Scripts from the book, A BARRIO AND WORLD’S POWER, by Chuck Chan.
Responses welcome. More supportive evidence to these ideas extracted from real life events are provided in the book. Agreement and disagreement is welcome if the thought behind it is well thought out.
P.426.The Psychological Influence of Architecture
Empty spaces in between, family strength, social rather than ecological environment, hidden agendas, reading between the lines, a place to worship, it is all part of Architecture in the reshaping of physical surroundings. People who think ecology is what affects the “poor”, are barking up the wrong tree.
Whereas I strongly believe that historic restoration and preservation has value, I also believe that the value and purpose is only for those living today, and for the future, to learn the lessons of the past.
P.437. Despite my love for family values, I have grown to understand that one of the most severe crises we face today, affecting large pockets of poverty, is the population explosion. Since economically advanced cultures have fewer children per family, as a by-product of their improved economy and education, it is the economically disadvantaged countries that increasingly grow, expand, and breed more poverty. Poverty breeds poverty. I am NOT promoting abortion. In the Hispanic culture, abortion is murder and contradictory to family values.
It is a misconception that the wealthy create the poor. It is the poor who create more poor people. Logically, you never go to work for somebody who has less money than you do. Blaming the rich for the existence of poor is the argument of socialism and communism. They are dead-end philosophies. Poverty breeds poverty, for the poor has nowhere to go but up. It is no coincidence that dictatorships and socialists and communists know that and use it to their advantage, keeping poor people poor. When you see nation’s leaders making mistakes causing an economic crisis, it is not always a mistake. Often it is done on purpose, as is the case here in the United States.
A1. 433Instead, intelligent use of money, to make more money, is based on an expanding free market, which creates new businesses and jobs. The Trickle-Up Theory is the only way to eradicate poverty worldwide
434 If countries with good economy and a decreasing population, keep feeding countries with poor economy and an increasing overpopulation, the result is to increase the number of poor. Redistribution of wealth is a criminal form of perpetuating poverty!
Share the power, the knowledge, to make money. But the real key is not to make money, it is to produce. Only perceptive people understand that. Making money by producing. By making money, I mean doing your part in producing and making what it takes to keep yourself and those for whom you are responsible for alive, sheltered, clothed, free, and educated enough to be able to be happy and not hungry, nor dependent. If you can produce the income level to have a large family, go ahead! Produce to afford your need for space.
The Barrio is a micro sample of a whole country. The same principles apply, and we didn’t want to fix people’s houses for them while keeping them poor. That is what the City does.
C2. 454. There is no reference to slavery in the Constitution. Instead, it calls for all men to be equal. While some people try to use that to argue that because years back, in the south, slave owners were able to utilize provisions in the Constitution to their political advantage, others will argue that those using that line are the same elitist mentality that today pretends to help the downtrodden while in fact are abusing them now. Most of the Founding Fathers followed through and either freed their slaves if any, or left instructions to do so in their wills. However, human behavior been what it is, abusive, thus racial behavior persisted among groups, and it led to a Civil War, which became one more supreme step at dealing with the negative nature of discrimination. Respecting equality was radical behavior then, and an excellent beginning. That is what changing the world all is about! Blacks didn’t fight the civil war alone, Americans did it for them.
Once more, why is there today an attempt to denigrate the very same people who did the most to advance the equal justice cause? This question needs to sink in. There is real evil lurking out there.
B. 493 Even if all life matters, we don’t choose to be born, but after we are, everyone prefers to choose how not to die, and yet, most of the time we end up having no real choice. Quality of life is not given; it must be worked hard for. We all do, and part of it is common sense adaptability to inevitable change.
Indians, like everyone else, deserve to live a life that matters. Christians call it “love your neighbor as yourself.” Our Founding Fathers wrote “right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” You and me and them. No civilization, creed, race, or culture has had a permanent monopoly on land possession. It comes and goes. At the same time, evil triumph when good men do nothing, so blind acceptance to injustice is not an option, nor giving up to the enemy from within. However, the power is with each of us.
While it is easy for people to complain of past slavery, past treatment of Indians, cultural appropriation, and lack of social justice, and feeling elated for doing so, today we continue to avoid acknowledging that sex-slavery, drug-trafficking, and organ-harvesting coming across the border. It is so because we are the main consumers of sex and drugs, and these crimes are abundant in our society, even among our own leaders, whites, browns, yellows and blacks – including professionals and politicians, liberals and conservatives, along with many others. Great nations needs to clean its own house first. The power to do so is in each one of us:
B3. 115 +- Equality
Consider this carefully: Communism promotes believes in inequality between the have and the have-not, as a crisis, and the need to step in and make a demand for equality, so they can manage everyone equally. However, some socialist countries are not necessarily happy with equality in an economic level, and some are reverting to capitalism now, because socialism did not work for them as they were promised. In socialism you relinquish substantial personal and economic freedom for equality. What exactly is their concept of equality?
