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 New Orleans The closer we get to 2014 and the full implementation of the Affordable Care Act or so-called Obamacare, the more our hopes for health security for all Americans are being dashed as we stumble over what appear to be loopholes in the law and its regulations large enough for companies to drag an army of sick, injured, and underpaid workers through. Embarrassingly, Pan American Life Insurance Group, New Orleans-based company with offices on Poydras Avenue, which calls itself the “Wall Street of New Orleans” is right in the thick of this mess in marketing to large employers bare-bones or “skinny” low cost plans that would provide fig leaf coverage for workers for preventive care only with nothing for hospital stays.
How can this be possible?
According to the Wall Street Journal, the problems allowing these kinds of insurance scams can be uncovered in the glaring light of a close reading of the regulations. Where most employers, experts, and government officials have seen the ACA as a mandate for “robust” insurance, the Journal reports that “…the rules make it clear that those mandates only cover plans sponsored by insurers that are sold to small businesses and individuals, federal officials confirm.” Citing a Citigroup Inc report, the Journal says, “That affects only 30 million of the more than 160 million people with private insurance, including 19 million people covered by employers….Larger employers, generally with more than 50 workers, need cover only preventive services, without a lifetime or annual dollar-value limit, in order to avoid the across-the-workforce penalty.”
The hope for workers shackled to these cheap rate employers is that though the company might avoid the $2000 per worker penalty for offering no coverage, if the worker opts out of the company bare-bones plan and goes to the state health exchange to buy fuller coverage they would have to be subsidized $3000 annually by the employer. To take advantage of the subsidized exchange plans a worker would pay about $70 per month for so-so midlevel coverage and if they were making more than $12 per hour their costs could go up to $140 for the full package. That’s still a good deal for full health coverage, but a lower waged worker would still have to be able to afford it, and that could be tough for many.
The employers who are thinking about stiffing their workers on these low-to-no coverage skinny plans are betting the odds favor them. Knowing how little they pay their workers, especially in the hospitality and food service industry, they think so few of them will be able to pony up the money to go the exchange route, that the few times they will have to fork over $3 grand will make it worth the bet for them. Companies in Texas like El Fenix, the Tex-Mex chain with 1200 workers, and San Antonio-based Bill Miller Bar-B-Q with 4200 workers are already indicating they are going with the bottom of the barrel options. For unions like Local100 or organizations advocating workers’ rights, I can already see the faces of workers coming in our offices to report being fired for having signed up for the exchange and costing their bosses an extra $3000. If credit card histories can disqualify people from jobs now, health care problems and health care coverage decisions will no doubt lead to firings of workers throughout the country. There may be some protections for such blatant discrimination, and surely there must be, but there are protections for firing workers for labor law violations, union activity, reporting EEOC and health and safety issues, and workers still get fired for such activity every day, as companies and the government essentially say, “Prove it!”
We are in for a hard, rough fight in the trenches to try to win good, affordable healthcare coverage for Americans, because the ACA is just the beginning, and it may not be as good a beginning as we either need or had hoped for.
Crummy Care
 New Orleans Most cases of payday lending abuse come to me in the normal channels, which is to say right from the mouths of the victims. This time the shock and awe at the abuses of some payday lenders, like that of large, but low profile small loan, payday lender, World Acceptance, are so offensive that news of their consumer outrages were forwarded to me by a friend in the investment business and included scathing indictments by a hedge fund manager in his advisory newsletter.
World Acceptance operates a big niche business of lending at high interest rates and predatory terms to largely lower income and working families in the South and Mexico, where they have more than 1100 offices handling a portfolio of about 800 loans per location. They are huge in Texas, but Texas is huge, too, with 245 offices, Louisiana with 45, South Carolina, where they are headquartered, Georgia, and other states that don’t do much for their citizens in keeping the wolves away from the doors. Arkansas where there are still remnants of what were once the most aggressive anti-usury laws in the country has no World Acceptance offices, nor does North Carolina where pay day lending was outlawed years ago. Not that such prohibition stops World Acceptance since they are thriving in Georgia where payday lending is also prohibited.
