Ask and ye shall

Last night, thinking about the satanic “government” of Spokane, which is unfortunately the default in most cities, an odd analogy popped up.

When other jobs need to solve a problem and can’t think of the solution, we Google it. More specifically we go to subject area websites like Slack or StackExchange, where people within a job type swap hints and solutions. There must be a private exchange site for city administrators, where they could look up their problems with vast homelessness, fires, and dozens of overdose deaths each week. Surely some other city must have solved the problem?

Ask and ye shall receive. Via Compact Mag this morning, the answer is Newark. Mayor Baraka belongs to the Booker T line of black activism, which was rebranded as Black Nationalism in the ’60s. He has impeccable radical genes and credentials, so he can be HEARD when he follows FDR and Booker T.

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Baraka demonstrates the extent to which he has been schooled by the self-determinist leanings of the black-nationalist tradition, with its emphasis on grassroots solutions and prioritizing the immediate needs of ordinary citizens, rather than by identitarian “anti-racists” who place their hope in diversifying bureaucracies. As cities try to learn from Newark’s example, they would do well to pay close attention to the populist and localist inspiration behind the mayor’s methods.

Rather than “going out and grabbing everybody off the corner” at the site of a crime, he opted to make use of ShotSpotter technology to hone in on major areas of violent crime. “The worst crimes tend to happen on the same 20 streets,” Ambrose noted. “If you can target them, you can curb a significant portion of crimes in the city.”

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You have to focus policing on the professional criminals, and you have to keep THEM in jail.

I don’t see one crucial FDR ingredient in the article, though it might be part of Baraka’s recipe. Above all you need JOBS for ordinary men. When ordinary men feel useful and get paid enough to support a family, they don’t slide down the path of crime and self-destruction. In the ’50s Newark was Tech Central, with hundreds of factories and dozens of high-tech businesses and labs. The downfall started when electronics moved to Japan, and accelerated in the 70s when Nixon, using EPA and MMT, donated the whole country to China. Detroit is the same story with a different main industry and the same villains.

MEN NEED TO MAKE THINGS.

WHEN MEN CAN’T MAKE THINGS, THEY WILL BREAK THINGS.

Including themselves.

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Later: Turns out I discussed Baraka before, with the same criticism. I looked back at the 2019 item where I piled up old ads showing Newark as Tech Central in 1957. The reason I wrote the item was to bash Baraka for advocating UBI instead of jobs. This is the LBJ/Nixon answer, not the FDR answer. FDR provided highly useful real jobs and real training for unemployed men. The men of WPA/CCC literally built America, and they were rightly proud of their achievement. LBJ started the evil tradition of compensating the lost jobs with welfare and bank debt. Nixon shipped our economy to China, pretending to compensate the loss of skill with “negative income tax”, the ancestor of UBI.