Wade Rathke: Chief Organizer Blog

 Little Rock    As a protest and oppositional movement this is gentle fare.  Reading Mike Lux’s manifesto there’s almost an apology to the President, while raising a hand from the back of the room in objection, but a protest this is, and a serious one, as good people and some sound, Nobel prize winning economists, raise [...]

Little Rock    There have to be some habits and certainties and for my family one of them is going to Little Rock for mi companera’s family reunion on the Saturday before Easter.  The family swears they really want to see each other, but after many years of experience the mass volumes of fried catfish, fries, [...]

New Orleans         The President is back from his European smash concert tour where he played to wild applause and standing ovations in countries from the British Isles to Turkey, so now it is “game on” for the big ticket items:  employee free choice, health care, and immigration reform.The lead article in the morning [...]

 New Orleans         Moldova is squeezed into the crawl space of Europe between Ukraine and Romania.  It’s one of those former USSR countries trying to find a space and place in the world, and finding it hard to do so in the current mix and mayhem of the economy.  Though some might ascribe this [...]

 New Orleans         On the road for three weeks means a pile of messages I couldn’t access on the cell from India for whatever reason, email I couldn’t read for the same technical mysteries, and some old fashioned mail stacked up and waiting.  There was a surprise piece though, a book of some kind [...]

New Orleans     Finally after a 40 plus hour schlep from almost 8000 miles away in the world, I found myself straggling home to New Orleans and the bounty of spring in the city.  I picked up a lucky break changing planes in Chicago and wildly ended up on the same flight with a bunch [...]

Dhaka        I’m at the point where one foot is still in the south Asian sub-continent and the other is already reaching out for home, but here are some more observations from this part of the world for what they might be worth.Fiscal year in India runs April 1 to March 31st.Bought “biscuits” at a [...]

Dhaka        None of these cities on my route the last ten days are small:  Bangalore (6.2M), Chennai (4.3M), and Kolkata (7.8M).  Yet, Dhaka with 6.7 M seems something very different moving from India to Bangladesh, as if I were rolling backward in time several decades.  At some level this is a surprise because one [...]