In negotiating with subprime lenders while with ACORN, I would frequently begin the session by conceding that our members used subprime lenders and needed them, since banks ran away from direct lending of small sums and often our members did not have pristine credit histories. Forbes in a glowing report on World Acceptance at the end of 2012 was giddy about World Acceptance’s 327% stock price increase since the recession meltdown, as well as the soaring increases of their competitors Cash America and First Cash Financial, all of which are ubiquitous in lower income, minority neighborhoods on my daily journeys. As Forbes reported without a hint of irony, “Left to its own devices, it’s hard on customers but potentially kind to investors.” And, as I have often argued, the $2 billion in loans put out by World Acceptance would not be possible without the huge, and lucrative, lines of credit extended to them by in this case their bankers, Wells Fargo and Bank of America.
Reports from ProPublica, the nonprofit foundation funded investigative news shop, were more revealing about World Acceptance’s business methods. Routinely, they bundled in all kinds of different credit insurance products in the loans as a primary part of their business model. The hedge manager, admittedly trying to short the stock, argued that 50% of the company’s net profit came from the various insurance scams. Furthermore, he called the fact that 30% of their repayments every month are late, a “giant ponzi-accounting scheme,” which certainly stirs the pot hotter. The “ponzi” part comes partially from what some former World workers described as the operating motto, “pay and renew, pay and renew,” meaning that they were constantly refinancing the original loans to lard them up with higher rates, meaning higher returns, when ever fulfilled. Ex-workers descriptions of “chasing” where they visited borrowers homes and workplaces to implicitly threaten them about their loan status, are more reminiscent of the common practices of big lenders, including Citibank and others, using gangs to force collection of small loans in India where it is standard operating procedure.
Interest rates between 200% and 400% are not uncommon on the World Acceptance schemes. Abuses of the Military Lending Act are rampant as the company exploits loopholes. Meanwhile the new Consumer Finance Protection Bureau is vilified for its efforts at the federal level to issue regulations and guidelines attempting to curb the industry.
When people inside the finance world are grossed out by the business model, interest rates, and predatory practices of payday lenders like World Acceptance, there’s hope, but they may be as isolated inside that world as we are, banging on the front door for change, drowned out by the voices in Forbes and elsewhere, essentially saying “buy,” but hold your nose while doing so.
World Acceptance Audio Blog
 New Orleans My father, as longtime readers recall, would often greet me when I would return from an international trip, with the challenge to tell him “stories” that he “would want to hear.” Though he died just short of five years ago, I still find myself making mental notes as I travel, of the kinds of eclectic, but vital, pieces of information, he might find interesting.
- The men’s bathroom in the basement of our meeting rooms at the stately, revered University of Edinburgh were decorated in dazzling blue lights that were so distinctive that I couldn’t help snapping a picture. Later I found out that there was a less than decorative reason. The blue lighting made it difficult for heroin users to locate a vein, thereby discouraging addicts from using the university water closets as a shooting gallery.
- Virtually all of the public buses in Edinburgh are double-deckers, which locals cite as a claim to fame for the city compared to elsewhere in the United Kingdom.
- In Prague there are no workers in the toll booths for the Metro. On buses and the subway, no one pays tolls except for the occasional tourist I would see trying to navigate how to use the ticket machines.
- At the end of the reception after I arrived in Prague, the organizer Michal Ulver encouraged people to enjoy the food and eat hardily as they were doing and then mentioned that all of the food was “recycled,” as it was translated to me. What he meant was that the food had been collected by him with the help of a friend at a local grocery store from the rubbish bins after closing. I stayed with Jon Black and his roommates in Edinburgh my last few days in Scotland, and they generously offered me to enjoy any food I saw handy. Jon told me later that they practiced what they called “skipping,” which turned out to be the same dumpster diving routine that Michal had mentioned in Prague. He and one of his roommates alternated every other week going to the local grocery store at 11:30 PM after it closed and “shopping” for what they needed from the bins, washing it off later, and voila. If there is a breakfast of champions, skipping seems to be setting the dinner table for ACORN organizers in Europe.
- At a community kitchen in the Edinburgh housing complex I let the volunteer worker convince me to have a “stovie” for lunch, which he described as a local Scottish dish. Turned out it was corned beef and “mash” (mashed potatoes) all mixed together with no vegetables allowed.