The meaning of the word Equality is different in a democracy from that of socialism. In a democracy, equality is symbolic and equal right to freedom or liberty with equal rights to happiness, not with equal happiness. Note the difference! Democracy doesn’t promise happiness, only the right to it. Socialism promises equal happiness, but contrarily, in socialism equality is a preventive term, as it leads everyone to equal treatment and equal results, or equal terms, or equal joys, and therefore equal misery as well. It requires overpowering to promote equal results on people, for it is not intuitively. You need someone, the estate, to determine what is equal for everyone else. The hope is that the estate reaches a just degree of imposed equality. Happiness by equal mandate. To reach that goal, it is irrelevant to them wherever everyone reaches 95% happiness or only 5% happiness, provided it is all equal.
138. Architecture, Culture, and Adobe
History has a way of overlooking the obvious. Find your group’s weaknesses in history and replace them with strength before blaming others. Good advice, but is it historically relevant?
Once you declare someone a victim, you des-equalize them, you reduce them to a minor position as minorities, and put them in your pocket, or you end up in someone else’s pocket.
A2. 142. Second to parental education, the children’s formative years in academic education is the fundamental stage in their development into becoming citizens of our society, one that will forever command their outcome and the outcome of an entire nation, but we are failing at improving public education, and I see a progression toward the wrong direction. With time, I learned that more money towards education was not the solution. Proof of the relation between money and education can be found in Abraham Lincoln’s life, and in this link, https://youtu.be/Q7INTqGVQKk . 136. . It is not environmental pollution that will destroy us, but the pollution of our social values that we need to deal with before it will destroy us.
B. 142. On the other hand, magnet schools helped a lot, as they gave parents a choice. Parents knew better in which schools their kids would do better, just as they know the importance of education outside of schools, a difficult balance to obtain. School choice for their children is a privilege parents who can pay can have, and therefore poor public schools in poor neighborhoods is not the cause of racism, but the cause of lack of choice, and it is the result of bigotry. Opposition to charter schools is depriving children of the best education for them. It’s worse than racism. It’s bigotry and borderline criminal, or at least a crime against humanity at the most fundamental level.
Barrio kids did not learn the same as kids in other schools, where most of them could go on to college if they choose to do so. Even if their family ties and the street-life lessons they learned were much more profound, which was excellent, their literacy level was weak. As always, there are exceptions. However, as a rule, the flaw is not that education is geared toward the learning process of the prevalent culture. That is as it should be. The issue is that educators did not pay attention to other cultural incentives and include them.
A5. 156. Avoiding corruption and sharing the power are that which is necessary to reduce and abolish poverty. If we want to eradicate poverty, we must understand the negative effects of corruption at all levels, for: Corruption Is the Most Powerful Force That Keeps Other People Poor
Corruption is in politics, churches, law enforcement, business, and schools. It’s in all levels of society. People like to blame poverty on corporations, organizations, ideologies, and religions, but poverty is present at birth in all individuals. We are born naked and we have the innate drive to move out of it. What keeps human beings in poverty is lack of resources kept away by the individual corruption of others. We must also learn to distinguish the real from the fake, including the corrupted agenda of people saying one thing, while intending to do completely the opposite. Before thinking of others, I had to do some soul searching myself. I may be hungry and lack money for long periods of time, but I was not poor. Poverty is much more than lack of financial resources. Poverty is more than three months of stomach-pain hunger. I had health, education, and the capacity to communicate. I had no fear of the future, none. Therefore, ‘reality’ said that I didn’t know what poverty really was. Not to fool myself, a solution to poverty cannot be based on whether it would work for me, as I am not poor. I needed to see it from others.
One way to identify the fake poverty warriors is to listen to their message; if they use the word ‘collective’ along with ‘helping the poor’, they are blowing smoke. They are fake! Think of it this way: to eradicate corruption while distributing power is a difficult thing to balance. To fight financial poverty, we must create tools to promote the economy and establish training and education for individual strength. Poverty is not based on income amount, it is the output per capita that establishes standard of living. You must change what you produce. You must have the freedom to produce what your talents and learnings allow you to learn to produce. These are all important elements in getting a neighborhood in good shape. Always remembering that poverty is not just financial poverty, but that there is mental, emotional, and spiritual poverty, which are all in need of tools to get out of the pits, out of the knot. The freedom of an individual to obtain knowledge, education, move at will, to pursue their dreams, earn their own wealth, is what leads to an economy that responds to a free market, setting the stage for a free political system. That will eradicate poverty substantially, if not absolutely!
