Once the money gets into the hands of the City, the issue is, where does that money ends up at? Inside the City limits, the Department, or the Barrio? What should be the role of the City Council? If the funding from HUD through Community Development Block Grant programs is for low-and-moderate-income citizens, then neither the City at large (Republican goal) nor the City Department (Democrat goal) should be among the recipients. However, it’s more than just recipiency. It’s wise investment, but to the Democrat politician, it was a source of power and the City staff represented more power than the residents, except for votes, which can be bought with that money and promises.
The Democrat politician recognizes that when residents no longer need city assistance, their allegiances may shift, especially as a previously dependent constituency is now becoming independent. I was getting the impression that “individual independence” among the poor was a bad word for the Democrats. The City staff and the 10 dissenters enhancing displacement in the Neighborhood found themselves on the same side on this issue. Why? Because of the money involved. Wealthy Anglos also like handouts. I could only assume that some of the dissidents expected a better chance at getting some of that money to do work on their properties from the City Department, or they simply resented whoever was getting it. This is human nature. The same thing would happen to “minority groups” when they don’t get it. Like us. As we did things, we represented a majority in numbers in a neighborhood representing a minority in the City, but in income, not in race or even culture, and that was the guidelines of HUD.
What we fail to comprehend is the camel whose nose is coming underneath the tent, is the fulfillment of Alinsky’s desire to do away with the middle class, which is to keep everyone poor. Fix houses, but not jobs, a gain for those in control. On the other hand, administratively, at the local scale, I must agree that civilians don’t always do a better job than city employees, or that corruption could be equal on both sides. It takes consciousness, and on the national scale, patriotism. In our case, we did a better job, and the only valid answer is that if you want to win, never, never, never give up! But be fair and ethical.
Much has been written about Keynesian Economics which, among other things, says that: “Keynes advocated increased government expenditures and lower taxes to stimulate demand and pull the global economy out of the Depression.”
My imperfect understanding of this theory is that it states that the government (with our taxes) should take a commanding role in managing and promoting economic policy, while creating infrastructure projects like highways and bridges, etc. While they are good things, my personal experience is that this is mostly a bunch of baloney. The government consists of politicians and bureaucrats whose experience is not on how to make money, nor even on well-functioning government management, but on how to protect their own positions and cover their rear ends. Business thrives, or dies, by growth based on success in competition. Government employees may compete for job titles. They don’t compete for economic growth. Only a businessperson would know well how to run an economy.
There have been a few exceptions to this rule, such as the original development and maintenance of the Interstate Transportation System, one of the recognized wonders that has led the USA to economic world power, initiated by Eisenhower, a military, not a businessman. Unfortunately, it caused the demise of many by-passed small towns. However, it helped enhance the unity among states. Try to get the European nations to do the same with roads and overcome their bickering! Similarly, the Internet may create a communication artery worldwide, but this is not globalization, for each country should requires, as each of the states in the U.S. did, to retain their sovereignty. Scale matters, and so does competition. One global government attempting to provide unity would be a disaster, as it is the wrong kind of monopoly. In fact, it will be Global Dictatorship! Again, the camel’s nose under the tent. Keeping the international poverty line high is desirable for globalists who want an international tax, choosing winners and loser, and central unopposed authority.
Democrats often come up with good social programs. The first generation of good, efficient, public servants get the ball rolling. Thereafter they are run by bureaucrats. Some are good, some are not, but their incentives are seldom in the right place. This is a pessimistic look at conditions in the real world, but just as a benevolent dictator can be the most efficient form of government if he or she is smart, just, and honest, so could good government officials in a democracy. However, the good ones are the exception.
How many can you count? I can think of Dan Benitez and his staff being inefficient, just as Benitez thought that we, the sub-recipients, were inefficient. Yet, efficiency is only part of it, the broader objective is much more significant.