- The most ubiquitous retail establishment I saw in Edinburgh anywhere near where we were organizing as well as everywhere downtown and elsewhere were “charity shops” featuring 2nd hand clothing and other goods, run by all manner of nonprofits as a way to develop resources to support their work from Save the Children to the Salvation Army. Incidentally, I also was taught the term “chuggers” which stands for “charity muggers” and describes street canvassers that highjack debit and credit card information for fake causes.
- A vote on Scottish independence from the United Kingdom is upcoming but polls are saying that currently voters are 60-40 against.
- A scheme to privatize social or public housing has foundered in many parts of the UK. My colleagues favorite paradox was a picture we all took of a vast track of land in Pilton, where we are planning an organizing drive for ACORN Scotland, promising development, which has not happened, on vacant land where social housing was torn down for private interests whose plans didn’t develop anything due to lack of financing.
- In a humbling cross cultural note, I learned that the choice of cold or warm beer that I have often noted in Kenya and speculated that it came from lack of refrigeration facilities, actually comes from colonization by the British there and the fact that some of them prefer warm ales. More embarrassingly, when our folks were talking at a pub about the different ways that some things were pronounced in various parts of Scotland, I cited the example from India of urinal being pronounced by ACORN India organizers as ur-i-nal. Calmly, they informed me that they all pronounced the term ur-i-nal. Whoops!
- My father used to enjoy a bottle of Glenfiddich for Christmas, but over in Scotland they claim that they grow fonder over time for scotches with a stronger taste of peat. They gave me a bottle of Aberlour. Cheers!
Stories for My Father Audio Blog
 New Orleans Andrew Breitbart was the face and force behind a number of high traffic websites during his career, ended suddenly with a fatal heart attack more than a year ago. He played a role in helping set up the liberal Huffington Post, but at his death was best known for his “big” sites, especially Big Government, a right wing love feast. To goose the traffic on these sites, Breitbart courted controversy including releasing cellphone photos that became the undoing of Anthony Weiner, now a former Congressman from New York City, and potential candidate for Mayor there, but perhaps his best known escapades were based on his partnership with the even more controversial conservative activist and videographer, James O’Keefe, especially his ACORN takedown.
Interestingly, I interviewed Andrew Marcus, the director of a documentary about Breitbart, called Hating Breitbart, yesterday on my weekly “Wade’s World” show on Friday morning’s at 9AM, since the movie was appearing at the Little Rock Film Festival. Marcus’ route to the movie had been circuitous. Coming out of film school in Chicago he became fascinated with filming protests because of the “human drama” that always emerged through the camera. He created a blog on protest films, and next thing he knew he was filming Cindy Sheehan, the Iraq war casualty’s mother, protesting at President George Bush’s Crawford, Texas ranch, and in the process the experience radicalized him as he witnessed what he saw as a double standard of lax reporting by the national media about the protests and the infrastructure that made them possible. From there it was a short leap to catching the Tea Party as it grew and to then bonding with Breitbart, who he met while filming him speaking at a tea party, and gathering the footage that becomes Hating Breitbart.
Marcus confirmed in our conversation that Breitbart was in many ways apolitical. He liked a good fight and wanted to build his business, so he was a happy warrior in some ways who became a conservative darling. Certainly Breitbart’s real passion, shared by the director, was poking the rest of the media in the eye. All of which seems natural to me, because he wanted to make his web-voice stand out in the herd. Marcus, and perhaps Breitbart and many on the right, see the media’s indifference not as incompetence, but conspiracy, not as laziness, but bias and design. Ironically, this view would find much common cause on the left as well, where victimization can also be a common complaint. Marcus’ “hating” theme comes from his perspective that the antipathy stirred by Breitbart discolored the true man, but Marcus is surely aware that the “hating” from the right as well and the demonization of politics, politicians, and organizations, like ACORN, is equally obscuring.
