If people started to get together to help themselves, with the resources of the federal government to help them, who would need the ward politicians, the district leaders, the clubhouse lawyers, the courthouse gang? So the local politi- cians' response was to take charge wherever they could, and usually they could; they made sure the representatives of the poor were hand-picked, middle-class, and "responsible" lead- ers who had more in common with the existing power struc- tures than with the truly deprived. It did not take long for the mass of the poor to catch on that they were being
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