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 Ronnie from Via Organico San Miguel San Miguel de Allende is a picturesque 500 year old colonial town in the central highlands that played a major role in the Mexican Revolution against Spain and more recently is known as an artistic and ex-patriot center for North America. I first visited at the founding meeting of Enlace a dozen years ago and always enjoyed my time here. On our last visit in January 2010, close to 50 folks had packed the patio of the offices of the Center for Global Justice to hear about ACORN International’s work, so we were excited to be able to return to the Biblioteca, a nonprofit library touted as the largest such institution in Mexico and perhaps North America, where Judy Duncan of ACORN Canada and Dilcia Zavala of ACORN Honduras would join me in updating folks here on ACORN International’s progress.
After Cliff Durand of the Center introduced the discussion and our presentations the questions were interesting and focused on everything from what we had learned from the ACORN experience in the USA to Occupy San Miguel to whether or not it was practical to organize effectively around economic development in rural areas of the developing world. It was great to have some of our friends ask for updates on the Remittance Justice Campaign who had been with us in San Miguel in 2010. Before the end of May, we will post the session on ACORN International’s YouTube channel upon our return.
After a last look at the Biblioteca and a wave towards Juan of our favorite San Miguel coffeehouse, Juan’s Café, complete with a can of Café du Monde coffee & chicory commemorating his own visit to New Orleans, we joined Ronnie Cummins for a fantastic lunch and deeply educational tour of the Via Organico café and sundry operations. Ronnie is a fellow traveler on the activist path who originally hails from the homeland around Port Arthur, Texas, and after a stint at Rice in Houston jumped into the maelstrom as many of us did to oppose the Vietnam War and, as they say, the rest is history. He ended up making a career of advocating around food and other environmental issues and now heads a 850,000 strong Organic Consumers Association based in Minneapolis where he lives part of the year and Via Organico, the Mexican counterpart, where he is based in San Miguel. The Via Organico nonprofit is in many ways a demonstration project for an all-organic operation as well as a combination store, café, brewery, classroom, storage facility, and rooftop farm operation.
And, a heckuva operation at that! Lunch was fantastic and some of our number felt it their duty to try the beer brewed by Via Organico from cactus among other things while others had a dessert to die for that included homemade ice cream and later lime popsicles. Ronnie gave us a full tour of the entire operation along with the warehouse and brewery. He did such a great job, he made it feel like it might be possible to duplicate it, but as organizers, we all knew how difficult bringing projects like this to fruition really are.
 Alex McDonald of Ottawa ACORN trying a cactus beer Among the more interesting things Cummins showed us is was the rooftop growing area where the old ways that Mexican farmers used gourds were in use for growing produce in this dry, high, arid land by conserving the water they had collected. They would plant large gourds at intervals among the vegetables and refill the gourds with water through small caps on the gourd. Because the gourds were fired from the more porous clay, as the ground dried, the soil would literally suck the water out of the gourd and into the dirt nearby in order to water the plants to good health and yield. Amazing!
Anytime you can have a great dialogue with people, share what you’ve learned, join others successes and experiences, and learn something as well, it has to count as a great trip all around. As we hugged our old companera, Ercilia Sahores, who had organized all of these events for us, we said hasta luego, but in our hearts we could hardly wait to return for more.
 All Organic Operation  Gourd Watering System
 Jamie Dimon San Miguel de Allende It’s a dogpile now, so I feel totally justified in saying “I told you so” for the umpteenth time after years of being a Cassandra about the damage that Jamie Dimon, JP Morgan Chase CEO, and his bank had done to the country by bullying the Treasury Department and Obama Administration on regulations, foreclosures, and god knows what else. There’s no particular joy in reading about the $2 billion and rising loss at the bank despite red lights and sirens going off to warn them to duck and cover, largely because so much of the damage is done.
The banks have practiced naked self-interest and self-survival while pretending to have wise counsel and a voice in public policy as millions lost their homes and struggle to find work and decent wages in the worst recession in most Americans’ lifetimes. Dimon on the other hand thinks he’s still got a horse in the race as he sneers that the “pundits” will be coming for him now. Dude, you better hustle or you might even find out what the unemployment line looks like yourself.
Other banks seem to have realized that Dimon, Chase, and their derivative arrogance has cost them dearly. Perhaps Dimon will get the message soon. He needs to go, and shame on his board for not doing the deed when they meet in June.
Meanwhile, it’s time to revisit the compromises and lost opportunities around financial protections and real regulations on banking again. It’s not a matter of being “too big to fail,” but recognizing that big banks are public concerns not private playthings, and need to be steered to a proper course with the national economy and public interest foremost and everything else, way, way later.
