My Usual Charming Self | Bernie Reeves | Monster Devours America

Monster Devours America

By Bernie Reeves

The old saying “I lost my hat, ass and overcoat” is sadly resounding across the economy. But the malicious consequence of the crash is the theft of the future – the force that propels the American system. You buy a house confident it will gain value in the future. You start a business betting on the future. You pay for college hoping a degree will pay off in the future. A business borrows for inventory assuming the goods will be sold in the future.

Even in the Great Depression, or the downturns in 1947 and 1961-62; the oil crisis recession of the mid-1970s and the following downturn in the early 1980s; through the crippling 1989-1994 deep recession on the heels of the 1988 stock market crash; and through the dot.com bust of 2001, there was always hope for the future. But not anymore.
Even worse, government and university employees are enjoying the good life with high salaries, retirement benefits and top-shelf health insurance on the backs of taxpayers who watch helplessly as their nest eggs and home values disintegrate. The new class of super-rich, including the crooks that brought down the mighty American economy, is now living la dolce vita and avoiding taxes.

Meanwhile, the consumer and small businesses sectors - constituting 90% of the US economy - continue to decline as the Obama recovery plan ignores their plight. Looking ahead, there is more misery and pain for small businesses in the form of mandatory health insurance coverage for employees in the proposed health care overhaul bill endorsed by the White House. As the alleged recovery continues to founder, the next step will be draconian taxes to feed the bureaucracy — the monster that is devouring America.

The middle class of small business people and their employees who are shouldering the burden are already groaning under outrageous property, state and local taxes and the myriad of fees imposed by their banks and local governments. They now realize the Obama cadre is stealing their quality of life — and the one thing that means the most — the future.

Notes From La-La Land
As the American Dream turns into a nightmare, our federal law-makers are planning to impose even more taxes to support national health care and to pay the so-called “climate debt” to third world nations, ensuring generations of government over-spending stretching out into a unhappy future.

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Meanwhile, our North Carolina solons fiddle while Rome burns, imposing an intrusive ban on smoking as their great contribution to solve the problems we face. Not just in public buildings and environs, but in privately owned restaurants, hotels and clubs. Here, where tobacco money was the central force for good works for generations, you can’t smoke anywhere but home or in wide open spaces due to sketchy and unverified science that says passive smoke kills. They have even taken away the small pleasure of smoking a butt from prisoners. In their zeal to trample individual rights, health zealots have created an new strain of fascism, cloaked in the familiar mantle of the righteous who know what’s best for you — whether you like it or not. Hell, even Obama smokes.

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Already in place by the same missionizing meddlers is the preposterous drinking age laws legislated by extortion in the late 1980s. The feds passed laws mandating you had to be 21 to drink a beer — or any alcohol — and told the states, who constitutionally maintained their own age limits, either to pass conforming laws or have their highway construction funds confiscated. The consequences include binge drinking by teens who indulge in private conclaves to get drunk without the option to drink “socially” in public where they can learn moderation. The “suicide by police” incident by a UNC junior came on the heels of a drinking binge at the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity, where consuming alcohol followed the pattern since the ridiculous laws were imposed. At 18, you can be killed in Afghanistan, vote, get married, own a gun and be held responsible as an adult in court — but you can’t drink a beer. I’d binge too.

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The word disgust permeates the shenanigans at NC State University where the Governor Mike Easley scandal left a stain in the hiring of the Lady Easley for a plum job at a high salary. But the key reaction is bafflement that the chancellor of a major university would sneak around the appointment process — and then lie about it. My conclusion hearkens to the US Constitution. The founders in their wisdom knew the foibles and weaknesses of human beings could bring down the democratic experiment. The central document they executed is mostly concerned with how to remove individuals to assure the institutions of governance prevailed.

The same principle applies to corporate organization. The board of directors is the entity that absorbs responsibility for any liability caused by management. But in the structure of universities around here, the board of trustees serves as a political entity with no real power to check the decisions of a rogue chancellor. Perhaps a strong trustee board could have prevented the embarrassing events over Mary Easley — and corral in the interim chancellor, who appears to be acting autonomously in upper level personnel matters, such as the brutal termination of the school’s alumni director Lennie Barton. As one former NC State board chair told me who served a while back, chancellors would routinely contradict any agreement on an issue and go off and do whatever they pleased, knowing they were unsupervised free agents — despite alleged safeguards administered by the university system board of governors far removed from the everyday management of the school.

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Governor Bev Perdue’s low approval ratings are a bit of a mystery. One reason could be her effort to balance the state budget by cutting teacher salaries by one measly percent, and state worker salaries a bit more. She forgot that teachers and state workers form the coalition that elects North Carolina governors. Thinking they would desire to be part of the solution was a grievous error.

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The teacher/state worker coalition was whipped into potent political shape by former governor Jim Hunt. He also strived and succeeded in passing legislation allowing the state’s chief executive to serve more than one term. Gazing through the looking-glass of the Easley scandals - and the seemingly rampant corruption in state government today — Republican State Party Chairman and former Raleigh mayor Tom Fetzer opined to the News & Observer that letting governors serve two terms is the determining factor in the mess we have today. With two terms, the party-driven appointees burrow in and can’t be dislodged for eight years, giving them ample time to demonstrate their incompetency (as in the parole scandal, when it was learned that 80 people were killed by unsupervised parolees) and to set themselves up for a comfortable retirement with bribes from state vendors.