Racketeering 101: How Oregon Voters Are Convinced by Politicians to Allow Themselves to Be Fleeced as Taxpayers

Racketeering 101: How Oregon Voters Are Convinced by Politicians to Allow Themselves to Be Fleeced as Taxpayers There is Double Taxation, Triple Taxation and Now Getting a Separate Bill when You Actually Receive a Government Service Lex Contributor Network . Portlanders may be surprised that the city of Portland is now going to arbitrarily decide who gets a $15 charge for the city cleaning autumn leaves off the city streets. Some people will get charged per pick up cleaning and other will not. No one has any idea what criterion are used to decide who will pay and who will not. One thing is for sure the city used to do it for free for everyone but not anymore. Taxpayers already paid for all the street sweeping trucks and equipment over the years but that does not matter. The greenies tried to run their fantasy of creating a city owned socialist business that would recycle and mulch yard debris and found they were losing money doing it just like a lot of us told them so. So now to keep up the greenie appearances the city wants to find a way to make the impossible show a marginal profit by forcing some citizens but not all to pay for leaf pick up services and street cleaning. In the past several elections, as long as we can remember, the politicians kept telling us that we needed higher and higher taxes to pay for the very services the city now says it can no longer afford to provide even with taxes. That is one great way to run a racket. It is not the first time this has happened. The city and state are now trying to charge people in jail by the night the way hotels do because taxes can't afford to pay for that. Of course your tax money is going somewhere. You pay it. It could have gone to build the OHSU tram which supposedly had to be done by big government for the benefit of society with your money but now it is a business that has to be self sustaining and to ride it you have to pay $4 or more! That is a great racket. You pretend like government should run like a business and then instead you run it as a business. The public pays to build a business and then it has to pay later on to support it. How ingenious. Lawyers must have though of it. It is typically called public works or community investment ,sort for calling it communism, where the community communist benefactors are in business to get rich. Learning how to run a racket is what Portland City and Oregon Politics is all about. As a successful politician everything is a community investment for the public. You charge the public high taxes for project seed money and then to keep the racket going you run the government programs as a business charging for the service offered. It amounts to double and triple taxation and that is really lucrative. The same logic works very well in our public schools in Oregon . You charge the public more than twice the actual cost. You only graduate 60% of the students even when you have 10-15 thousand dollars per student in each class room and then you are always out of money looking more assessments and fees to profit from. When you hear a candidate like Dudley saying he will raise the amount of money going into classrooms while still cutting taxes he may not be lying because more than half the money that goes to Portland public schools as one example never reaches a class room. No one really knows exactly where it goes. It is supposed to be a mystery because voters are usually certain that their elected officials are taking good care of them. It is amazing how much trust there is when the budgets are published and the figures never add up properly. The voters are not stupid they are just being intentionally confused. Go beyond the systematic waste of our public schools in Oregon and then start looking at agencies like the Port of Portland. Portlanders live in a state of complete ignorance. They tend to pay out more in taxes every year to keep a giant for profit profitable business entity running like the Port of Portland. The public does not know that they own this. It consists of lots of industrial land and port facilities and the Portland airport and more and it is one of the biggest industrial outfits in the city. Instead of helping to lower you taxes or paying a dividend to citizens who own it it profits and cost tax payers more each and every year. No one running for governor or mayor in recent memory talks about privatizing the port of Portland and sending out ownership shares to each adult in the Portland district zone that pays for it so instead of owning something collectively that benefits someone else they would instead get about a $400 dividend check a year or be able to sell their shares for a lot more. The public is left in a complete state of ignorance about what is going on with so called public ownership. It is just the way the local media that says it is in business to educate us wants it to be. Why share the profits with the public that owns all of these community investments? That is a really good racket to keep going so why spill the beans and help educate the public that they are being cheated. Though out Oregon we find the same systematic racket. State parks that are publicly owned used to be free even for camping and now there are fees for visiting and for camping. You paid for most of these parks. You own them and you pay taxes every year that originally were supposed to go to keep these open for free for the public. What a great racket! The public does not want anything for the taxes it pays. You can charge them double or triple or quadruple and the will accept a fee on top of a fee to use something that is already owned by them. Then you drive down a Portland city street and you see some strange signs like a street with signs that say call the pothole fixing hot line. Those signs are put up on streets with no pot holes --you never ever see those signs on the streets with the pot holes so large a car can fall into them. The reason is on the streets with out the pothole signs the city will send property owners special assessment bills to get those real pot holes fixed. Those neighbors will never be calling the pot hole emergency hot line for good reason. In front of construction projects even on completely flat land in Portland there are these absolutely stupid "erosion control" signs. The city forces people who do any sort of digging to put up one of these signs and they charge a fee for the service even when it is completely flat with no chance of erosion. It keeps a hole lot of bureaucrats employed with $60,0000 a year wages but the only point is because of the beauty of having yet another racket. Public parking lots were built in down town Portland at public expense originally to offer free parking to keep the downtown core vital. Long ago the city discovered it had a great lucrative racket renting out parking lot management to fee collectors. The public pays three times or more for using their own public property and it only gets worse as the city discovers that parking meters are an excellent way to force more people into public fee