My 20-60-20 Theory applies to bureaucracies. In helping the community, I would place Dan in the 60 percentiles. He was not outstanding in his job, nor was he a leader in developing work ethics among his staff. However, he got rid of sub-recipients as dictated to him by his bosses, that’s what he was hired to do, so I would place him in the upper 20% efficient, even if not in our favor. His bosses selected what his leadership would dictate, in which way the 60% influenced by him would go on, and that 60% leaned towards preventing rather than stimulating citizen participation. Bureaucracies in general do not promote citizen’s participation because it complicates their life.
Almost any system can work well if run properly, but the people’s weakness for corruption is so potent that some systems fail sooner than others. The reason capitalism works better than other systems is simply because it operates in a free society within a free market, and despite the presence of corruption, it has competition, it is not controlled by monopolies, and it works within a system of balance of power. With capitalism, necessary regulations are kept to a minimum and are administered to prevent monopolies. Socialism and communism are simply governmental monopolies. Competition allows the small but smart entrepreneur to grow faster and flourish more than socialist-controlled businesses due to the ambition of the creative and hard-working individual. If you do not succeed at first, never, never give up! It is up to the consumer who votes for good business by purchasing the product.
Never, never give up! Free to get up and start again!
In voting with our money, we encourage the invention of a better nail clipper, since people will buy it. Those involved get their paychecks. Thus, successful entrepreneurs contribute to the trickle up. The enemies are corruption, monopolies, and an interfering government. There is also the amoral enemy infiltrating slowly through the ranks of bureaucracy, but that is beyond the scope of this book (or is it?). I just want to point out that there is more than a casual parallel between the small-scale Barrio struggle and the affairs of world governments. The enemy from within.
Unfortunately, competition does not exclude corruption. A good justice system and law and order are necessary. From the government, we need no favoritism, no cronyism, no allowing monopolies, no selecting winners nor losers, not a separate justice for those in power. No imposing equality, only true equity.
The only legal monopoly is the government! It has no competition, except other countries, and it is saturated with bureaucrats. The ideal of “civil servants” who dedicate their lives to serve a system directed by “for the people by the people” was destroyed by the public unions in the government sector. Let me explain. Public unions are an enemy to the free market, because they serve a legal monopoly. As compared to public unions, the private sector unions must be credited with a significant amount of advances in fair wages, safety, and protection for workers that we now enjoy. This is not the case with public sector unions.
What keeps the private sector unions honest is the third leg of the stool, which is the free market, - the balance of powers.
There are three legs:
1) the business owner,
2) the workers, and
3) the free market.
You need all three. The unions give power to the workers to balance the power of the owner, but that power is balanced by the fact that if they ask for too much, the price of goods go up too much and the consumer stops buying the product. The company ends in bankruptcy, and everyone experience losses. To survive competition, the price of the product is what the free market will support, or people will buy something else. Government monopoly of choosing winners or losers causes derailments of the free market, like a flat tire.
However, the unions in the public sector (government, schools, etc.) are a two-legged stool: unbalanced! The government is a monopoly and has no competition. Then the unions give political contributions to the party that will favor them. That political party enacts laws that favor the unions, who then give more contributions to the politicians who favor them. Once this back and forth decides the result of an election, you have a vicious circle with only two legs.
Therefore, the public unions expand enormous power which they can use for personal gain and not for the benefit of the public (or the students). When public unions reach a limit in salary increase, and benefits, they opt for the “You can’t fire even an incompetent teacher,” thus ignoring the students.
Other enemies of the free market, hindering the stability of the three-legged stool, are the lobbyists. These folks sell themselves to the highest bidders on behalf of big business and can dissuade legislation with large gifts. This is a recipe for fraud. Contrary to popular belief, both Democrats and Republicans are involved in big business and the cronyism that goes along with it. Big business can pay for legal expertise (and political contributions) to navigate restrictive regulations that strangles smaller competing businesses, ending up helping banks that are too big to fail, and so on. Thus, regulations need to be kept to the necessary minimum and be equitable. Regulations should guide and protect fair competition and not stifle it.
