The Passage of Times

The more with which time passes, the more one sees how some things always stay the same.

This is something unrealized by youth… I certainly couldn’t see it, though many elderly tried to project their insight into me.. I simply lacked enough background to understand.

But seeing the return of things you fought to vanquish and were once successful, as well as expanding ones knowledge-base across many cultures, times, and distances, one tends to see a larger pattern in effect that probably is conducive to our survival…

Here is how it relates to conservatives and liberals, democracy and our ultimate survival…. .

No matter who you are, when you are, or where you are, if you are comfortable in your position, you tend to lean towards conservatism… Why wouldn’t you?  It’s what enabled you to get and keep what you have… On the other hand, when you have nothing but dreams listed as your assets, you’ll insist on change, or newness, or something better than what you have.. Why shouldn’t you?  Who would want to stay in the same decrepit conditions one finds themselves when they don’t have to?

And so democracy is simply a mechanism that allows for the ebb and flow of fortunes to change policy so parity is maintained for the most part…

When a majority of people are doing better than those who are not, then keeping what is working now is best for that society as a whole.  On the other hand if it it not working, then changing ones course is better for that society.  That makes so much sense, does it not?

So being a liberal in a time of economic well being is, how should we say politely, being “very forward thinking”?… Likewise being a conservative in a time of turmoil, could be rather dangerous, being so outnumbered so… you better hope you are “well liked”….

It is rare that events outside the human experience impact us on a large scale. Most of what affects us drastically (wars, Depressions, power grabs) usually comes from mankind’s own doing:… acts where we consciously chose to go a certain route, and more or less, damned all the torpedoes that got in the way.

Today we are in a bru-ha-ha of our own making…. Most of it directly came from our choosing to go towards giving the top 1% all of our money and keeping less for ourselves… It was a conscious decision on our parts.  We elected enough Republicans to allow them to do what they told us they would do.  It was no secret. We made a bad decision.

The experiment failed.  They kept all the money and none trickled down, at least here within our borders… Our wealth actually built up China, which is great for them, but that hasn’t helped us much.

When one finds out one is losing something important, one hangs onto it harder… Which means someone has to try harder to take it away, right?… This gives insight into the harshness and lack of decorum in politics today… The ugliness we see today in Conservatives, and the hard clenching tenacity we see in Liberals, we’ve seen before in this country.  We had it in the 1820’s between the old guard wealth of the Eastern Seaboard, and the wide individualistic wealth newly available across our national heartland.  We saw it in the 1850’s as slavery hit the hot button and both sides became bitterly entrenched as support for slavery evaporated into a cauldron of gunpowder.  It only took one spark.  We saw it in the 1890’s as the capitalists grabbed up more and more companies, crushed workers rights, and the workers in cities became less and less empowered. Finally Republican Progressivism broke out of the chokehold. Then WWI flipped the scales back to big business and an investment boom followed by a Great Depression again created the necessary environment for another total sweep of old for new.  That “new” lasted 60 years until it succumbed to having been so successful so that so many numbers who had previously benefited from liberal policies switched allegiances to keep their assets to themselves… And that leads to today, where our individualistic efforts to improve ourselves simply were not enough to balance ourselves comfortably against wealth and power and we are again looking at more government interaction…

So rawness and candor have always been part of politics.  Always will be. Some things never change. (Some of us love it, btw.)

So what is happening today is that the post Republican Depression economy has made mockery out of those “traditional” Republican values and the only thing they have to hold on to power right now, is their appeal to the prejudiced.  Against this direct solicitation, Progressives continue to offer a new vision of hope to millennials, or the return to the old vision of what actually worked well for 60 years to those still alive who actually lived it.

The conservatives count the votes and know their time is numbered.  Population trends have pointed this out for many years. Which readily explains why they focus on ways and methods to limit large numbers of those voting, and have vacated all plans to appeal to new members… No surprise here.

In this election conservative policy has been reduced to stem complete annihilation of their party… For whereas they have failed over the past 16 years, Progressives have succeed across that same time. By going hog-wild on bigotry, they are using the only tactic with which they know how to keep some members in their party from flipping…

Bigotry is a “thing” unfortunately… And right now…. it is the only “thing” Republicans have to garner one single vote this November…  Unless of course, it is ….. “wild hair”…

 

Do The Math. All Referendums

Courtesy of The O Zone

You hear the handle turn, you here the wheels start to grind.. and then the sound.. the awful sound begins to screech… “Your taxes are going up; we can’t pay more money… Vote NO. It’s outrageous to pay more in taxes… Cut Administrators.. Blah, blah, blah”…and then the sound gets softer and softer and fades quieter and quieter into silence until the next person turns the handle and …”Your taxes are going up… we can’t…..”

