Hostile Takeover

A staffer brought a book to our attention and it started the ABG water cooler conversation that so often spills into a spirited “war room” type of debate. This time it took a twist. Christina said it sounded like Greenburgh to a “T” and insisted we post it. Bill thought it a lazy exercise as it merited recognition but was hardly worthy to post, as we hadn’t penned it. As so often happens, it came down to a coin toss. Christina called tails while the coin was in mid-air. Tails won.

This post is a small portion adaptation from a free excerpt from Matt Kibbe’s book, “Hostile Takeover”. While there was certainly more to it, and it leans too heavily in one direction, we’ve truncated it, utilizing a small portion of it. If interested in reading more or even purchasing the book, you can find the entire prologue at www.freedomworks.org. We are not endorsing this site or book and have not been offered anything to mention it here. We’ve added Town-appropriate inserts in orange where we felt it applicable.

Prologue: The Hostile Takeover

Imagine a once successful Greenburgh, long ago built on the principles of hard work, growth, and innovation, that has grown arrogant, fat, and happy from earlier successes. Achievement, once sought out, strived for, rewarded, is now assumed as given. But there are telltale signs of trouble: Expenditures are skyrocketing even in the face of declining revenues. Debt servicing now dominates the Town’s balance sheet. Leadership has been replaced with a stultifying bureaucracy Paul Feiner and the Board, and hard work has given way to cynicism and complacency among the rank and file. Taxpayers no longer want to buy what senior management Paul Feiner is selling. There was a time when things were good. “The customer is always right,” was the mantra that drove the Town’s culture, and Paul Feiner and the Board vigilantly guarded against unnecessary spending, any hint of waste, or any deviation from the core mission of the Town. But now continued success is treated as a birthright, and innovation has been replaced with an aggressive sales pitch for tired ideas and bad decisions that taxpayers don’t want. It is a story that plays out time and again in the life cycle of a Town. Over time, innovators are replaced by bureaucrats, Paul Feiner, and future managers, Commissioners, lose sight of the values and principles that made the venture strong in the first place…

  

Paul Feiner and his Board at Greenburgh was a smart, eloquent, fantastic politician, but he didn’t know anything about management. The same thing happened at Xerox. When the sales guys run the company, the product guys don’t matter so much, and a lot of them just turn off. It happened at Apple when [John] Sculley came in … and it happened when [Steve] Ballmer took over at Microsoft.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? In Greenburgh, our political management has failed taxpayers, attempting to replace founding principles with a slick sales pitch for tired, bad ideas. The Town enterprise grew exceptional based on the bedrock foundations of individual freedom, decentralized knowledge, and accountable, constitutionally limited government. But our “Paul Feiner and the Board” in Greenburgh, have systematically replaced the dispersed genius of Greenburgh with top down dictates and expensive schemes designed to expand the power of insiders  and protect the privileged positions of Paul Feiner and the Board. Paul Feiner has failed us, and it’s time to clean house.

The Greenburgh people know that it’s time to shake up Paul Feiner and the Board, and as taxpayers we are acting swiftly to protect our interests and those of our children. But entrenched Paul Feiner and the Board— everywhere inside the Town, but particularly in the communities of Greenburgh—is circling the wagons. They don’t want change. Solutions are being ignored, and residents and taxpayers rebuffed. We know where our problems begin, and they begin in Town Hall, with a Town Board that has neither the will nor the inclination to do what must be done. But we do. And so our taxpayers needs to take over the Town. Blithely ignoring our entreaties, Paul Feiner and the Board in Town Hall say: “no thanks, we got this.” Our taxpayers multiple and repeated proposals have been roundly rejected by Paul Feiner and the Town Board, the microphone has been shut off, name placards removed, conference tables broken down, and naysayers herded out the front doors. In effect, Greenburgh has been thrown out of its own shareholders meeting. Things are getting, in the parlance of corporate governance, “hostile.”

It’s only “hostile” because the interests in Greenburgh—the political class, the rent-seekers, the power-hoarders, the government-employees-for-life, the moochers and looters—like things just the way they are. Paul Feiner and the Town Board bemoan the mere presence of citizens with better ideas and the will to implement them is viewed as a hostile act.

The only way we will ever reduce the debt, balance the budget, and restore constitutionally limited government is if the Town’s resident first beats Town Hall.

In the private sector, a “hostile takeover” seeks a controlling interest in a publicly traded company against the wishes of the current management. When you think about it this way, it seems like a perfect description of what needs to be done to take back control of our government. In our democratic republic, the people need to get involved again… We need to pry it from the hands of well-heeled career politicians that would block the unwashed nouveau from getting riche, through higher tax rates and government imposed barriers to success.

Know that “We the People” will not consent to this fiscal mismanagement by Paul Feiner and the Town Board, just like the citizen activists who did not consent to Crown-protected monopoly tea, choosing, instead, to spill it into Boston Harbor. We will not subjugate our voices to the whims of a Paul Feiner and the Town Board. We will not be silenced.

The taxpayers need to take Greenburgh back. We need to break up the privileged collusion of Greenburgh insiders and return power from self-appointed “experts,” back to the people.

We can only hope.