The TBA experienced the necessity of lobbying to win the race for funding. You can argue with validity that elected officials can’t travel all the time to know the details for each legislation. Someone must summarize it and explain it to them. However, when high-powered, well-paid attorneys have the exorbitant money to wine and dine at a high scale, or buy lots of coffee like we did on a smaller scale, secretly offer bribes to a politician, like a beautiful Barrio photograph, but at a higher scale, and buy the media, pay for TV adds, flattering articles, plane tickets, vacations, and other costly perks, then the public at large is left out. It works.
We used creativity. Not large amounts of money, but where do you draw the line on the scale of the bribes? Our competition didn’t have much money either, but if they did, we would not have had a chance. The public is also left out when the “experts in the field” insert the irrelevant self-serving attachments at the last minute to a non-related bill for which their peers need their vote to pass, the so-called bacon. This common practice should be illegal!
Surprisingly, a third of the enemy to the free market is the media. Rather than provide valuable information on how the market works, because they know little about that, they take sides based on ideology and fail to fully and neutrally inform the public. Instead, they tell a partial story and explain with bias. A good example of this is when the media covers the political argument of increasing the minimum wage, without fully explaining the pros and cons of this governmental interference. When the media ‘informs’, it may cover the three-legs of the stool, but when it ‘misinforms’, it omits one leg, which results in creating instability.
“The media” is not synonymous with “free speech.”
Who determines if the media is using free speech responsibly? Where is the balance of power when free speech is abused by false news? Why gun control ‘yes’ and word control ‘no’? It must be ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to both.
Saul Alinsky knew how to abuse the use of speech. He openly exploited this loophole when he advocated in Ethics of Means and Ends stating: “(# 11) Goals must be phrased in general terms like ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, Of the Common Welfare, Pursuit of Happiness, or Bread and Peace”. In other words: lie, deceive, deceive, and deceive. He also says, “The end justifies almost any means.” When the Media begins to blur the line separating reporting from an opinion piece and begin to give opinionated reporting, Alinsky’s influence hurts. A media that abuses their freedom of speech is not a friend of the recipient. When they do so to an extreme, they become a legal enemy of freedom!
The reason the Barrio experiment did work is complex, but it may contradict part of my previous statements, including the part about keeping the government out of it. It was a CDBG Government Grant we were using, among others, however, the real fuel was not the money. The government money made much of it possible as a catalyst, but the real fuel was the respect and confidence of the individuals involved, faith in the belief that if you provide the opportunity and the incentive, those individuals will rise to a higher level[xlii].
The City did more intense work on less houses, but other benefits would be missing, as well as the quality of the contractors. After my experiences with the rehab crew, I kept trying to understand why some things work while others do not. Specially, why kids respond differently to respectful treatment and why, when given the tools and the freedom to excel, they perform better.
I found out that in their case, their enemy from within was their choice to not to perform well other than for the benefit of their own group or culture.
Selective government funding can at times enhance the dynamics of free market competition, mostly when it acts as an incentive, but it just as easily ensnares and creates imbalance and become an enemy of liberty. The reason is that government function is to protect freedom, not to dictate behavior.
The real value of the free market is felt when corruption is kept at bay. All the bad and negative examples of the free market are based on examples of corruption. Fortunately, because of competition, corruption in a business cannot control the entire market. Corruption is limited to that one company, and no matter how big it gets, before monopoly, others can provide the same product or service. Not so when a government interferes by choosing winners and losers, instead of keeping a level playing field. As the only monopoly, by the people for the people, its main role is to prevent monopolies. In our democracy, only an honest government can prevent monopolies from forming, and only the voters can keep the government honest. The responsibility rests on the shoulders of the individual voter. You and me!
Here is where Ray’ theory comes into play. In the United States, socialism will creep in through the back door, by big government and big business will scheme to form monopolies, where the owners controlling the monopolies get loopholes in exchange for letting the government pretend to control business but calling them “too big to fail.” It is all a farce.
When a corporation gets so big that it can corrupt willing government officials, who were elected to the only legal monopoly – the government, we have problems!
“He who permits himself to tell or accept a lie once…” And the lies grow. Therefore, the voters must be ever vigilant.
