01| Start with what oppression is for. Not cruelty for its own sake — cruelty is expensive and draws attention. The working purpose is to keep a group out of the parts of the economy where the money and the decisions are. Deny the equal education, so the skills never form. Erode the confidence, call them inferior often enough that they say it themselves, so the ambition never forms. What you get at the other end is a labour market with fewer serious competitors at the middle

01| We use the term often, so here is the definition. Personality power is a person who by and large makes his own decisions, based on looking at the world as it is, relatively free of blind conformism and peer pressure. That is the whole thing. It is not charisma, not volume, not the confidence that performs well in a room. 02| It includes something people rarely file under strength: the ability to take criticism of your work without losing self-confidence, without losing co

01| Getting access to the game does not mean you win. It means you get a chance to compete. That distinction is the whole promise, and we would rather say it flatly at the start than have people discover it later and feel lied to. 02| Empowerment gets sold as an idealistic, romantic adventure. It is not one. It is a hard confrontation with yourself and with the world as it is — hard because to succeed you will most likely have to do things differently than you do them now, an

01| Rightful protest has a structural problem: it is almost completely severed from building value. The energy goes into changing what others do, and none of it goes into producing socio-economic power or into productive collaboration with people across the social spectrum who could help produce it. The talk stays talk. Then more talk. Ten years on, the grievance is better documented and the neighbourhood is the same. 02| Part of the reason is uncomfortable, so here it is. Ma

01| Creating places of power for the poor so their voices are heard is a sympathetic idea, and we support it. There is a real shortage of vocal representation. It cannot be the main pillar of the strategy, and the reason is not cynicism about the people who take those seats. 02| Reforming a system from the inside is notoriously tricky, and the odds run the wrong way: the representatives of the poor adapt to the existing system far more often than the system adapts to them. Th

01| Assume the best case. The model works, results are beyond reasonable doubt, the barrio is visibly better. There will still be groups with specific interests that will not cooperate. Appealing to a moral code of solidarity will have roughly the effect of asking a hungry bear to leave the salmon alone. So IkoCiti has to be able to play the power games — by every legal means — in the fight to rebuild the barrio. 02| That is what the PI Movement is for: the political arm, org