Jeff's Recent Thoughts
Moving forward against McNerney
Wednesday March 17, 2010, 1:00 am
The mid-term elections of 2010 are a critical litmus test for the direction our republic is taking. Will we repudiate the bipartisan mutiny against the taxpayer called “stimulus?” Will we reject the attempts to socialize our private health care? Will we defend ourselves against the creeping tendrils of federal power into our lives? Will we dethrone those who continue to defy the will of the voters?
Of late, the Republican Party in Congressional District 11 has a poor track record of delivering anointed candidates to the voters and it is critical that a viable, energetic conservative who has a clear vision and a clean past be chosen to juxtapose the liberal McNerney.
Since I withdrew from the race, I have been contacted by all the remaining relevant candidates and I have advocated hard for responsible, responsive government and a commitment to take up leadership on the most critical environmental and economic issue our district faces – water.
I am pleased to say that all candidates pledged to me their opposition to any sort of Peripheral Canal scheme and the adoption of a water policy that consults the locally elected leaders of the Delta area in any federal agenda or legislation.
I do not necessarily agree with the remaining candidates on all the issues or the order in which they prioritize them, but I have decided that I will pledge my vote for the candidate that I believe is best positioned to defeat McNerney in 2010.
I pledge my vote for Elizabeth Emken.
I will vote for her because she can articulate the damage being done to our economy by reckless federal spending and how to reverse it.
I will vote for her because she has experience in Washington getting our elected representatives to hear the people they represent – and I don’t think she will forget to listen to us in turn.
I will vote for her because she has management experience at a Fortune 500 company.
I will vote for her because her experiences on a dairy farm give her firsthand knowledge of the livelihoods, needs, and desires of my neighbors in the Manteca-Tracy-Ripon corridor and the titans of San Joaquin County agriculture – the dairy farmers.
I will vote for her because she sees public office as an honor bestowed and not an ambition attained.
Elizabeth has demonstrated the fundraising horsepower necessary to win and the wisdom necessary to steward the funds entrusted to her.
Most importantly, Elizabeth is a candidate that the independent voter will not shrink from. Only by re-earning the independent votes that have left the Republican Party and the hard-working blue-collar Democrats can we hope to beat the incumbent. Elizabeth can do this.
I am proud to endorse Elizabeth Emken and I look forward to her defeat of Jerry McNerney in November.
In Liberty – Jeff Takada
NUMI today, gone tomorrow
Thursday March 11, 2010, 9:06 am
It can be said that one’s leadership qualities come to the fore in a crisis. In the impending closure of the NUMMI plant we have an epic crisis. Scores of thousands of skilled workers will be displaced or unemployed in the worst economy since the Great Depression. I’ve been told that the Roman emperor played a fiddle while Rome burned to the ground. All I can say to Congressmen Pete Stark and Jerry McNerney is at least that tyrant had the decency to provide musical accompaniment to the ruination of his district.
While government takeovers of private industry (as in our new not-quite-General Motors) are an abomination to the Constitution, advocating on behalf of one of the most important job providers in the Bay Area is not. While Stark and McNerney supported the takeover of GM, they have not lifted a finger to save the NUMMI goose laying the golden eggs, save a few oddball questions thrown at Toyota executives while they testified on the Hill about an unrelated matter.
I have many questions for these presumptive district representatives:
- Why have you not been working day and night with the Toyota Motor Corporation to save this plant?
- Why have you not advocated on behalf of the thousands of workers and managers in your district to save NUMMI as space for the revitalized General Motors?
- Why have you not been barraging your counterparts in Sacramento to create a more business friendly environment for NUMMI today, and every other prospective manufacturer tomorrow?
I expect these questions will only be answered by smug reassurances, bland counterstatements, and aloof, intellectually dishonest form letters to constituents.
Toyota has said this closure decision is final as of April 1, 2010. I am not going to be able to halt the end result of a shattered economy and the gross negligence of our preening political elite, but I can fight against the deindustrialization of America. Without a productive capacity, our economy will never recover. We were not saved from the Great Depression by lattes, back rubs, and call centers, but by rivet meeting steel. Japan recognizes this and so they are beginning to pull their productive capacity back to the home islands.