LATTER
A1. 419 It is the consumer who votes for good businesses with their money by purchasing the product. Invent a better nail clipper and 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.
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 in the U.S. must be credited with a significant amount of the 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 contributions. This is a recipe for corruption. 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 fair competition and not stifle it.
434 The Barrio is a micro sample of a whole country. The same principles apply, and we didn’t want to fix people’s houses for them while keeping them poor. That is what the City does.
REPEATED 433Instead, intelligent use of money, to make more money, is based on an expanding free market, which creates new businesses and jobs. The Trickle-Up Theory is the only way to eradicate poverty worldwide
If countries with good economy and a decreasing population, keep feeding countries with poor economy and an increasing overpopulation, the result is to increase the number of poor.
Redistribution of wealth is a criminal form of perpetuating poverty!
Share the power, the knowledge, to make money. But the real key is not to make money, it is to produce. Only perceptive people understand that. Making money by producing. By making money, I mean doing your part in producing what it takes to keep yourself and those for whom you are responsible for alive, sheltered, clothed, free, and educated enough to be able to be happy and not hungry, nor dependent. If you can produce the income level to have a large family, go ahead! Produce to afford your need for space.
The Barrio is a micro sample of a whole country. The same principles apply, and we didn’t want to fix people’s houses for them while keeping them poor. That is what the City does.
477. The misguided Elite of today take the progress made throughout civilizations and kidnap it and falsely claim they can move it forward by their shaping social norms, scientific engineering, socialism, towards their imaginary utopia. To do this reshaping, they must undo the key elements in the weaving that made America what it is, otherwise they can’t. In this retrogressive intent, a few of them may be sincere… maybe. Most just want the power of control. The failure of this effort rests in their lack of a well-established plan that includes law, physics, psychology, philosophy, spirituality, weaved together to produce a cultural tapestry with moral and ethical common sense. Allowing the freedom of the individual to flourish. Broader history is loaded with one culture pushing another for over 100,000 years. Nothing new. Today a new displacement of the American culture is slowly taking place, to be just as devastating as the displacement of the American Indians.
496. Religion “I think,” said Ray, “that what keeps us together is the constant spirit of advancement.”
“You mean technology?”
“No, more. We keep advancing in the arts, letters, methods of production, urban and social challenges of living in larger cities, developing better farming, that spirit of competition and improvement moderated by justice, we keep advancing in our approach to justice, and a more benevolent attitude towards Religion liberties.”
“Religion? Benevolent? You lost me there. I know of some religions that have engaged in cruelty as well.” I needed more details. It’s easy to select the items that we think prove our point but leave others out.
“I meant benevolence towards believers and non-believers, towards all religions. Religion deals with morality and spirituality. Government deals with physical law and order. Both may contain corruption. Both come together under ‘justice’, you need a little of each. There can be no just laws without morality. The only thing that protects us from ourselves at the human level is spirituality, which gives us a moral compass. That is why the Constitution never said to “exclude” or even to separate religion from government. It only says: “not to impose any one particular religion.” We have advanced much in this direction and then gone overboard. Those religions that are good are the glue that holds sanity together. Even the Muslim faith is a decent religion if you take away Sharia Law from it. Atheist may lack religion, but not morality necessarily. They still have spirituality. Individual freedom to believe in any religion or freedom not to, is one of the great advancements of civilization. Because people are spiritual beings, we will always have religions, which is the social way to share spirituality despite the enemy from within’ s attempt to usurp it. To try to deprive others of any type of religion, as communists and progressives like to do, is a step backwards instead of progressiveness. Remember, there is a reason why the churches helped free the slaves.”
Ray was not a religious guy, but that didn’t stop him from recognizing reality. “At times, some religions have been oppressive, but has there ever been an enduring non-oppressive civilization without religion? While a hallmark of tyranny has always been the doing away with religion.”
“Some people have been arguing that it’s religion that allows for the oppression of people, the opium of the masses.” I persisted for the sake of argument without conviction.
“Not so,” said Ray, “but the opposite. I would say that it is the human element of corruption in individuals within it, that allows mankind to oppress, not religion, which tempers evil. Spirituality rejects evil, and corruption is evil. What do you think would do a better job? Look at communism. Total oppression. Socialism? Total manipulation for control. Islam with Sharia Law, total cleric control. Corruption leads to control. Only corruption in imposing religion, or lack of it, leads to control. People should be free to choose their religion.”
“What about evil witchcraft?”
“Evil. Corruption.”