Don’t Imitate Them!
Even when you have to fight fire with fire.
The Fun Part Starts -
Can Government Act Like Criminals?
Talking about creating a wedge. The next and last year for me, was an explosive and rowdy experience. I had to be careful. The Adobero Yard was a running business on its own. The 32 ex-working force of kids were now better qualified to go and find work elsewhere, and so they did, but most of them stayed living in the Barrio. Good! The Tool Library was kept alive by the members of the SHH Family Group and every other homeowner. The TBA Board continued meeting monthly as volunteers administering the loan collections and revolving the funds into new loans, and once those loans were being paid, it was TBA administered money and the City had no claim to them. Residents never defaulted on a loan. We had a Sunday brunch every Sunday and often a Fiesta in the Parquesito Del Tiradito. Five of us got involved with the creation and evolution of the Neighborhoods Coalition of Greater Tucson, a larger organization consisting of 118 Neighborhoods from all over the City, but after helping create it, my energy was totally dedicated to making sure the Self-Help Housing Group finished and inhabited their houses. They had been working for one and a half years, and there was much yet to do.
Before long, a somewhat negative article came out in the newspaper, hinting at irregularities and criticisms despite the excitement and energy of the families, and putting in question the families’ ability to succeed due to their origin, or minority inferiority. I wrote a letter to the author of the article and attempted to correct some of the misconceptions and misinformation in the article. I was polite, or so I thought. The article author’s response was simple. She took my letter and with a red pencil she circled every misspelling I had made. There were an embarrassing bunch of red circles. It is not a good idea to send a letter until you have cooled down. Then she added, in her own handwriting, “Misspellings is a sign of low intelligence.” I liked her humor, so I called her for a personal meeting, and she accepted. When we met, she was much younger than I had imagined, just like me a few years ago, probably fresh out of college. We spoke some, then I asked her if she could draw.
“Not really. I’d rather write,” she said.
I took a blank piece of paper, and I drew a three-dimensional perspective view of the corner in a kitchen with cabinets, a sink, windows, ceiling, and plates drying in a plate holder. I gave her the drawing and said, “The capacity to visualize in three-dimensions is a sign of superior intelligence.” Of course, that is hyperbole, and not necessarily true, but she was too young to know better. She didn’t say another word and left. I never saw her again, nor did she write about the Barrio again, but that was not the last article in the papers. Soon thereafter, there was another un-complementary article about a family group who were forced to work to build their own house instead of the City just giving them one. The implication was that this was a sad group of people who had somehow been abused. I called the reporter and asked if she had talked to any of the families. She said, “no.” Where do reporters get their information? Or their training?
“Would you mind coming over and talking to a few of them? I can call them in as a group, so you can talk to several in a short time.”
“I’ll love to do so,” she said.
She was not as young as the other reporter but still under thirty, and as she walked into the room with four of the families from the Self-Help Housing Group, I noticed she was in a fighting mood. Her attitude was hostile and abrupt. I introduced everybody and sat back. She began to ask questions, which the families answered openly, and the conversation soon expanded into jokes and humor and tales of childhoods.
Each of the families told her why they were in the Self Help Housing Group, and how proud of it they were, and how they were benefiting from the process and the experience. Nothing like her article had illustrated. Carmen talked about how her children were working so hard, Trejo about how he liked to tell his coworkers what he was doing, Otero about how his now pregnant wife kept active by cooking lunch for everybody and running errands. Armando, the teacher, talked about how he brought his students on a field trip to see the houses under construction. Her next article was a celebration of the project, and the positive impact on the families, but the newspaper didn’t let her write about the Barrio in any future articles.