And it’s a very small tiny ridiculously low amount of people who believe this crap. .. but they are highly motivated to vote.. Why?  Because they get $15 dollars a hour to hand out pamphlets, call radio stations, and write letters to the editor… They are hired by large landowners, the developers…

The developers own thousands of acres. Just $200 an acre costs them  a minimum of $200,000 dollars a year.. But, they are making hundreds of million each single year so that much money is still like losing a penny to us… But they still pay people to squawk.

The estimated average is that the increase will be around $237 a year… That means that half of the people who can afford to, will pay higher than that amount and half those who are living on tight incomes, will pay less….

Most houses sell for $240, 000 but they are assessed at 1974 levels.. Which means $60,000 for the above if an older house..   At $60,000 assessment, the current tax is $852 per year.   (Go to that site if you know your assessed value),  Your new tax will be roughly $180 dollars more… Divide that by month, it is  $15.00 more you will find added to your escrow when you pay your mortgage…

If your house is at $100,000, and the 1974 assessment is $30,000, the current tax is $426 and the increase will be $90 more per year or $7.50 per month…

If you rent, this referendum costs you absolutely nothing..

If you are on the high end and have a house assessed at $500,000, your current assessment is $7,100… Your new assessment will be $8,600 ($1,500 more).  That huge (cough, cough) jump puts you at an increase of $125 a month. Which it you own a $500,000 house, your cost increase is less than normal utility fluctations…  Big deal.

So all the screaming is not from little people owning house, unless they got whipped up by someone with big money… The screaming is by the huge landowners who lease property…

But local real-estate experts insist that good schools DO lead to higher property values, and several studies done in other cities have found strong correlations between highly performing schools and higher house prices.

So defeating the referendum can cost your home to plummet in value by $120,000 balanced against voting “no” you saving your pocketbook $15.00 a month…

It is past time to raise revenue for schools.  Many have gone years with no increase, yet costs increase every year. Just as your costs have increased, so have those of all schools. All districts must continue having referenda as often as possible until a “yes” vote occurs, simply because they are out of money.  Referenda are the only way districts can increase revenues.  Christina for example this year cut 90 teachers and raised.class sizes from 20 to 30 per class.  That does not bode well for better learning. it does not bode well for your children….

That makes this a no-brainer.  Vote Yes for the referendum…

I forgot to tell you something… Even though at the top I said these “NO” voters were a small sliver of the population,… they all vote.  And even though parents of school children can easily overwhelm them 1,000 to one, they don’t every referendum because only 5000 of those 50,000 parents supporting children even bother to go out and vote… Just 6000 “NO” votes were able to derail the last referendum, because only 5000 yes votes bothered to show up…

If you don’t vote, the no’s win… That simple. Everybody who cares about Delaware, needs to vote to make Christina District a better place for all.

Bottom line, this extra tax is not a burden and you have so much benefit to gain for your yes vote.  Don’t be dissuaded from voting in YOUR best interest by some fly-by-election-night outfit that is paid for, owned, and controlled by the wealthy landed class of citizens who can easily afford to give up billions for our schools, but cry over giving up 30 additional cents per $100 dollars of assessed value… For a nice $200,000 home, you pay $15.00 a month more for the privilege of living in a district with great schools…

People lie, lie, lie… Math never does.

 

 

Poisoning The Well

Christian Hudson at 30045 (Eagles Crest Road, Milton, Delaware 19968; (302) 729-2178; info@FirstStateLiberty.org) is responsible for the robo calls now dialing off hate-lists compiled out of zip codes undergoing the Chrisina Referendum.

If you go to the beach, the above property is that old airport that has always been just north of Lewes…

If you’ve been here very long you may remember it as the location when as a child you looked out your window and saw this….

It was also one of the early fields featuring Pumpkin Chunking….