 Houston Light Rail Houston For a change it wasn’t work. We were in Houston during the weekend to celebrate the wedding of Emma Graves Fitzsimmons and Gerry Smith. First time ever any of us had attended a wedding reported in the New York Times. It goes without saying that Emma’s job on the national desk of the Times and her marriage to Gerry, a reporter for Huffington Post, so no slouch, had a lot to do with it. Good times or bad Times, having been at the wedding of her parents and known her since birth, we wouldn’t have missed the event for the world. They were deliriously happy, which might not be enough to change my views about marriage, but certainly was enough to convince me that the culture has a couple of strong and persuasive advocates still. Anything that for any reason can make two people that happy, has to have some real value.
I was also excited to have an excuse to be back in downtown Houston, 4th largest city in the United States. We found a hotel right next to the new light rail system running down Main Street. I could hardly wait to see it. I could remember the arguments both pro and con about light rail when ACORN first opened our office in Houston in 1976 and now more than 30 years later, here it was. It was beautiful, too. Long and sleek. At some points along its route there were watercourses. At dawn, I watched a young woman absorbed in her cell phone with the water placidly reflecting the last shadows of the night behind her. She was also about the only person I saw anywhere around either then or the evening before. The light rail might be called light because its passenger loads were infinitesimally small with trains passing with only a couple of people aboard.
We were in a virtual ghost town. In fact walking early in the morning the number of For Lease signs and vacant properties throughout the main streets of this thriving commercial center were mindboggling. I started to wonder whether or not the buses coming up one street and the rail going down another had severed the arterial passages to the heart of the city? Rather than attracting businesses to the pathways along the speedy rail line, it almost seemed like businesses were in full flight.
Nothing was open. There was no place for even as much as a cup of coffee. It felt like we had stumbled into the valleys of an urban desert walking between modern skyscrapers. Even in Detroit, which once was the 4th largest city, I could have found a diner. What had happened to Houston and its “catch the horse by the tail” bold and brash Texas shout to the urban future? Had this slipped into the bayou with Enron? Been lost in the skepticism attending a future with diminishing oil?
I love Houston, but I couldn’t help feeling with every block I stepped off along the miles of my walk that something was terribly wrong.
 Congressman John Lewis Speaking up for Voting Rights Houston The lion in winter is still a lion, and John Lewis, a beacon for the civil rights movement in the 1960’s and now a longstanding Congressman from Atlanta, roared in the halls of Congress the other night about voting rights once again. The simple issue that pushed his button was the hater amendment from another Georgia Congressman Paul Broun trying to deny all funding to the Department of Justice for enforcement of the critical provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Broun, caught in the act, by Lewis, smartly apologized and withdrew his amendment, but that was tactical not sincere. The strategy of voter suppression continues to go unchallenged.
Broun’s amendment was meant to push back the Department of Justice, finally arising from its own slumber, and challenging Georgia and other states’ efforts to implement the Republican strategy of voter suppression through new voter identification methods. Sadly, not all states are subject to the Voting Rights Act prescriptions, and many from Wisconsin to Kansas that have emerged as the “new South” in denying citizen rights to access the democratic voting process can escape with their strategy untainted.
Lewis’ roar reminds us that we critically need a civil rights movement now about the rights of the disenfranchised among the poor and racial minorities to vote, since they along with the elderly are the key components of the millions likely to lose their ability to vote in November’s election. While the Obama campaign whined in the front pages of the paper this week that “they got this” on registration and turnout in answer to George Soros, the Democracy Alliance, and other consortiums of the rich stepping up to register and mobilize these voters, the truth is that we need a full court press with all players suited up and on the court. For my part I hope they are not coming into the game too late, because much of the damage is already done.
Let Lewis lead a new civil rights movement again right now on this issue!
In the absence of major efforts like the independent ones that ACORN led cycle after cycle to register and mobilize voters; we now have overtly partisan outfits like the California Republic Party contractor, Momentum Political Services, reported on this week by the Sacramento Bee, that was hired to overtly add Republican registrants in battleground areas. Seems they have some huge problems with bad cards, bad addresses, and overtly obvious changes in party registration to Republican. Voter registration is hard work and the Republican strategy is clear: suppress the likely Democratic voter base and enhance the Republican voter files.
Without a viable party or campaign strategy at least the rest of us can stand solidly for civil rights and the promise of democracy, even as John Lewis once again has reminded us, the practice of democracy is absent everywhere.
 Marching in 1965
 The Port of New Orleans in the 19th Century New Orleans Consider these facts if you will:
From Wikipedia: As the country’s major coffee-handling port, the Port of New Orleans has 14 warehouses covering over 51 hectares of storage space and six roasting facilities.