This trend will not stop at NUMMI. As Japan and America’s economies continue to plunge into what could become the Depression 2.0, Japan will retreat from our shores to the extent they can. This is why I have proposed and will lead a Congressional Japan Caucus – to work with their government to bring (and keep) the benefits of their high tech gadgetry, industrial production, and innovation here and to share with them the bounty of our agricultural harvests and productive capacity. Such leadership would have forestalled this catastrophic blow to our regional employment figures and our national industry.
It is important for the voters in Central California to understand the extent to which the political class has been struck dumb, eyes glazing over and a stream of drool emerging from their collective mouths as the destruction of the mortgage and banking collapse, years of profligate government waste, and the meltdown of the American working and middle class due to over-taxation and under-representation becomes apparent.
Jeff Takada is a career public school teacher and a grassroots Republican candidate for Congressional District 11.
Tea Parties: The Key to America`s Freedom
Tuesday February 9, 2010, 10:37 pm
I think the Tea Party movement is one of the seminal moments in American political history. There is nothing more fundamentally American than individuals finding common cause in the reinvigoration of the founding principles that made our country a true beacon in history – limited government, a firm commitment to the strength of the working man`s dollar, and that a nation need not be built on greed or fear or violence, but on the simple principle that a government`s purpose is to protect the natural rights of its citizenry.
I guess I was spoiled growing up. I knew nothing about the foibles of Nixon and the malaise of Carter. My baptism into the world of global politics was the so-called Miracle on Ice – the crushing by an upstart collection of American amateurs of the most formidable hockey team in the world, the Soviet Union. My dad explained (as best he could to a toddler) the complexities of the Cold War and the constant threat that lay implicitly over the people of the US and the USSR. I distinctly remember wondering what it would be like when – not if, when – I heard a loud crack and looked out my window to see a mushroom cloud billowing out from behind Mt. Diablo, having consumed San Francisco. In this very uneasy state, I began to watch Ronald Reagan on the television and he struck me (I was a child, mind you) as a kindly, grandfatherly figure. His tone, his mannerisms, and his actions reassured me that my worst fears would not come true. Not because he would prevent it but because WE would prevent it. Being American, standing up for freedom, protecting our allies and friends was a job we could all do; not a job that a president could solve, if only the government had a bit more money or if the people would stop clinging to their rights. Being American was a mindset and Reagan, to my young mind, seemed to be calling us forth to act on the better angels of our nature, not the fears that drove them away.
Since Reagan passed from the political scene, very few men and women in politics have impacted me in the same way. I look for leaders and I see followers. I look for humility and I see hubris. I look for honesty and I see deceit. I look for resolve and I find cowardice. That is why I have stopped looking for direction from a fossilized political elite and see that the answers to the problems we have allowed our leaders to foist upon us can be solved by the same juggernaught that willed the Soviet Union to its knees – Ronald Reagan`s WE. Us. The individual American citizen. We are the posterity for whom the Founding Fathers sought to secure the blessings of liberty and all we have to do is join our voices to those of our neighbors, friends, co-workers, and family and say we want our country back.
This is what the Tea Party movement is all about. The American system of government inherently empowers the citizen by enumerating and offering protections for our natural rights, but there is a growing dread that we have outsourced those protections to a disinterested plutocracy – Wall Street versus Main Street. The power of momentum that the Tea Party movement generates may be enough to allow for a new birth of freedom.
I have said that a major catalyst to me joining the race to become the U.S. Representative from District 11 was a tea party rally held in Modesto in 2009. I watched radio hosts Dave Diamond and Rusty Humphries exhort the crowd not to let the momentum, the energy, the passion of that day die when the crowd dispersed. I wondered who would take them at their word and challenge the political elite with the ideas common to the Tea Party movement – limited government, slashed taxes, a return to Constitutional values, and a retreat of Washington, D.C. out of the storerooms, classrooms, and boardrooms or America. It appears I am the only one – in District 11 anyway. It is a lonely fight. At times it takes me away from my classroom, my family, and thrusts me into the oozing, gaseous realm so comfortable to our grasping political class. Then I think about Reagan and all he meant to me as a youth. He was someone working on my side, with me for a world where self-determination and freedom from fear and oppression were the order of the day. I am no Ronald Reagan, but I have taken a stand and am asking what we together can do to turn this nation back towards the sun and forge a better future for our posterity as the Founding Fathers and Reagan did for theirs.