Today it is headquarter for Hudson Management, a wide ranging assortment of investments scattered across the winds, some of whose seeds have drifted close to home. Some of which include the wooden Fairfield Inn, Rehoboth Beach, Sam Yoder and Sons, Village of Five Points.  Other investments include:

• 300MW Wind Farm and Solar project in northern Ontario, Canada (under development)
• 150 unit ocean-front luxury residential development in San Juanillo, Costa Rica
• Video commerce network- TV Page in San Diego, CA
• Leading digital news and information network in Dallas, TX
• Self-storage investment firm with 12 locations in the US, and 2 locations in Ontario, Canada

As would any investor, zeal against taxation would become a cause celebre because taxes sap some of the return off investments… And Christian Hudson has almost zealfully crusaded against any form of taxation….

Any form of taxation…. as would any zealot I could imagine.

Here is one of his ads on removing all taxes. Here are his ideas of cutting the state budget instead of raising taxes.  Here is why they are against “smart” growth, advocating for its opposite instead.  Here is him as a plaintiff trying to remove Delaware from the Regional Gas Initiative.

Those of us who have sparred with Christian Hudson across DelawarePolitics.net and Delawareright.com are familiar with his single-mindedness whenever anything interferes with the personal accumulation of money.  Nothing wrong with that; were I raised differently it would make sense to me too.

But why would someone with no bone to pick in Lewes (Milton), employee his Robo-tax-cop machine to bother people in a district far-far away?

The first and simple reason:  it costs nothing for him to do so.. The apparatus is set up; calls are free; and all it takes is 5 minutes to leave a greeting on tape, and then off to the Sussex Country Republican Convention while voters in Christina drop what they are doing when the phone rings, rush to their phones, only to hear a taped message telling them their taxes (but not their time) are wasted and they need to vote no on the upcoming increase….

For whether your taxes are or not wasted, here is a first rate breakdown of their funding… Basically Christina District is one of the most efficient districts in the entire NATION and if it weren’t for the abject poverty endemic in both Wilmington and the Route 40 Corridor, they would be considered one of the best districts in the United States…  For the real fact is, those who are paying school property taxes across that small swath of state, are carrying the bulk of the weight for up to 90% of its students….   The real fact is that all the bad press being used to smear that district, is strictly because of the poverty that district bears; from the DOE website, we see one student in every two lives in families making less than $16,000 a year. Here is a quick succession of charts from the above Delaware-Liberal article.

Over 98% of all salaries go directly to people in the buildings or bus drivers.  From a quick search over multiple educational funding sources, that seems to be the highest of any United States of American school district….

When you don’t vote FOR a Christina referendum…. you are voting to kick children in the teeth…  Those lies of being too top heavy may apply to other districts INCLUDING  CAPE HENOPLEN WHICH ENCOMPASSES CHRISTIAN HUDSON’S DISTRICT, but it does not apply to what is probably the most efficient school district in the entire nation:… Christina.

Of course. We understand there may be personal legitimate reasons, (such as living on limited pension income that is being too-quickly drained by ever-increasing corporate fees), which could push you not to want even one more dollar of money taken from you which you can’t spend on absolutely necessities.  It’s just like there are reasons you don’t always put money in the collection plate as it’s passed by you in your church.  You are entitled to vote and that is why we put it up to a vote.  But be advised. Outside influences spreading mis-truths to achieve a certain outcome from which they are completely insulated, such as Christian Hudson and everyone who votes his way solely on ideologically grounds…. are putting loaded guns to the heads of children and pulling the triggers, especially in a place where one out of every two children comes from an under-$16,000 income family.

Just thought you all should know that…..

 

 

Don’t Let The Slum Lords Win — Vote Yes For Christina

If anyone looked for their mail on Memorial Day, they may have found an illegal flier…… (no one is allowed to put anything in ones mailbox other then the US Postal Service….)  urging all to vote “no” in the referendum….

It sounded scary… “If you vote for this referendum your taxes will go up $60,000 a year and your water will be shut off. Electricity will be stopped until you pay the back taxes.  This is a very bad tax bill and it must be voted down…”

Scrawled in ink (not typed) was the admonition that renters in the future will be paying $15,000 more per year if this referendum passes….

So…..

We sent out a posse and quickly discovered the culprits, and then secretly watched to see to whom they returned to…

Our guess was correct… The slum lord who owns at least 20 properties in almost every neighborhood, was in his black-tint windowed Mercedes, paying out $100 bills to those returning with few or no unused flyers….

