Greensboro has long suffered from a drug problem that has never been openly spoken of among Greensboro's leaders. Developer drugs that fill the veins and twist the minds of Greensboro's elites confuse our leaders and make them blind to the realities Greensboro's working class face every day. For example in Eric Ginsburg's, The capitalist mystique he writes,
"The entire point of a job is to sell your time in exchange for wages, ostensibly in order to pay for things like food and shelter. A recent study showed that workers can’t afford fair-market rent working minimum wage in any state even if they are working full time. In North Carolina, you’d have to work approximately 75 hours every week to be able to pay rent, according to a recent study from the National Low Income Housing Coalition. In other words, it would take more than $13/hour just to scrape by."
And yet the Mayor and the Greensboro City Council recently presented us with the East Greensboro Summit where the Mayor's proposed solution to Greensboro's and East Greensboro's economic woes was said to be to build more shopping centers and restaurants to provide minimum wage jobs.
Surely, Mayor Perkins must be on drugs if he expects us to believe shopping centers and restaurants will solve our woes. The Mayor's "solution" will only lead to more of the following, also from Eric Ginsburg:
"People find all sorts of ways to make ends meet, from squeezing into apartments to slinging drugs or stealing, and while some may be publicly considered more desirable than others, what do we expect is going to happen when working minimum wage is pointless or there are no jobs to begin with?"
And yet the Mayor and City Council give away $Millions in the form of water and sewer drugs to developers like Roy Carroll and others to build industrial parks on the county lines 10 miles outside of the Greensboro City Limits so that communities like Burlington and Kernersville can thrive. Don't get me wrong, I like Company Shops (Burlington) and Kernersville and have family in both cities but both are doing comparatively well when compared to Greensboro and don't need Greensboro tax dollars to subsidize their growth. Though I'm sure they appreciate the boost.
Eric continues,
"If the cities of Greensboro or Winston- Salem actually cared about the well being of working and unemployed people there are plenty of things they could do differently, but these ideas aren’t even on their radar. What about raising the minimum wage, providing affordable housing, decriminalizing marijuana, improving public transportation, strengthening the human-relations department to support workers being robbed by their employers, providing seed money for workerowned cooperatives or a hundred other ideas that our residents could come up with if given the forum?"
Seems like if you can always find $4.5 Million for millionaire developer Roy Carroll's addictions then some of Eric's ideas shouldn't be that hard to do, right?
"But that’s exactly the point: People aren’t waiting — nor should they — for politicians to provide the solutions, but as we figure out ways to cope and push for reforms that would make our lives easier, let’s not forget the bigger picture and why we have to struggle to get by in the first place."
Now here's where it gets sticky. If people aren't waiting on the politicians then what are they doing? I guess some will start businesses that follow different models that put people ahead of profits and others might engage in the political process, run for office, become a part of the system. And all that's okay I guess. But what if, just if... a few more residents of Greensboro decided to do what I have done and turn to Tyrannicide?
Hey City Council, you cannot deny that I have made a difference in the last year. You might not like what I've done but you know full well I changed the way your game was played. Could you handle 2 of me? 3 of me? A dozen? A hundred perhaps? Blogger.com blogs like the one I use are free and easy to use. Like I warned you a year ago, you can't spend enough money on advertising and PR to make me go away-- every effort has made me louder. And Blogger.com users don't even have to use their real names. Who knows, the next Tyrannicide might be the secretary you refused to give a raise or your neighbor who saw what you did when you thought no one was looking. Or that jealous developer who got cut out of the deal so a bigger developer could get cut in.
My motives are open, honest government and Real Progress For Greensboro but not everyone who tips me off has the same thing in mind. And seriously, if they wanted to do it badly enough they could do it without me. If Greensboro's leaders don't take bold steps to curtail Greensboro's Developer Drug problem, I'm betting you'll have a lot more Tyrannicide on your hands. And some could end up worse than me.