Marcus seemed defensive about questions concerning James O’Keefe and his relationship with Breitbart, wanting to define O’Keefe as a “freelancer” and ignore the factual history of Breitbart’s dissembling about his financial and professional relationship with O’Keefe for months before admitting to it, which is anything but something described in the common vernacular of publisher to freelance journalist. Marcus wanted to have questions about O’Keefe and his plummeting credibility around fake presentation of video on ACORN, legal settlements in San Diego for harm he inflicted on an ACORN worker, and the fiasco he was involved with in tampering with phones in Senator Mary Landrieu’s New Orleans field office, referred to O’Keefe directly. At one point he even offered to give me O’Keefe’s phone number on the air, which would have been a huge privacy breach that I declined. He was disturbed that people didn’t understand that the final settlement on the Landrieu case was for a misdemeanor and not a felony, which is hardly the point. I asked if O’Keefe had any questions now about how stupid a stunt it was, but the answer was again a phone number for O’Keefe. He also expressed amazement that people saw O’Keefe’s fake pimp video promo getup on his ACORN assault as “racist.” Wow!
All of which inevitably leads to the conclusion that he got so close to the subject that he lost perspective. What in some situations might have been an interesting and nuanced film about contradictions often missed by participants but shared by activists on both sides of the line, seemed increasingly to have been an attempt to hoist a banner on a battleground now abandoned by a warrior for another lost and forgotten cause.
Hating Breitbart Audio Blog
 First team of EPTAG / ACORN doorkockers after a successful afternoon on the doors. — in Edinburgh, Scotland. Edinburgh Jon Black of the Edinburgh Private Tenant Action Group (EPTAG) had done a nifty bit of research to figure out where the giant cooperative ScotMid owned apartments that they were renting. He figured that the 100-year old coop had regularly owned the flats above where they had their small grocery stores, so he systematically did the research on where the tax records showed their property and then searched for the apartments above ScotMid and eventually had a list of almost 100 units worth trying to doorknock.
EPTAG also had a great issue and Keir, another EPTAG stalwart, had already proven it would work because he was also a ScotMid tenant. Renting his flat, the leasing agency for ScotMid charged him 120 pounds for various administrative and cleaning fees. All of which are illegal. Keir had demanded his money back on that basis, and Retti, the letting outfit, had meekly returned his money. In short, EPTAG had a great handle to begin the conversation with Scotmid tenants.
After another hour of going through doorknocking fundamentals, the volunteers broke into three teams and a little after 6pm with the far northern sun still high in the sky and the rain breaking, we all started bushing the bells on the doors near Stockbridge to see if we could talk our way into the entry hall and knock from the fourth floor down. Our brand new ACORNistas were excited and nervous, each for different reasons, as they tried to remember their points and prepared to ask for dues for the first time on the doors.
Keir told me after the first half-dozen doors that his heart was still pounding and his feet were already hurting, but he still felt great about the reception we were getting that was so much better than he had expected. One person was a clear “yes” for the meeting in two weeks. Another would have been ready to join on the spot and had heard of EPTAG’s work, but was following his wife to London in 2 weeks where she had a better job. People talked freely. There were issues. No one liked the leasing group.
Before 8pm after all of the doors were hit, the numbers were good. Almost 45% were “at homes” and we had close to 35 visits with more than 20 positive responses and a clear dozen “yesses” for the meeting in two weeks. The reception to all of the teams had been excellent. Our crew was excited about coming out again on Sunday to mop up the list.
And, importantly, Jon Black and his team had signed up the first member. Just as promised, she was so excited she tried to give them the dues in cash first before they got her on a “standing order,” which is something like a bankdraft in the US and Canadian banking system. Jon and Liz had then tried to jokingly compete on their team for who led the raps and got the next members, which is also what the organization wants and needs.
There was celebration at the pub later with great good spirits as we summed up the work over the week. They proved they could get on the doors and make it happen and had their first member “in the open field.” For my part, I walked away with a bottle of great local scotch available nowhere else. We all had great memories and high expectations for the future of ACORN Scotland!
 Hitting the Doors in Scotland Audio Blog
 WADE Rathke from the USA is a one-off. Original has to be his epithet.
A community organiser, a self-appointed role he adopted at nineteen years old, today and 40 years later he is helping ordinary people to change swathes of societies the world over.
Founder of ACORN International, this unique individual focuses on what he calls ‘citizen wealth’ with an astounding optimism and immediacy that works for, and often achieves, transformational results. He never doubts any citizen’s capacity to make a difference, despite the battle scars earned along the way. “The fight for change is progress itself,” he told the Network.
Activists in Scotland, no matter what their campaign, can learn from this experienced veteran who advocates less talk, more listening, direct action and being clear about the issues as key components for kick-starting change.