And I thought… so that is who is always behind voting down referendums…. it makes sense now…

To be honest I had always blamed seniors and those on fixed income who rightfully might have reason to vote down something that would increase their property value by at least $30,000.  Because it would cost them and they wouldn’t live to see a benefit; though their heirs would.. But it really didn’t make sense for seniors with families to leave a devalued investment for their children, if their was any way possible to pay those few pennies the assessment would levy…. They would be paying pennies, and getting hundred dollar bills in return……..

But slum lords…. they have a real case….  they buy property as cheap as they can, and raise the rent as high as they can, and try to increase the gap between the two to as high as is possible….  This referendum does cost them money…..

Let us say you are a senior….. Your assessment is probably $45,000 based on the last time anyone cared to look….   For $45,000 each year you would be assessed an additional 37 cents… on every $100 dollars of value…  That is like buying a lawn mower on sale at Lowes and choosing between two models, one on sale at $99.99 and the other at $99.62….. Gee ….. which one will you get?  The gas efficient power one that keeps your lawn looking nice but at the higher price?  Or that push mower you will have to burn calories to get it to do anything… .  (Heaven help you if you miss a week).

On $45,000 that is (45 X 10 X 0.37) $166. 00…..  Although that sounds like a lot, it is spread out over a year and is included in your bank payment which will jump $13 dollars a month… which if budgeted correctly as most senior do, rounds down to $3 dollars a week….

To save $3 dollars a week, Seniors are willing to lose $30,000 of value on their home, when their neighborhood becomes too difficult to resell houses because the schools have become like Philadelphia’s…   But for that $3 assessed and paid, one gets to continue living in one of the best districts in the country…

BUT IF YOU ARE A SLUM LORD ON THE OTHER HAND…………………………………………………………..

and at a minimum, you own 1000 properties scattered across the Christina district…. and you don’t care one iota about kids, schools, education, jobs, tests, …. then this referendum has the potential to hit you each month, with an additional cost of  $130,000……  WHOA…. The slum lord is going to lose $130,000 a month………. on a thousand houses…  shock of all shocks…  that is $1.5 million a year!!!

No wonder they are handing out $100 dollar bills to try to overturn the forces of good and kill this levy…..

Which brings us to pig-face Vince D’Anna.  (Nancy has pictures, go see for yourself…)  This was the same prostitute who hired himself out to the TDC to whip up public opinion to allow it to sprinkle carcinogens and toxic particles on top of Main Street, completely covering the University of Delaware, and even dumping waste on top of Christianstead, home of mayor Polly Sierer.  And now again we see, he has hired himself out to slum lords to do exactly the same thing… Whip up hysteria, (as prostitutes-for-hire are well known to do),  to allow big money to keep more of what it should have given up long ago……

Now before you feel too much empathy for those slumlords….  let us see how much they do make each month, and then see what percentage this will cost them?   At 1000 properties each renting close to $1500 a month….. the monthly accumulation of pure profit, is….. $1,500,000…….  Per year, it totals  $18 million……..

Instead of earning $1.5 million each month…. they will earn $1.37 million each month with the difference going to schools…..   Is there anyone out there who thinks earning $1.37 million each month is too little money?  (this is all profit, mind you.)….

So the battle is such that in order to protect the wealth of this 1,000 homed slum lord…. Vince D’Anna is hired to try and scuttle the referendum by writing emotional op-ed pieces based on fabrications.  And to be completely honest, if that were me with 1000 houses, I would probably do the same thing, thinking about myself as selfishly as possible…. So we can’t blame that guy for trying…..

But the rest of us have to face the facts, and we have to do our part and make sure OUR best interests take precedent over the interests of slum-lords both for our children and for our homes’ resale value….  If you live in the Christina School district and are not a slum lord,……. there is only one way to vote to better your community…..

And that is to vote yes to increase your taxes by $3 dollars a week… That is a medium bag of Skittles……. which you really don’t need and which are not very good for you, (though it is hard to pass up when they have tropical flavors though……….)

Now if you are completely neutral, and you really don’t care one way or the other about $3 ….. then help a sister out, and vote yes just to stick Vince D’Anna in the eye with a pointed stick…. So that loser gets two losses on his belt for selling-out Newarks’ finest, …. good and beneficial citizens to the highest bidder for a price…