I had gone to Nogales few times, a City on the border with Mexico, I had bought a Honda motorcycle 750 cc besides my truck when I was making money in construction and from the hills of Nogales, I had heard from locals about the sex-slave trade, mostly of children, and drug trafficking crossing that border into the U.S. all year long. Some of it had to flow through Arizona. While not a word in the newspapers about this criminal butchery, someone had taken the time to incite a false article about families building their own homes in a Barrios with dishonest information
I wondered if reporter’s lives were threatened if they wrote about modern slavery by the drug cartel? No, that could not be happening in the USA! The illegal transport of immigrants by coyotes was to expand into another lucrative trade. The medical profession worldwide was in early advancement of organ transplant. There is a high demand for hearts and kidneys and other organs, and not sufficient voluntary donations, placing on demand a black market on organs. China is known for supplying much of it.
Children on the way to the border attempting illegal crossings would often disappear, with no one to fight for them, and their organs would emerge in universities and in top rate hospitals. Media exposure would have put an end to such business quickly, but it was not talked about. Families who were often paid to let their children go were riddled with guilt to denounce those to whom they sold their children to.
To compensate, there was a good and fair full-length video done about the Self Help Housing Project by a young man working for a cable network. That video was shown on cable TV and must still be in existence somewhere, but then the fireworks started. Some readers may think I am making up what follows, but I am not. Details may vary, due to imprecise memory but not the basic accuracy of the facts.
The City Department, at their own expense, after taking over our funding, had hired a contractor to hurry things along and finish the families’ houses with the excuse that they were almost completed and the final stages were taking too long, their purpose was to reduce the interest accruing in the construction loan. We all thought that was a decent idea, until we found that the workmanship by the contractor’s crew began to be shoddy and unacceptable.
I informed the City, but they ignored me. I spent many hours documenting a long list of inadequacies and infractions in inaccurate dimensions and sloppy workmanship. I included pictures, one with an electric meter pole in the middle of a driveway, no kidding! I reported them to the State Labor Department. The State put an immediate stop to all that work. I went to the next City Council meeting and showed the Council and the audience the pictures, and the letter from the State, of which Council members were ignorant. They were appalled. Bill Eally suggested that the City hire Geraldo to correct errors and continue guiding the families’ and that Geraldo, himself, could do some of the work, if that were agreeable to us. Of course. it was.
When Geraldo came back everyone was happy, but life is never simple. Within a few days, two brothers, owners of a company who had delivered materials to the site a few times, came to me and told me that there was a memo months before that had circulated in the Community Development Department stating that Geraldo was willing to speak against the TBA and had been in favor of the City to take the Project over. I could not believe that. I told them that that could not be true. They must be confused. They simply said, “Go and ask for a copy of the memo. Freedom of information. They have to give it to you.”
I never did. I never mentioned this to anyone. We all loved Geraldo and there was no evidence or proof of such behavior, and as for the one possible proof, I was unwilling to pursue it. Was it the truth, or was it an attempt to spread mistrust among us; to divide and conquer?
On the other hand, this was the only thing I could think of that would have given the Department the gumption to try to interfere with what was a very popular program.
Things were just warming up. I got a call a few days later from the Savings and Loan, “Sir, this is a courtesy call just for your information. We just received a call from a City of Tucson staff asking us to deny the approval of the loans we have in the files for the Family Group. We told them that that would not happen, and not to call again.” Then next day I got a call from the Property Title Company. Please understand I knew very little about real estate and not much about the legalities of what I was being told about lending or property titles.
“Sir, a person pretending to represent the City of Tucson has called on us to request that we cancel the title to the properties that the TBA holds on behalf of the Family Group. Of course, we will not do that, but we thought we should let you know.”
I was not smart enough to ask questions. Today, I would have raised holy hell and taken the City to court. But then, too many thoughts went through my head. First, “someone pretending to represent the City” could be anyone. Second, if the City was involved in this, I had major problems outside my capacity to comprehend, and I didn’t know whom to turn to. Third, there was nothing the City could do, no matter how hard they tried, to take it over.
Ha…! Famous last thoughts.
Under Geraldo’s supervision, all the errors of the previous contractor were corrected, and work was proceeding smoothly. Geraldo and the families were working diligently to see their homes completed.