We saw this with the TBA and the ten members of United Neighborhood, who opposed the TBA, who were fighting to improve their own lot in life as well, which is not bad, but they wanted to grab the funds, and not to compete by the rules. They considered themselves liberals, just like I did, and some, wealthy enough, wanted to deprive those for whom it was specifically intended: the low- and moderate-income families. Both money and power. If they resented anyone who leveled the playing field as un-American and anti-entrepreneurship and free market for giving funds to a specific economic group, they would have been correct. But such was the nature of the City’s request for funds from HUD, and it would be hypocritical after getting the funds, to then try to change the rules. The TBA went along with the Federal Government’s guidelines for low- and moderate-income level, with no discrimination for race, color, sex, age, or religious belief, but yes for income as intended. Our records, inspected by eight different City units, support these facts.
Accepting other cultures into the Barrio risked displacement, for those not versed in the Barrio culture could try to dilute elements of the previous culture. However, the more present danger was the influx of rich, liberal, educated kids who would grab and grab and would walk away with the benefits of these funds. We got their animosity and resentment that our project was approved to utilize HUD money for assisting lower income people, not them.
As an organizer, you have the power to control and manipulate, you try to evaluate where things are heading and who is behind that direction, and if you don’t take part in it, rest assure that others will. You must constantly fight the tendency to tell people what to do, and to prevent mixing race with income, a flaw you should never fall into. Again, if you bring race into the issue from either side, even if you think it is to do good, you throw sugar in the engine. The original question remains: Is displacement good or bad, and for whom? What is the result of displacement? Who ends up in control? History shows over and over that when one group is displaced, another one group takes its place, catering to its own leaders and own needs, for no fragmented and diversified group can last long. As we have learned, diversity needs a common goal to be a wholeness. Therefore, level the playing field, share the power, fortify your character and cater to your common goal, create the environment for promoting widespread individual self-fulfillment, with tools for existing residents, and don’t give any free stuff to anyone.
Once more, any organizer could ask, what kind of national culture do you want? Those of the majority or of the minority? To think that if a so-called minority culture prevails by replacing another one, things would be better, is a delusion. While to strengthen an existing culture to hold their own is commendable. To elaborate a previous observation, we must study carefully what will be replaced by what, and to know that things are seldom what they appear to be. Replacing a majority by a previous minority may not be an improvement. A consortium of minorities will create a power struggle which the new Elite will win and will stay in power by suppressing all the others. Not better. However, a democratic evolution is possible, if done ethically, keeping core values, and under an unbiased higher unifying factor. This is what America is all about. The key is the higher unifying factor, as the preamble to our Constitution says it: We are all created equal.
Let’s examine other’s efforts. What the dissenting minority group of Neighborhood United did could be commendable for bringing alternatives to the table and confronting what was being done. Good for them! How they did it and what their intentions were was for the residents of the Neighborhood to support or reject. Their effect in the numbers of displacement they caused started small and innocent. However, their numbers were growing, displacing the original residents, leading to what is called gentrification. I did well to a point, but not as well as I should have. My mistakes were too many. In trying to prevent displacement, which is the nature of organic life. I was trying to spread the power, so that if displacement took place, it would be by the free and equal choice of those moving in or out.
If you think I may be harsh on myself, look at others who have done much more. All those who have given their lives to keep an independent nation, for a country free of slavery, keeping all of us free and alive. Are we making their sacrifice worth it? The country is, but are we? I did very little compared to them, and I was just going along doing my best. With nothing to start, I had nothing to lose. Any good soldier, good policeman, good firefighter who is risking life, or loosing limbs for the rest of their live, is doing much more than I ever did. We could be displaced by a conquering nation, although not likely thanks to our military and widespread gun ownership. Legal immigration will continue to keep this country moving forwards, fighting to keep the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution with the Bill of Rights alive, for that is what gave us our continuing growth and freedom. But we can get conquered by our own government, and illegal immigration keeps the power only to those at the top. The enemy from within will attempt to dislocate our freedom with a different ideology if we are not vigilant. The capillary action infiltrating the base of our core values of family, God, and country.