By: John Kass
Excerpts
When President Barack Obama hauled off and slapped American small-business owners in the mouth the other day, I wanted to dream of my father.
But I didn’t have to close my eyes to see my dad. I could do it with my eyes open.
All I had to do was think of the driveway of our home, and my dad’s car gone before dawn, that old white Chrysler with a push-button transmission. It always started, but there was a hole in the floor and his feet got wet in the rain. So he patched it with concrete mix and kept on driving it to the little supermarket he ran with my Uncle George.
He’d return home long after dark, physically and mentally exhausted, take a plate of food, talk with us for a few minutes, then flop in that big chair in front of the TV. Even before his cigarette was out, he’d begin to snore.
The next day he’d wake up and do it again. Day after day, decade after decade. Weekdays and weekends, no vacations, no time to see our games, no money for extras, not even forMcDonald’s. My dad and Uncle George, and my mom and my late Aunt Mary, killing themselves in their small supermarket on the South Side of Chicago.
There was no federal bailout money for us. No Republican corporate welfare. No Democratic handouts. No bipartisan lobbyists working the angles. No Tony Rezkos. No offshore accounts. No Obama bucks.
Just two immigrant brothers and their families risking everything, balancing on the economic high wire, building a business in America. They sacrificed, paid their bills, counted pennies to pay rent and purchase health care and food and not much else. And for their troubles they were muscled by the politicos, by the city inspectors and the chiselers and the weasels, all those smiling extortionists who held the government hammer over all of our heads.
I thought about this after I heard what Obama told a campaign crowd the other day, speaking about business owners and why they were successful.
“You didn’t get there on your own,” Obama said. “I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.
“If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.”
If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that? Somebody else made that happen?
Somebody else, Mr. President? Who, exactly? Government?
One of my earliest memories as a boy at the store was that of the government men coming from City Hall. One was tall and beefy. The other was wiry. They wanted steaks.
We didn’t eat red steaks at home or yellow bananas. We took home the brown bananas and the brown steaks because we couldn’t sell them. But the government men liked the big, red steaks, the fat rib-eyes two to a shrink-wrapped package. You could put 20 or so in a shopping bag.
“Thanks, Greek,” they’d say.
That was government.
We didn’t go to movies or out to restaurants. Everything went into the business. Uncle George and dad never bought what they could not afford. The store employed people, and the workers fed their families and educated their children and put them through college. They were good people, all of them. We worked together and worked hard, but none worked harder than the bosses.
It’s the same story with so many other businesses in America, immigrants and native-born. The entrepreneurs risk everything, their homes, their children’s college funds, their hearts, all for a chance at the dream: independence, and a small business of their own.
Most often, they fail and fall to the ground without a government parachute. But some get up and start again.
When I was grown and gone from home, my parents finally managed to save a little money. After all those years of hard work and denying themselves things, they had enough to buy a place in Florida and a fishing boat in retirement. Dad died only a few years later. You wouldn’t call them rich. But Obama might.
Obama’s changed. Gone is that young knight drawing the sword from the stone, selling Hopium to the adoring media, preaching an end to the broken politics of the past. These days, he wears a new presidential persona: the multimillionaire with the Chicago clout, playing the class warrior, fighting for that second term.
And he offers an American dream much different from my father’s. Open your eyes and you can see it too. He stands there at the front of the mob, in his shirt sleeves, swinging that government hammer, exhorting the crowd to use its votes and take what it wants.
Link to Article and Video:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/ct-met-kass-0718-20120718,0,2313230.column
This article? John Kass didn’t write that. Somebody else made that happen.
Whoever he was he got the car right. My family had a Plymouth station wagon that had the same push button transmission and rust holes in the floor. Worst car we ever owned.
My comment was a joke satirizing Obama’s recent foot-in-mouth quote.
Not really funny when you have to explain it. 😀
I wonder if the only business that the government has been responsible fir its success is those that end in CPA?
And lawyers. Neither of which help the economy grow.
The mask is off. Barack Obama has staked his hopes of getting reelected on a program of further dividing the country. On, as John Kass so aptly states, “slapping business owners in the mouth”, while selling his bill of goods that HE will be the one who determines who gets what in this society, and that hard work and personal financial risk does not make you any more valuable to this country than the family down the street who has been on public assistance for generations.
He is hoping that political correctness and the race-card will be enough to silence his critics. The fact is, that anyone who knows anything about Barack Obama’s formative years and the people who influenced his world view, know that the apple did not fall far from the tree. Obama’s values and goals stand in stark contrast to the values and goals the founders of this country laid down in our Constitution. Those gentlemen staked all they had on “equal opportunity”, and nowhere gave any consideration to “equal outcome”.
Many of those gentlemen, after providing extraordinary service to the country they created, passed from this life without a penny to their name, while more recent immigrants, through hard work and vision, were amassing new wealth for themselves.
Obama’s vision for the United States is not my vision for the country! Nor was it my father’s or my grandfather’s vision for the country.
Whether he will be successful in dividing the country into two camps, those who believe in equal opportunity, and those who believe in equal outcome, remains to be seen. The stakes could not be any higher in this election.
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Obama has passed more small business and entreprenurial tax credits and incentives than any president in history. You all need to get over yourselves.
Obama does not have a clue what small business needs. He passed stupid things that did not work because he never has had a real job and does not get it. The clueless one didn’t really have a chance when it comes to promoting entrepreneurship. We did get what we voted for though. All show and no substance.
All of this political crap is getting to me…I tried to escape at the movies watching the new Batman, however, the central theme played into the mob taking back what was theirs. They were rioting in Gotham instead of on Wall Street for what they were told was theirs. It is sad that so many people don’t really hear what Obama says! He swings into the campaign mode and people are in a trance while he spouts nonsense. God Help America!!
Thanks for telling about the movie. It sounds like the producers are feeding the idiot masses of bobble heads that are hypnotized by Obama’s preacherman style. Wasn’t it the preacherman that Obama adored that said God Damn America as opposed to God Help America. Well God Damn the writer/producer that turned what could have been a good movie into a endorsement for an entitlement society. BOYCOT BATMAN!!
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