By now, the structures were sealed, and the remaining work was mostly finish-work. I don’t know if the City of Tucson had an Occupancy Permit, which is the last permit you get before you can occupy a new construction. I didn’t ask. Instead, I had an idea.
We had been reminding the families from the beginning that they needed to open a savings account and save enough money for the closing costs. The Sweat Equity covered the down payment, but the closing costs had to be in cash. We estimated there were three to five months or more to the completion of the first house, and one or two weeks thereafter for the others. The families had signed an agreement between them stating that no one would move in and claim title until all the houses were ready, and that document could only be modified by the agreement and signature of every single one of them.
I called all of them to a meeting, along with the chairman of the TBA Board, and made the following suggestion:
“Rather than paying rent where each of you are living now, for the next few months, the TBA can let you move into your house-to-be, free, so that you can save a few months of the rent money and use it for the closing costs. You have to agree to keep working with Geraldo and on everyone’s house, including your own, before transferring title, but we are doing this to make it easier for you to make your payment for closing costs. If you all agree, we’ll do it, if one of you says no, then we won’t do it.”
They all said ‘yes’ and they moved in. I was told Dan Benitez was livid. A few weeks later I got a call after 9 PM from Carmen.
“Chuck, two of the staff working under Dan Benitez were just in my house tonight.” My antennas went up. City staff at 9:00 PM?
“What did they want?”
“They had some papers they wanted me to sign, saying that I agree to go to the bank tomorrow and get the title for the rental house I am in.”
“You are not in a rental house. It is to be your house, and you are not renting.”
“That is what I thought. It was confusing.”
“And did you sign it?”
“Yes, they said that Raymond had signed his, and the others were in the process of signing theirs as well.”
“But Carmen, you have an agreement with all the other Families that no one would do that until everyone was ready to do so.”
“They told me that all the other Families were ready.”
“When? Which of the other families do you know who have said so?”
“They only mentioned Raymond.”
“If you were to do that, then Geraldo’s employment by the City would end, and none of you are done yet, or know how to finish your house by yourself.”
“I didn’t think of that.”
“I am on my way to your house. Go to every other family and ask them to come to your house for a quick meeting right now, I’ll pick up the Otero on my way there.”
When we all got together, two other families had received the visit from the City staff and had signed the document believing that all the others had done the same.
I told them, “Let’s not sign any more papers from the City. What they are doing is shameful and probably not even legal.”
“But what about the three of us who did sign?” Raymond asked.
This thing was well thought out. They went to the more vulnerable, the less educated, and the most impatient, those three first, and then could continue to use the argument with the remaining, that all others had signed. How did they know who the vulnerable were? Did they really think they could get away with that? This was not someone impersonating the City. These families knew the staff members by face and name.
“As to your signature here, contract under duress, or with false information is not a valid contract. They lied. Besides, the Agreement you all signed at the beginning takes precedence over this one, unless it is in writing that you all agree to change the original, and you all have not done so in writing, so these three documents are null, not valid. Forget about them.”
The rumor had been spread by members of the City staff that the TBA never intended to pass the title to the families. The City was trying to do something seditious and fraudulent to deflect criticism, as Alinsky recommended be done, they accused others of doing what they intended to do themselves. That was what the City staff was doing.
I was beginning to lose sleep. The entire responsibility for seven families who had been working on their houses for two years was sitting on my shoulders and my signature. The title transfer could not take place if I didn’t sign the papers at closing. The way I figured what the City Department was trying to do was as ingenious as it was crooked. They wanted a signed document that said that the families were renting. A municipality could not do new residential construction with CDBG monies, but they could do Housing Rehab if the houses were rentals or “owner occupied” and not new construction. The occupant families didn’t own them yet, and they were not renting. The TBA held the titles, and we were not renting. So, if without the title, if the families signed a rental agreement, or instead got the title and then owned the houses, then the City could use CDBG funds to finish as if they were rehabs. The City could also take over the project, finish with incompetence and claim credit for all the work, or they could even keep the title to the houses. It dawned on me that “they” or “someone” - who would be “they”? - had influenced the newspapers to write articles saying the families were complaining to justify city interference, but that failed, just like they had gotten the FBI involved, and that had not worked for them either. Just like the Williams had tried to get an article of the Board having a conflict with the executive Director, but how did Benitez expect to get over the hurdle of the TBA signature, mine, at the closing?