parking lots because there is nothing publicly owned that cannot be run as an excellent community business for profit and nothing can stop you from raising taxes even when you are running all these rackets because the rackets merely transfer the benefits to private interests because the rule in Oregon government is that pubic employees are not government workers. Public employees have management jobs. All of them and to manage they have to hire more public employees to do any actual work until the new employees gain seniority and then get to be managers themselves where new public employees have to be hired for them to manage. That racket works very nicely because when actual work has to be done then you have to sub contract work to the private sector and they can just hire ten dollar an hour illegal alien workers from the Portland Work Center in downtown Portland instead of having to pay $40 an hour for a state employee to manage other public employee who manage other public employees who manage hiring private contractors to do any actual work. Racketeering like this has built Oregon's economy into a virtual powerhouse of community investment. The growth areas of Oregon government are now in cradle to grave social services to citizens. The government looks for the neediest and finds it can profit wildly by tapping into social security. The more people particularly the very young and the very old the state can farm into their social aid programs the more they send bills to the federal government to pay for it. It then pays to run a witch hunt looking for abuse of any kind against the young and the old because government can then go out and tax the feds and garnish wages. That racket runs into a multi billion dollar racket that employees private lawyers and social workers galore as private contractors but with all that spending one wonders how the welfare actually reaches the people the state says they are serving . it can't. If you thought something was fishy about the Kryon Horman case costing millions of dollars that has to do with details you are not aware of because you don't know much about how the racketeering business really works. You would think your police would not need to spend millions of dollars on a crime investigation? .. That's because of private contractors coming into do some of the actual work. Nothing pays for anything with your taxes. That money gets siphoned out and all the public employees know how to gain instant wealth with lucrative over time rules. It costs loads of money for public employees to management so many other public employees and to have so few government employees actually doing any actual work at all. It costs so much you can expect your taxes to just keep on going up for ever more and soon you will be getting a separate bill for your home to be visited by a fire department should you have a fire. Yes that is soon coming to Portland Oregon. You can soon expect the public library to start charging a $20 annual fee for a library card because the Internet is harming their business. On the ballot recently is a public assessment to bail out the Oregon Historic Society. This historic society had plenty of money in trust and blew it on bad real estate investments and so it comes to the state asking state voters to approve a public funding plan for their failures. That won't give the public free admission to their museum or library. No way. It gives us yet an publicly owned community Enterprise for someone Else's profits. Once you learn Oregon racketeering 101 you can understand clearly why the Obama health care plan calls 15000 new IRS agents and not for 15000 new medical students to be trained at government expense! You can then understand why the Oregon health plan and the old Medicare waiver turned OHSU into a private practice hospital and a private institution and also why Senator Ron Wyden votes for obama care and then wants a special waiver for "Oregon" which probably does not include you unless you are in the existing Oregon health plan or a government employee. The truth is even weirder because the state of Oregon and cities and counties own huge amounts of Oregon real estate and they rent these out sometimes at less than market value to insiders or they rent them out instead of not collecting taxes on them that would help to reduce other tax payers burden. You might even find public employees living for free in homes the government owns as a fringe benefit. You will find that the city of Portland and multnomah county have telephone book size inventories of private property they own and don't sell to increase the tax base or forests owned by the state that get raped for money that do nothing to reduce your taxes the way it should be. You get no money back the way Alaska state residents do from their state oil and natural gas royalties. Why not? You need to find out just how large the state's property holdings are before you decide this is just a crock because its not. Your state and local governments are controlling a lot of property that should just be sold so that these properties can bring in income from the sale and then provide tax revenues into the future and you don't even know this is happening or you think that it is valid because someone told you it is green. The tax payers,. citizens are getting no benefits from any of their community public ownership of property. Unfortunately you will not hear any of the Oregon politicians addressing this issue. You would hope that someone like Dudley would take a hard look at all the double and triple taxation and at government ownership of public assets they treat as a private business or leave to select private interests that should best be sold but then you remember president Bush giving no bid contracts to Halliburton in the war effort and think all politicians are the same. Its not true. You probably have a better chance electing Dudley if you also vote in the tea party in the legislature otherwise you re doomed to the same old racket going on for ever more. It likely will never end because you are worried about social issues like abortion in the election when it is not even a real issue . The first issue should be putting an end to an unnecessary overly expensive do nothing government that costs too much and to getting your fair share of the publicly owned investment properties you already paid for over the years instead of letting someone else benefit because of what i am trying to teach you about racketeering 101 in this article. Abortion is legal the supreme court said it not the state supreme court it is not an issue but your money being wasted by public schools is a real issue and a special one to consider when you are being taxed for more than two times what their actual expenses are in the class room. That is a real issue and it reduces your money you have left at the end of the year. What do you get for the expense? Less than nothing. If the government won't let you have all the fun running one of their lucrative rackets maybe you should be against them wasting your money on that. Worry about your social issues after you worry about where your money is going. .