This was put up by Copybook Heading Productions (CHP) on their Vimeo account. Copybook Heading Productions are the creators of AGENDA: Grinding America Down. While I do offer a minor critique of the documentary, I still recommend the purchase of it in order to support future projects by its creators.(Bulk and other purchases can be made at CHP’s store.) I also uploaded this as a low-rez version to make people WANT to buy the original or watch it on the authors Vimeo.
There is a lot of well respected people involved with the making of this documentary and quite a bit of important concepts and information gleaned from it as well. Amazon is yet another place to purchase the documentary for a family member. (Posted by: Religio-Political Talk)
‘I would like to black those days out — does that tell you how bad they were?” says Carl Schanstra, owner of a small Illinois parts-assembly firm. During the recession, his sales dropped by around 50 percent, and Schanstra was forced to take a calculated risk: He downsized considerably, reworked his business strategy, and invested his life savings to tide the manufacturing company through the hard times.
“We laid off 20 people in one day,” Schanstra tells National Review Online. “That day sucked. We got rid of some of the high-level management that was not functioning correctly, as well as our low-level people. We cut and cut and cut. And as the owner of the company, I went without a paycheck for over three months, several times throughout that period. You get to compound on that company’s traumatic experiences, and then add that you don’t have any personal income as well.”
At first glance, it looks like Schanstra’s sacrifices paid off. Automation Systems Inc. is once again stable, and sales continue to rise. During the recession, the firm was housed in a leaky old building with a gravel loading dock and tarps aplenty to protect equipment when it rained. Three months ago, Schanstra was able to move into a much bigger, light-industrial new building.
But the company now faces a new problem because of the Obama health law. Automation Systems Inc. has expanded to include 37 employees today, and Schanstra says he wants to hire more — maybe as many as 200 or 300 in the next 10 to 15 years. But once the business crosses the 50-employee threshold, it will have to pay $40,000 in penalties, plus $2,000 for each additional employee. That’s because of the so-called employer mandate, a fee imposed on businesses that get too big without providing health care the federal government deems acceptable.
“The government has made it clear with the health-care law that the incentive is to have companies under 25 people, where we can get tax breaks,” Schanstra says. “The mid-range companies with the labor of 25 to 60 people — those companies are going to be impacted by this dramatically.”
Between 2007 and 2010, the U.S. lost 27,409 manufacturing firms, according to data from the Census Bureau, most of the losses presumably occurring during the recession. At its low point in June 2009, American manufacturing production was down about 21 percent from what it had been in December 2007. The manufacturing sector became a symbol for everything that had gone wrong: Why can’t the U.S. make things like it used to? Is the U.S. losing its global edge? Factory jobs were America’s hottest export, as the story went, and furrowed faces personified the trend.
President Obama took up the cause, setting a goal to double U.S. exports by 2015 and to create a million new American manufacturing jobs in the process. Early in the stimulus, politicians on the left pushed for federal aid and Buy America clauses. Most neglected to mention, of course, the regulatory burden and union wrangling that have made these companies less competitive than their global counterparts.
Taxpayer money has since flowed copiously toward the manufacturing sector. Just last July, the president was pushing for a 2013 budget with $11.245 billion in funding for various manufacturing initiatives, and that’s on top of existing programs and the stimulus money.
At first, it seemed to work. Manufacturing has boomed in the past three years, a rare occasion for optimism in the midst of a lukewarm recovery. Though the manufacturing sector faces a skill-set mismatch, it’s one of the few sectors with plentiful jobs available. Deloitte and the Manufacturing Institute reported last year that as many as 600,000 manufacturing positions remained unfilled.
Yet that growth is fragile, as recent news has demonstrated. For the first eleven months of 2012, inflation-adjusted manufacturing essentially plateaued, leading to speculation that the sector was re-entering a recession. The most recent data, collected in November, show that manufacturing remains short of what it was before the hard times hit.
And it’s hard to say which direction manufacturing is headed next, says Alan Tonelson, a research fellow at the U.S. Business and Industry Council, which represents some 2,000 small and medium-size manufacturers.
“We have come back a lot of the way, but we’re not back all the way,” Tonelson tells National Review Online. “And what I find discouraging about this is, we’re still behind the manufacturing eight-ball despite the trillions of dollars that have been poured into the economy by the stimulus and the Obama administration. It seems like that spending should have created much more growth for the buck.”
Even so, a recent survey by ThomasNet found that 48 percent of American manufacturing companies want to hire. But many of these companies will be affected by the new employer-mandate fees, which would certainly give them reason for pause.