This one was a city governmental department playing tricks, trying to use the families against me. Or have their signature saying they were renting, overstepping mine on the title. I didn’t think Dan Benitez was that smart. Who then was behind this?
The City had failed to get the bank to deny the loans, then they failed to get the title company to sign the titles over to them. Unless they would now try to put pressure on the board to have someone else, such as the Chairman, be the authorized signatory, Larry would never allow that. What kind of pressure could they place on him? At no time were there more than one or two Board members who did not want me to continue, so they could never get the vote.
But who knew what connections they could have? They had reached out to the banks, title companies, newspapers, auditors, the FBI, the innocence of the families, and maybe they had even turned our own construction supervisor against us. If they could get rid of me, they could also go to the Board and without giving them the full information, using intimidation, saying that they had a signature from each family confirming that they were renting, existing houses owned by the TBA, even if there was no rent. They could then tell the TBA that the City was now willing to finish the houses as a rehab and get their approval, but I would still be in their way. I had to be one step ahead of them in a field I knew very little about. A government against an individual. Fraud. Intimidation. FBI. So far, they had found no way to put effective pressure on me, but that didn’t stop them.
I had thought until then that it was a false rumor that the city attorney had been researching my background to see how to get to me, but now I could not dismiss that rumor. If they had raided the unit I was renting, all they could confiscate was a sleeping bag, a toothbrush, some drawings, and my collection of Conan the Barbarian comic books.
This is the beauty of America. The laws, even if they can be manipulated by the biased and powerful, can help the little guy as well, provided the judges follow the law and not their ideology. At that time, the private sector banks, had decent officers who would not cater to government interference.
In the future, the government would get to control the banks increasingly by using monumental “regulations” with the excuse of “too big to fail”, and they could extort the banks to do their bidding, but that had not happened yet.
If you don’t think that employees from a city government agency could do such underhanded things, to prevent people like me from doing what I did for the families in the Barrio, look at what the U.S. Federal Government did. In 2008, when the Federal Government, not letting a good crisis go to waste, took the failing of the banks to step in and set up a massive system of regulations that saved the megabanks from collapse at the cost of letting the government by using new regulations, create an economic crisis, with the result of having full access to the personal financial information of every individual and corporation. Then the U.S. Government took control of the automobile industry, Chrysler and GMC, in a show of control, established regulations to control large corporations at will while pretending to protect taxpayers, and instead of letting bankruptcy take its normal course, bailed out part of the industry by liquidating the stockholders and giving a loan to the company they never intended to fully recoup. A farce.
This would show the country that once the Government, a monopoly, took over the first time, it could do so again and again. Another step towards socialism. Next, without having read it, and with only one side of the Legislature voting in favor, the legislature instituted the Affordable Health Care Act. In that program, the Government interwove all the components of personal health and financial information whereby, through health regulations and government control, through obligatory registration participation under the administration of the IRS, the government had completed full circle on the collection of financial information of most every single citizen in the United States.
The Government, in coordination with monopolies, now has access to all credit card, banking, business licenses, and by default, access to phone bills, phone calls, internet connections, etc. They promised, “you can keep your doctor”, but not so. At the implementation of this Act, your doctor was no longer your doctor, but an assigned administrator who assigned a physician. Your health was no longer your responsibility under your control, but the purview of an administrator. With the correct premises that Private Health Care in the US has reached high corruption levels, thanks to both parties and lobbyists, it became more control but no better care. Don’t let a crisis go to waste. Same as in China, Cuba, Denmark, Norway, Russia, Sweden, and Venezuela. This control is called PROGRESSIVE. Don’t let nice words fool you, those in governments reserve the right to choose winners and losers, who receive treatment and who is left to die; “till death do us apart.”