Coffee Handled Here. New Orleans is the nation’s premier coffee-handling port, with 14 warehouses, more than 5.5 million feet of storage space and six roasting facilities in a 20 mile radius. Two of the most modern bulk processing operations are located in New Orleans: Dupuy Storage and Forwarding Corp. (first in U.S.) and Silocaf of New Orleans, Inc. (world’s largest). [Source: Port of New Orleans]
Let’s discount the fact that the Port of New Orleans is probably involved in some boosterism, but there can be little doubt that New Orleans is one of the major, if not THE, major entry points for coffee coming from Latin America. Ironically, whether in trying to buy fairtrade green coffee beans in New Orleans or trying to ship them directly from Honduras for example, we keep hearing these days of shipping routes to Newark and the Port of NY/NJ rather than on the shortest route to New Orleans from the eastern, Atlantic or Gulf Coasts of Latin America. Talking to our roasters and sources for fairtrade green beans for Fair Grinds Coffeehouse as a 100% fairtrade shop in the city, we are constantly struggling to get our beans directly through the Port of New Orleans, rather than trucked in and warehoused in the city. What’s up?!?
I heard a rumor that New York /New Jersey had offered tax incentives to divert coffee traffic after Katrina to move coffee out of New Orleans, but after spending hours on the Internet, I cannot yet confirm the truth of that information. The facts though are that Katrina did ruin a lot of coffee and tea in area warehouses, and some have not returned more than seven (7) years later.
Sadly, and perhaps ironically as well, the leading fairtrade buyers have perhaps been the slowest to return, rather than the fastest. The coffee buying cooperative composed of 22 of the biggest, leading fairtrade roasters all used to bring all of their coffee through the Port of New Orleans, but are only now debating a return. These roasters include many of the best including Just Coffee in Madison, Café Campesino in Georgia, Bongo Java in Nashville, Third Coast in Austin, and Amavida in Florida, as well as a bunch of great roasters in all across Canada.
Seems like fairtrade social justice would include making sure that there is support for the City of New Orleans and its great, deepwater river port, as it recovers from Katrina, especially among the progressive forces in the rebuilding effort that continues unabated but with grave challenges even to this day. Add to that the union jobs and living wages on the Port and in the warehouses and the arguments made by many, including COWS director, Professor Joel Rogers from the University of Wisconsin, that the Port should be the “economic driver for high road development” after the storm, and I would think this would be an easy decision rather than a lengthy debate.
We should be up to our elbows in fairtrade coffee beans in New Orleans, not on our knees begging for a bag here and a bag there. What’s missing in this story?
Maybe it’s time for us to put our coffee cups down for a minute and start an organizing campaign, which is something we do understand!
 New Orleans Finally the fog is lifting around state and federal foreclosure modification programs and the real program is clear. In the way of acronyms and abbreviations that abound in such programs like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the largest of the mortgage guarantor agencies, the real program is called “No-Mo,” which stands for No Modifications Program.
It turns out according to letters released in Congress that the guardian of Fannie and Freddie, Edward DeMarco, missing yet another deadline for revealing any other program than No-Mo, had also presided over killing programs that would have accelerated foreclosure modification programs that had been approved by the agencies and were in testing trial runs with both Citibank and Wells Fargo. DeMarco substituted the No-Mo program for these efforts to actually keep families in their homes.
In responding to two Congressmen, he gave as his rationale the following answer: “These pilot programs…ended due to complex operational issues, involving system changes, accounting considerations and the interest level of Fannie Mae’s partners.” Let me translate that into English. “Accounting considerations” means that the banks did not want to restate their balance sheets to correctly reveal the current market value of their real estate portfolios which would have exposed them to be the “ghost” banks they are. “Interest level of Fannie Mae’s partners” is a euphemism for saying that the banks did not want to modify the loans and Fannie was unwilling to push them to do so, despite that being the stated Obama Administration policy. So, as many of us have known, the real policy has become No-Mo, no modifications.
Arizona Advocates and Action brought a good example to me the other day of how extreme the No-Mo program is being implemented in Arizona where foreclosures have risen to epidemic levels. There the state government, which has pretty much been a bellwether of what NOT to do on most every program these days has even come up with the absurd proposal that $55 million of the money negotiated by the various state attorneys general for foreclosure modifications and principal reductions should in fact be used for prison construction.
Can you believe it?!? Only in Arizona could the government have figured out a way to create No-Mo on steroids.
Possibly there is an even darker side emerging in the shadow of the subprime scandals that triggered so many of these foreclosures. A message from the British Columbia headquarters of ACORN Canada came to me last night on a newly enrolled member in Kamloops who was facing foreclosure. The mortgage, if you call it that, came from a company called Interior Equities, which is surely misnamed, and even in these days of 3 and 4% interest rates was carrying a 12% rate! Reading their website it also became clear that signing up for one of these mortgages meant taking on a much discredited adjustable rate mortgage (ARM) and giving Interior In-equities the right to alter the interest rate every month. This is a modern example of the old Wild West practice of claim jumping, where you simply steal someone’s property.
One there is No-Mo at the federal level it encourages states to steal relief monies and companies like Interior In-equities to steal property. When can homeowners get a break?
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