In a January 3, 2010 letter about me nominating me for CALI’s Distinguished Achievement Award, 53 year career private eye Eddie McClain wrote in pertinent part, “He has also been an effective advocate for the association and profession as a key member of the CALI Legislative Committee. As an active member of alternative organizations such as NOW, LULAC and the NAACP, he often persuades those organizations to support CALI bills or oppose unfavorable legislation detrimental to our fact-finding mission.”
This aspect of what I do for the California Association of Licensed Investigators and my profession bears some explanation because it is an important lesson for how democracy is supposed to work in America for interest groups. James Madison spelled it out in the Federalist Papers, in Federalist No. 10, writing as “Publius.”
According to Madison, a threat to democracy exists when large factions contend against one another. When one comes to power as a large faction, there is an inherent danger of dictatorship and authoritarian rule. To counter this, each small faction contends with other small factions and makes alliances with other small factions to create temporary majorities to pass or defeat legislation and to otherwise influence government policies and practices.
I make no secret of the fact that my overall world viewpoint is on the left. For one of the best explanations of what is meant by left and right, read Ideology and Utopia by Karl Mannheim. I eschew the term “liberal” for myself. As Heywood Campbell Broun, founder of The Newspaper Guild (AFL-CIO, CLC, CWA) once wrote, “a liberal is one who leaves the room when the fight begins.” I am a radical, just as that term might have been meant when Karl Hess wrote and Barry Goldwater said, “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice; moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”
CALI and the private investigative industry as a whole, needs its members who are Democrats or Republicans, Libertarians, or Greens, or like me, members of the Peace and Freedom Party, in order to make the temporary or even long range strategic alliances that enable us to be effective advocates for our profession when sculpting legislative and governmental policies. What I bring to the table in CALI, and in the National Organization for Women, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, League of United Latin American Citizens, and the trade union movement, is the ability to perceive where these organizations on an issue by issue basis have interests in common. That enables us to come together to oppose bills or support them when they will be detrimental to our interests or will advance our interests, respectively.
Then, there are the people who obviously don’t understand Federalist No. 10 and how democracy works in America or if they do, they have some self-destructive need to damage the long term prospects for legislative success for CALI and private investigators. Take the cabal of Rick Von Geldern, David Herrera, Ed Saucerman, and others who resorted to any tactic and proceeded motor-mouthed to either denounce the entire legislature as “whores” or who ratified the conduct of those who did.
One of the things they used in their battle against Mandatory Continuing Education (MCE) for private investigators was to vilify me and attempt character assassination by denouncing my ties to civil rights organizations as though they were inherently unsavory. Note of course that nobody in the profession was upset when I got several NOW chapters to oppose SB 208 because of the effect it would have had on sexual harassment and discrimination cases in the workplace. But when it came to their supporting MCE, all of a sudden I was accused with unabashed sexist language of “hiding behind the skirts of NOW.” I was also bashed with thinly veiled racist attacks against my affiliations with LULAC.
Did this cabal of miscreants care whether that kind of rhetoric might damage the long term interests of private investigators. It probably never even occurred to them. Which is precisely why it was lunacy for David Herrera to appoint Rick Von Geldern as legislative director for PICA (Professional Investigators of California) and for Ed Saucerman to sing Rick’s praises as though he was some kind of genius legislative tactician and strategist.
So, if they actually are literate enough to read and understand it. They should start their own voluntary continuing education by reading Federalist No. 10.