I want to illustrate what a City Government can do to a small Barrio, same as the Federal Government has done to very large corporations. Keep reading. The worst enemy is the enemy from within.
It is not a good feeling to know that there are multitudes of forces plotting against you. Those who are supposed to oversee the protection of citizens are not always doing so, and those around you don’t truly understand what is going on.
In this case, the welfare of other’s was on my shoulders, and I had lost lots of respect for half the honorable authority of individuals in the local government whom we still had to work with. I was feeling the weight of loneliness. The whole thing was way above my volunteer pay scale, but I was responsible by my own choice. However, volunteer or not, at no time did I lose the knowledge that underhanded government employees do not represent a city. The same is the case for the federal government. We need to concern ourselves with the injustices to the underrepresented, and the overreach of those in power. If this abusiveness can happen in a free country, especially when one political party has too much power, imagine what can happen is a socialist country where the government takes all the power. The American justice system, despite its imperfections, is still the best there is. Never lose faith. And then, for me to follow my own advice as well, never, never, never give up.
Do Not Imitate Your Enemy When He Falls To Temptation And Power
Temptation can come in insidious forms. It creeps in, or it bangs on the door loud and clear. You open that door, or you don’t. It’s up to you. When I was beginning to think that I was being marginalized, rendered impotent, Chico came to me one day with a big smile. Chico was a typical Barrio kid, brash and defiant with a chip on his shoulder. He had left the City years before and had just returned. Chico was eager to be hired into the rehab crew, but when he came back to Tucson, the rehab crew was winding down in their last few jobs. He would hang around with the crew as much as he could.
This day, as I was talking to Ray, Chico came by and said to me, “Carnal, we need to form a group, a team. You have no idea what we could do!” My face must have shown my lack of understanding. “This morning,” he went on, “I was stop by the heat, (a cop) he was coming down heavy, I told him, ‘Listen man, I am from Barrio Libre, from the TBA, we know what we do’. He heard me say the ‘TBA’ and he let me go. They are afraid of us, man, the bolillo is learning. We have power.”
He was ecstatic. He had funneled all the gains made in the last few years into a realization of the use of brute force also known to him as power, but he knew he needed me, and how many others would follow?
As an afterthought, Ray said in a low tone, “You got this Neighborhood going. You started the Inner City Coalition, the Greater Tucson Neighborhood Coalition. You have brought in the Governor, a Senator, and you have seen the President,” – “not me, Bertha”, I meant to interrupt him. He kept going, “… the Police, the…” - the FBI I meant to interrupt him again but didn’t - “you have a direct line to the Mayor, the Chief of Police, Judges, the Historic Register…”
“Stop.”
“A lot of people will pay attention to what you say or do.”
Ray was looking at me kind of funny. He went on, “I know you well enough to know that if you change your approach to solutions slightly, you can rally people behind you by the hundreds, maybe thousands.” Sublimation of goals.
Until the day that you feel that intoxication of false power, it’s hard to understand it. The fact of the matter was that what Chico was saying could be done, it was possible. Ninety percent of the Barrio and surrounding neighborhoods would rally around a reasonable cause, and I could easily create one, but it would be a betrayal of all the goodwill from the good people who had seen the value of the unique progress that had been made. Power over others is not the way to go even if it makes you feel liberated. Politely, I sent him away. Would I be letting the rest of the group down by saying yes… or by saying no…? Sometimes our best choices are in choosing what not to do. Besides, the only reason there was any power in what we were doing is because I and others were sharing it, not hoarding it. Ray was dead wrong; it was not a “slight” change to solutions. I needed to take care of myself, and tempting as it was, I was not going there.