Automation Systems Inc. is the perfect example. The employer mandate has made it financially untenable for the business to expand in the U.S., so Schanstra is reluctantly looking south of the border.
“I’m going to do what’s best for the company no matter what, so what jobs we have here, we can keep here,” he says. “As a business owner, I will learn the restrictions that the government imposes. But based on those restrictions, much of my business may no longer be within the country.”
Ahmed Dogan, leader of the Movement for Rights and Freedoms, survived an assassination attempt today during a party conference in Sofia, Bulgaria. The assassin’s gun misfired giving the opposition leader time jump out of the way and for security guards to jump the man.
[….]
The would-be assassin was identified as Oktay Enimemehmedov, a 25-year-old ethnic Turkish resident of the city of Burgas, with a previous criminal record for assault and theft….
Here is an interesting side-note on Ahmed Dogan, “in September 2007 Dogan’s name was listed on an official report of communist-era secret police collaborators. According to the report, Dogan was a paid agent of the Committee for State Security from August 1974 until March 1988″ (source).
If an intruder has broken into your home are you going to pray that they leave your family alone and simply call 9-1-1 with the hopes that law enforcement will save you? How long will you have before police arrive at your home, office, wherever? In Atlanta, it’s 11 minutes. Nine minutes in Nashville. Quite a lot can happen in that span of time. And we know from the Supreme Court ruling that there isn’t a legal obligation for anyone else to protect your life. Are you OK with those odds? You may be, but I’m not, and I will resist the urge of anyone whose goal is to erode my right to protect myself and my family.
I am not willing to disarm the helpless and punish those who are law-abiding. They are the ones who fall victim to those who chose to flout the law. Guns are neither good nor bad. Motive is. Intent is. Character is. Inanimate objects have no such qualities. Let’s not risk more lives by pretending that “gun control” works. ~ The Dana Show
…As Richard Larsen, in his excellent article, says:
“The limits of presidential declarations, like the EO [Executive Order], were clarified judicially by the landmark 1952 Supreme Court ruling of Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer. By executive order 10340, President Harry Truman declared that all steel mills in the country were to be placed under federal government control. The Supreme Court ruled, however, that the EO was invalid since Truman was essentially creating, or making law, as opposed to clarifying the executive branch enforcement of an existing law.” [emphasis mine]
So, is Obama going to “create” law? Is the law he “creates” going to infringe upon our constitutionally guaranteed right to keep and bear arms. History is NOT on Obama’s side.
Or does Obama understand the phrase, “… shall not be infringed,” and just wants his way?
In 1718 the “Puckle gun,” the first machine gun, appeared. (One could argue that the so-called “assault rifle pre-dated the Second Amendment.) The Colt revolver followed not long after and in the late 1800s the Gatling gun, which fired 200 rounds per minute, appeared on the market. The evolution of firearms was observable during the time that the Constitution was drafted; to argue that the Founding Fathers were unaware of, or not living through, the ever-evolving capabilities of firearms is blatant ignorance of both common sense and fact. Jefferson himself was a noted collector and in letters explained what technological capabilities he favored in pieces over others in his collection. ~ The Dana Show
…Prior to the Civil War, the Bill of Rights only applied to the federal government and that first Congress dropped references to “as allowed by Law” that had been in the English Bill of Rights. The Founders intended that Congress was to make no law curtailing the rights of citizens to keep and bear arms.
The 2nd Amendment, contrary to much of today’s conversation, has just as much to do with the people protecting themselves from tyranny as it does burglars. That is why there is so little common ground about assault rifles — even charitably ignoring the fact that there really is no such thing. If the 2nd Amendment is to protect the citizenry from even their own government, then the citizenry should be able to be armed.
There are plenty of arguments and bodies to suggest that we might, as a nation, need to rethink this. The Founders gave us that option. We can amend the Constitution.
In doing so, we should keep in mind that in the past 100 years Germany, Italy, Russia, Japan, China, and other governments have turned on their people at various times and, in doing so, restricted freedoms starting often with gun ownership. You may think a 30 round magazine is too big. Under the real purpose of the second amendment, a 30 round magazine might be too small.
Regardless, as the President announces how he will curtail the freedoms of the second amendment, we should remember Justice Robert Jackson’s opinion in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624 (1943)
The very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials and to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts. One’s right to life, liberty, and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and assembly, and other fundamental rights may not be submitted to vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections.