It’s about health care
Wednesday February 3, 2010, 1:12 pm
At a recent forum in San Ramon, I was asked a question by a member of the audience what was to be done about the health care crisis. Something about that phrase leapt out at me and I had to reevaluate what I was going to say. My response could be summed up in the following paragraph.
The word crisis conjures up images of doctors not doctoring, nurses not nursing, patients going untreated – like a medieval sanatorium. We do not have this condition in America. Almost 300 million people in this country have available to them the finest medical establishment in the history of the world. The crisis is not in health care – the crisis is in the cost of health care and the two responsible maladies are both directly attributable to the federal government and Congress in particular.
HMOs are roundly criticized today as being the evil, soulless bureaucracies that prevent egalitarian medical treatment of all, but you must remember that Congress itself created the HMO system we know today with the HMO Act of 1973. Prior to that, medical practice was still very market oriented, because the free market over the course of our Republic had set it up that way. Doctors made house calls and took on charity and hardship cases, religious and humanitarian groups built and managed hospitals (it’s not a mystery why so many have religious names), and costs were managed by the simple fact that if one provider charged you too much, you simply went to his competitor. HMOs do prevent many of these workable facets of our former system from functioning today, but it must be understood that Congress’ initial meddling was what has gotten us into “crisis” mode.
The second reason for skyrocketing health care is inflation. Prices have been inflating, at a faster or slower rate for 100 years. The dollar is now only worth five percent of what it was when the Federal Reserve willed itself into existence on the pretext of preventing inflation. They have failed in their mission and we are paying the cost – in increasingly worthless dollars. This overall economic trend will necessarily have a negative effect on the cost of medical services and pharmaceuticals. By refusing to reign in the Federal Reserve and its inflationary practices, by fostering runaway government spending, which facilitates the spread of those inflated dollars into the marketplace, and by basing our national ledger on debt and borrowing rather than on wealth and industry, Congress has created a perfect storm.
The climax of this tragi-comedy is that culprit that created this storm is now selflessly preaching to the people that only it can save them – if only they surrender their free market principles, rights to privacy, and their quaint desire not to be treated in the ER or the obstetrics wing as they are at the DMV.
As if it weren’t bad enough that our pilots seem intent on wrecking the ship of our medical establishment on the shoals of big government, there are sharks in the water too – I’m talking about trial lawyers. Why don’t doctors take on charity cases in the US anymore? Because they could be ruined by the first grifter that came along. How effective can a surgeon be when he must glance over his proverbial shoulder to see if an attorney is wagging his finger at him?
I want to conclude by saying that the problem we face is a major one with no quick fixes – at least not when the fix is in from Washington. But when I take your message to Capitol Hill, I will work hard to see that all medical expenses are tax deductible, Health Savings Accounts are available to all Americans should they so choose, and that employers can deduct contributions to your health plans from their taxes.
In the future, I would like very much to continue this discussion about the dangerous and un-Constitutional nature of government run health care, especially a conversation I had with a student recently on the subject. Please let me know what you think. I look forward to hearing from you.
We Need Water: The County of San Joaquin Burns
Monday January 25, 2010, 10:44 pm
The water situation in California’s Central Valley is becoming increasingly serious. We in San Joaquin County are simply one flood, one earthquake, one more big drought away from a major shift in the economy and livelihood of this vital breadbasket.
The Delta water recedes (or is less useable) due to several reasons:
- A serious, multi-year drought in the region.
- A more serious drought in the south of the valley, where unsustainable agricultural practices soak up water like a sponge.
