are stacking yet another bureaucratic plan on top of the other past bureaucratic plans before it and each infusing more money into it to cover for it's failures.

And throughout it all, each administration, Republican or Democrat, has added to the mess, raised the debt ceiling, voted for the unfunded mandate and attempted to fix the previous administrations fiscal missteps by either throwing more money at it or paying out less in benefits.

So now when a Republican  presidential hopeful comes along and says he wants to right the sinking ship, they have little to stand on. The Republicans like Paul Ryan actually asked for stimulus money for his state. Many Republicans have asked just like many Democrats have asked. Yes, to their credit there were also Republicans who refused stimulus funds, they get it, but they are but a cry in the wilderness.  And I'll only mention RomneyCare.

But ultimately, it’s just all about the dough to these bureaucrats, each clamoring for Federal money for their state and bowing to all the conditions and strings attached to it no matter whether it’s harmful to the nation and its people in the long run. The Congress has gone along with many hair brained spending scemes like "No Child Left Behind" and "Medicaid Plan B" prescription benefit plan.

The Federal Government has become a giant "Make Work" program and results are not as important as long as the government checks keep coming in. Since government doesn'ctually produce anything, this sends the country into deficit.

Even those crusaders for reform have skeletons in their closets voting for stimulus packages, requesting government money and voting for endless wars or crazy spending by past administrations. No one, it seems, has any moral high ground anymore. We’ve become a society too easily bought and it shows.

But there is now a nation of people the government has to support and much of it is mandated by law.  This is really what the people will decide in November: Which side can keep those checks coming?

By the way things are looking, the answer will probably be: Neither.

Romney Understands the Economy

And President Obama clearly does not.

If you want anything in this world and wish to bring it about through your own hands and you still vote for Obama just because he’s black or you’re black, you deserve what you’re going to get.

Even if you’re getting free stuff from the government, how long do you think this will last? You can’t distribute what isn’t coming in. Redistribution of wealth relies on one thing…wealth. And the Obama plan won’t bring wealth to the government bank account.

President Obama does not know this, Romney does.

It was clear from the debate that one candidate understands what’s happening in the economy and one does not. You can’t fix something if you don’t understand it. Romney sees it clearly.  How do I know? He SAID so. He spelled it all out. The more you tax people, the less money they have to spend. Duh!

But the political Left will never see it. They are standing with their fingers in their ears, eyes closed, going “La-la-la-la-la” while Romney is explaining this simple concept. They don’t see it because they have never understood it.  

The economy goes beyond politics. Politics will not make people start buying all the stupid stuff we all used to buy. Three quarters of the economy depends on people buying Salad Shooters, George Forman Grills and Pastry Toasters. This is what makes America, no, the World, run! And America drives the world economy because we buy the most stupid stuff. It’s practically a birthright. To us,  dogs, cats and rabbits are pets but to many countries in the world they are “alternative food supplies”. While some people are dressing a cat for diner, we’re dressing them in expensive pet outfits for Halloween or Christmas. This is civilization!

But this is a free choice by people who work hard for the money THEY earn! It’s their money and they can do anything they want with it.

But you tax it away, they’ll stop. They’ll give up the pets and the pet food and the pet clothes. They’ll stop buying the new microwave oven and hold onto the old one for as long as they can. They’ll stop traveling and spending the money because they won’t know if the place they work for, the Salad Shooter Company, is going to lay them off or maybe they already have. It becomes a slow downward spiral.

And yet again, this is a rebuke of the Socialist left. Once again they got it “wrong”.  The steps they have taken have been failures since they've never addressed the fundamental problem of spending money the nation hasn't earned yet. If they were going to work, they would've worked by now.

You want something more than a government handout?