ACORN is the Association of Community Organisations for Reform Now. Wade resigned from that board in 2008 after 38 years as a founding member. He is now ‘chief organizer’ for ACORN International, built on similar lines. His latest book Citizen Wealth: Winning the Campaign to Save Working Families, documents his journey with enthralling stories.
Rathke is known globally as the premier organizer of low and medium income labour and community groups and an inspiration to change makers who recognise that “a personal problem becomes a political issue”. It was on an ACORN project in Chicago that Barrack Obama cut his political teeth, a process he proudly documents in his biographies and has since staunchly defended against sometimes vicious attacks.
Sharing the story
IN May 2013 Wade Rathke visited Scotland for the first time in his long career. He was invited and hosted by several organisers of Edinburgh Private Tenants Action Group (Eptag). The enterprising, entrepreneurial young people who have founded this already influential organisation set up a day-school workshop in Edinburgh University’s Teviot building. It was well attended by committed activists from Glasgow, Edinburgh and other parts of Scotland.
The goal was to seriously consider starting another ‘affiliate’ or outpost of ACORN International. The buzz in the room became palpable as Wade’s direct style identified doable campaigns, an organising committee, weekly meetings and achievable goals. He clearly enjoyed moving away from “litanies of despair” to tongue-in-cheek reminders that “community organisers don’t stutter”. He engaged keenly with his audience and you could see the light of vision in his eye.
Since 2008 Rathke has travelled globally to help ordinary people do extraordinary things. Canada, Peru, South Korea, Czech Republic, Dominican Republic, Kenya and Mexico are some of the affiliates of the global group mushrooming globally at grassroots level. Ordinary people are learning how to organise and mobilize. Their mentor focuses on pragmatism, encouraging ‘winnable’ campaigns that drive people out of a sense of political hopelessness into a can-do state of mind.
“Justice is just-us” said Wade whose blog at chieforganizer.org daily records, probes and supports the struggles that working people face against minimum wage abuse, inequality and injustice both in his home state of Louisiana (rebuilding New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina), across the United States and the world over.
“Individuals alone don’t have the capacity for resolving long-standing grievances,” he said. “The process is messy, it’s difficult and it can be a fight. You need to identify and organise your constituencies, you need strong organisations to achieve the change you believe must happen to protect and empower ordinary people.”
Expect to pay up front
UNIQUE to ACORN is the payment of ‘dues’ or membership fees, a concept that Wade says does not initially sit comfortably in some cultures, but creates a strong and vital sense of accountability. This fundamental principle is crucial to project success, and ironically, he notes, it is the lower income members amongst diverse constituencies who pay most willingly. At the same time, it is more often the organisers who stumble over asking.
“The key issue is the asking, not the getting,” says Wade. “Often it’s the organisers who need to change their approach as lower income people find it incredible that anyone else would fund their fight for change. They expect to pay dues and it is the poorest who pay most consistently and continuously.
“But with those fees comes a ‘testing’ from the members as they decide if you are making their case. You should expect that testing, another reason to set winnable goals that are achievable within a reasonable time-frame. Members will gauge success and develop confidence with that good feeling from wins, even though those achievements are small and incremental. ”
At the peak of its success ACORN had 500,000 members, all paying dues, and subsidiary partners amounting to 168 corporations within the “family”. “We got big,” says Wade, “Perhaps too big and it became more difficult to manage such a big organisation.” He admits that he has learned from some of the past experiences. “ACORN International is built out of the US experience,” he says.
He looks back to Little Rock Arkansas in May 1970 where the National Welfare Rights Organisation (NWRO) had sent him as an organizer. It was here that ACORN began and his first campaign was to help welfare recipients gain their basic needs. It was the starting point from which all the rest has unfolded. As a young man already dedicated to ‘Adequate Income Now’ he knew that “people have to come together to generate change” and that mantra still drives him today. He emphasizes the importance and power of “playing in teams” referring to Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam’s book of the last decade on this subject, listed below.
Our society can learn a lot from all of this in the fluid state of change that is Scotland today. This article only scratches the surface of the achievements in the life and times of the political force that is Wade Rathke. Further investigation may take your own activism to new and better levels. To learn more, follow the links below.
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