Don's Tuesday column

             THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson      Red Bluff Daily News   12/17/2013

Wisdom, abundance, unions, irony, lie of year

Note: Comments on last week’s column were thwarted by “Warning: (URL) is unreachable,” perplexing even Daily News staff.

My sense of the wisdom of our county supervisors is reinforced over their decision to let the voters weigh in on dissolving the ties that bind us to California. My analysis: 1) it is quite a long shot effort, requiring great patience to achieve the goal; 2) it’s worth letting the people’s voice be heard in the short term. If the State of Jefferson movement takes hold in counties further south (I’m thinking of the vast swaths of so-called “red,” or Republican-voting, California), the possibilities and practicalities of scale become far more realistic.

Such a state, built around a thriving economy due to a business-friendly regulatory atmosphere, a more restrictive social benefit structure and non-unionized public employees, would have far greater abilities to create abundance for its productive businesses and workers. If accompanied by serious budgetary discipline and relatively lighter tax burdens, the private sector could grow as the public employee/welfare portion shrank. This is not far-fetched by any means. California could, if Sacramento politicians so desired, once again be the “Golden State” of opportunity and economic growth—such are not their priorities because it would require shrinking the public sector/welfare class and growing businesses and the workforce.

Which brings me to the current kerfuffle between our teachers union and the high school superintendent, Ms. Escobar. My views against public employees, particularly teachers, unionizing against local officials and the taxpayers they represent, are not surprising. My views will have no bearing on the existence or tactics of the teachers union. That both President Franklin Roosevelt and union pioneer George Meany opposed unionization of public employees should spare me from the unhinged, hateful broadsides such groups seem happy to muster.

Were there no teachers union or “association” (the feel-good term they prefer), they might act and respond to changes in standards and performance requirements in ways more appropriate to the term “employee.” Such is the proper description of their status, which status I believe they have artificially elevated to that of a quasi-independent interest group of near-saintly providers of unimpeachable expertise in the art and science of educating our youth. Curiously and counter intuitively, children schooled at home by mere unpaid parents turn out to be as informed and capable as “expertly instructed” public school students, costing taxpayers $10,000+ per pupil. That these unions use coerced dues to fund campaigns in support or opposition to citizen initiatives and propositions, to harass those same home-school parents and their children, and to oppose the expansion of union-defying charter schools—that all should persuade reasonable people of the inferiority and compromised, even diabolical, motives of the unions. We’ll see if school board members like Barbara McIver, bought and paid for by unions (my view), are fair and neutral.

Stepping far afield of local concerns, I share with many my opprobrium for President Obama’s shameful performance at the Nelson Mandela memorial service. Obama had no time to attend the memorial ceremony for a truly great friend of America, Lady Thatcher; however, he embarrassed American values by bounding up stairs to give a semi-bow and warm embrace of the hand of Cuban dictator (his true title—not the news media concoction, “president”), Raul Castro. He, his deceased brother Fidel, and their many ruthless communist, co-tyrants, have the blood of many thousands of Cubans, as well as around 100 million of earth’s inhabitants, on their ideological, collective hands.

A far more appropriate response came from Senator Ted Cruz, who walked out on the speech of Raul Castro, inexplicably chosen to address those paying tribute to a tremendous leader of South Africa. Inexplicable unless you were aware of 1) the enthusiastic embraces Mandela gave to such communist tyrants over the years, 2) the fact that the African National Congress was ideologically communist-oriented, and that 3) he tolerated, if not encouraged, some very violent attacks on political opponents and enemies. True, he later set aside recrimination and revenge for the greater cause of uniting South Africa’s racial partisans, placing his leadership distinctly and morally above his ruthless neighbor to the north, Robert Mugabe. My flag’s half-staff tribute was dedicated to the Pearl Harbor remembrance, not a tainted foreign figure.

 I also found it ironic that Obama should be favorably compared to Nelson Mandela. He epitomized the reconciliation of former political enemies while Obama has implemented the politics of resentment, revenge and recrimination taught to all of Saul Alinksy’s community-organizing acolytes. “Punish our enemies” appropriately describes his endless campaign of demonization, persecution and vengeful retribution against those standing in the way of his now-apparent “fundamental transformation” of America’s free market, capitalist system. Obamacrats want a top-down, centrally planned economy more akin to Mussolini’s fascist-controlled Italy. An older Italian immigrant described in an interview how the fascists in his day relied not on violence and physical persecution, but rather the inexorable imposition of state control which led to a “comply or economically perish” response by Italian businesses. Such are the Obama methods now.

Obama’s “… you can keep your health care plan” is the “lie of the year” says PolitiFact. Saying that Bush based “his whole war campaign on something he knew to be false” is truly the worst kind of lie “anyone could ever make.” Bush “derangement” lives on.