- Urban and suburban sprawl in the south of the state and here at home.
This has led to a bevy of problems for the state, including:
- A plummeting water table under Stockton and eastern San Joaquin County. This has permanent consequences for agriculture and sustainable housing in the area.
- Increasing salinity which means species and habitat degradation, more reliance on expensive out-of-the-area water, permanent damage to aquifers and soil, and increasing energy costs as desalinization becomes standard for groundwater use.
- Increasing pressure from southern California to renegotiate by mediation or judicial or legislative fiat the senior and historic water rights that give precedence to area of origin and flow.
- The destruction of multi-million dollar river and San Francisco Bay fisheries, including the formerly lucrative Bay herring fishery that has closed.
The Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta is the heart pumping blood to the extremities of the state. Almost two-thirds of Californians are reliant on water that comes through the Delta. Already, bureaucratic gridlock and environmental wrangling have prevented critical storage projects, aquifer recharging initiatives, and conjunctive use proposals from seeing the light of day. While this fiddling proceeds, the County of San Joaquin burns. We watch our water flow unused to San Francisco Bay or scoot past us down the California Water Project conveyances while our vines wither and our groundwater reaches the terminal pool.
It is as though the team of doctors operating on this patient from Sacramento and Washington, D.C. have determined that the hands and feet are in more critical need of blood than the heart. But I can tell you that when the heart stops beating – the aquifers merge and harden, the ecosystems collapse, and agribusiness uproots and leaves – we will find a withered corpse of an economy too mummified to revive.
Without the political will and the voice of the united people, we know that this will happen. Look at Owens Valley. Look at large swaths of Montana. Look at the dustbowls of Depression Era America. Jared Diamond tells us in his book “Collapse” that human civilizations will invariably and inexorably consume their resources until the society itself is no longer sustainable. We here in San Joaquin County know this and are feeling the clammy hand of insatiable southern water interests clasping at the very beating heart of our livelihood and economy.
Water is not a sexy or profound topic, but it is essential – as essential as the air we breathe. Americans cannot secure the blessings of liberty our forefathers fought for if we do not have the basic elements necessary for survival.
It is for this reason that water and the protection of the vital Delta region is central to my campaign to represent the 11th District. We cannot win this fight if we bicker over the “greens” or the “evil businessmen.” Both ideologues want water to flow into the Delta. Only after we secure that, should we feel comfortable enough to fall back into the old “Green vs. Mean” argument. If we allow ourselves to be divided, as some running for the same office as me have suggested, we will lose. All of us will lose.
Please follow my campaign and the principled fight for water that I have launched.
Today Scott Brown – Next up: CD-11
Tuesday January 19, 2010, 10:11 pm
I’m looking at the results coming in from the Senate race in Mass. and WOW! Scott Brown has done what no commentator thought possible a few months ago. This is almost like the Red Sox winning the Series – now Bostonians and Republicans can celebrate together; not just a stunning upset and victory, but the first steps on a long road to freeing our country from the self-important, encrusted politicos who view the public vote as a plaything and not the lion’s roar of a sovereign people.
The motto of my dark horse candidacy to beat liberal Democrat Jerry McNerney in Congressional District 11 is `Take back the Hill.` It’s a war cry and a call to action and the people of one of the most left-leaning states in the Union just joined the chorus.
Wouldn’t it be great if we here in CD-11 could be part of the army of conservative, Constitution-grounded voters reclaiming their party and Capitol Hill for limited government, sound money, and individual liberty? I think that’s a possibility. Republican Chairman Steele said it won’t be possible, but I feel that the frustration, tension and disappointment in government as usual has reached a boiling point.
Massachusetts tonight was the shot heard round the world. Let`s make CD-11, the hottest Congressional race in California, the Gettysburg, the Midway, the D-Day – the turning point – of the encroaching leftist tide. Let`s take back the Hill!
Follow the race at www.takada2010.com and help us win this fight against hand-picked establishment politicos and their Democratic counterparts – contribute $17.76 on a one time or monthly basis and let us know how you`d like to volunteer.
In Liberty – Jeff Takada