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I believe you are spot on. My last Career Position as Parks and Recreation Director in the City Of Lorain Ohio I negotiated work release programs for non violent offenders. These men were an asset and some of them found full time employment through this program. They worked in the Parks. It is as simple as giving water to a thirsty child. Starting with our own neighbors is essential just like starting a wave at a sporting event.

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I retired this year after nearly 50 years as President of our local Park and Recreation Board. We have much to discuss I think along the lines you suggest. I only, as I wrote to Greg below, want us to see ourselves as potentially influential parts of the larger frameworks of politics, trade, finance and law that make it both difficult and necessary for us to develop local solutions. Local programs and national policies are fundamentally related. We need to resolve some difficult issues with taxation and local authority.

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"All politics is local" seems a quaint little phrase from days gone by. The current iteration is more like "all politics is national", even potholes.

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But in a way, Greg, I'm trying to say that. I don't think that the "solutions" are all, or mainly local. Problems are more real, nuanced, interrelated when understood locally. But politics must reach up. Band-Aids by all means locally. Much can be done, as Kudrin discusses above., I had a discussion yesterday with a former retired sociology professor and former student at Heidelberg about creating neighborhood ownership of their lives. An interesting idea with rich possibilities. Still, we can't lose sight, as I think you clearly see, of the ways in which our national, and even global, patterns of finance and ownership, really matter.

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It would be preferable if local politics was local and bubbled up. It's not like that. I used to worry about billionaire funded think tanks but now it's all about billionaire cults and corporations too. They won't save us. Meetings I attend, we're subjected to a lot of screaming, laundry lists of "national" grievances, and other nonsense.

I live very close to an interstate put through the center of the city by the state using federal money. People in the city were forced to abandon soon to be destroyed homes, communities, churches, and businesses. This very same thing has happened to every single city in the US. The scale of the destruction is huge. If the bulldozers were foreign or on a terrorist list, the US would have been mobilized for all out war. Locals are fighting back but it's a tough fight. People apparently have important places to be and our cities are in the way.

The federal government has been a force for good. But local communities have a really hard time in the face of so much federal money. I'm at a loss.

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Very interesting. It looks like State authority can be an extension of national power and in both cases local voices, local power, local advocacy is vitally important. My point, of course, is one that you have always supported. By understanding problems as they display at the local level, we are able to understand national policy, and perhaps mobilize opposition. At least we and others will understand the real implications of the policy. The beginning of wisdom?

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Maybe not the beginning, just another step. It strikes me that after being overrun by outside money a new order sets in. Then, to bring a local community back into balance, we find a new set of nimbyism has set in.

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