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 [...]]]>

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

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New Orleans    For decades Robert Caro’s Power Broker, a biography of New York City’s parks, ports, bridges, and roads czar Robert Moses, has been required reading for community organizers interested in understanding how power works in cities.  Jane Jacobs of course was the author and planning [...]]]>

Protest where people dressed in their Jane Jacobs eyeglasses

New Orleans    For decades Robert Caro’s Power Broker, a biography of New York City’s parks, ports, bridges, and roads czar Robert Moses, has been required reading for community organizers interested in understanding how power works in cities.  Jane Jacobs of course was the author and planning aficionado best known for her advocacy of human scale community development.  Roberta Gratz, our neighbor, wrote a book (The Battle for Gotham:  New York in the Shadow of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs) about their conflict some years ago and was going to give a lecture on how their shadows could still be seen on the New Orleans landscape, so it was bound to be an interesting hour at the Historic New Orleans Collection on Royal Street to hear her remarks.

I had been attracted to the lecture because I had thought she was speaking about shrinking city footprints, which is a critical organizing issue these days.  That turned out not to be the real drift of Roberta’s remarks though it was fascinating to hear her point about a Brooklyn land survey finding more than 500 acres of undeveloped property in the city, making that amount larger than Prospect Park!  The real sharpness of her critique was on the Moses-like attempts to create state authorities over local land use and development without any accountability.

She correctly drew direct comparisons in New Orleans to some of the controversial Moses strategies of public control that authorizes the Bio-District developing a so-called medical corridor for the new Veterans’ Hospital and replacement for Charity Hospital.  The outsized footprint of the hospitals she argued would create a suburban-like city center competitor driving businesses and services out of the core central business district to the magnetized health facilities.  She predicted that they would end up requiring subsidizes and would not deliver new jobs or enterprises as promised. The virtually all-white French Quarter and uptown crowd wildly applauded these remarks.  They were equally enthusiastic about her critique of a newly state proposed Tourism District that would not involve the immediate planned destruction as the Mid-City hospital district had, but amassed $11 million for marketing that was seen as unnecessary and she warned that an unaccountable authority in the Moses-model could keep annexing more area and power having already claimed even the Treme neighborhood as part of its footprint.  She argued that this district was little more than a hotel development stalking horse.

One of the key components of the Moses-model was the ability to control public revenue streams which Gratz did not mention.  The authority may have been the Moses hammer, but the money from his ability to control bridge tolls and other streams provided the muscle that moved the tools.  In a city where one of the proposals for renaming the local basketball team is to call us the New Orleans Poor Boys and in a state which is not hesitating in its guerrilla war against the city to transfer power and control, revenue is still the delimiting factor in plans no matter how grand.

Gratz had the dignified crowd whooping when she raised the Jacobs arguments against one current streetcar plan that would extend the line for tourists near the behemoth Morial Convention Center and not farther downtown along St. Claude in our Bywater neighborhood.  She related an Jacobs-like development axiom:  “…do it for locals, visitors will come…do it for tourists and the locals will leave eventually.”  That’s worth thinking about some more.  Another line about “authentic regeneration” is also intriguing along with a Jacobs term she cited about something called, “cataclysmic money,” all of which I need to consider longer and weigh harder.

The contradictions and ironies in the crowd were hard to avoid.

Gratz took incoming hits during the question period for her criticism of the cloistering of Armstrong Park and her comparisons to the earlier planning disaster of Grant Park in New York City.  She made an interesting point about letting people decide by waiting to build sidewalks until it was possible to recognize the “desire paths” that people chose to walk.

She let the crowd off easily by not defining the passage of the Community Reinvestment Act as having been specifically passed in 1978 by ACORN and others to end racial discrimination in lending, but soft pedaling it more as something that moved the banks to lend more to neighborhoods.  Also unspoken was the obvious points that might have lost her the support of many in this particular room had she pointed out the fact that nowhere is an unaccountable and undemocratic state control in the city in more dramatic evidence than the usurpation of the local school system which still goes largely unchallenged and in power almost eight years after Katrina.

Nonetheless, anyone listening carefully would be hard pressed to escape the conclusions and the dire warnings that hung from Roberta’s words at almost every turn.

Jane Jacobs

Milwaukee   If it has been said that newspapers “write the first draft of history,” perhaps it is panels like Lessons from ACORN organized by Oregon State Professor Marisa Chappell at the national [...]]]>

Professor Carroll speaking as Fred Brooks, Robert Fisher, and Gary Delgao (from right to left) listen to the Lessons from ACORN Panel at OAH

Milwaukee   If it has been said that newspapers “write the first draft of history,” perhaps it is panels like Lessons from ACORN organized by Oregon State Professor Marisa Chappell at the national conference of the Organization of American Historians that starts to outline the second draft.   At the least an excellent panel of very knowledgeable folks had been assembled to take a crack at it.

Fred Brooks from Georgia State argued that there was not yet a full appreciation of the “radical vision of social change” that drove ACORN, citing the Peoples’ Platform and its 309 points as evidence.  He also talked about a great personal story from an action in Atlanta done by 200 at a conference where Coretta Scott King was speaking and the grace with which she wrapped the ACORN demonstrators demands in Martin’s legacy saying that “if Martin were alive he would have been protesting with us,” and the meeting with bankers the action forced.

Robert Fisher of the University of Connecticut and editor of the evaluation of ACORN in The People Shall Rule drew comparisons from a recent conference on community organizing he had attended in France where many argued that community organizing was dangerous because it could be “disruptive of social engineering by the state,” which Fisher thought was the whole point of ACORN’s “conflict over power.”  Fisher made an insightful remark about the efforts of ACORN increasingly in the early years of the 21^st Century to “build bridges” to other organizations and the intriguing promise it had shown in steps to build “a united front” where others had been more sectarian.  Fisher also rejoined later in the panel on my point about working now on an organizing model where the organization “eats what it kills” to also add correctly that ACORN had pioneered in “eating what we won” as well as evidenced by the H&R Block campaigns and many others in the 21^st Century.

Professor Carroll of the Rochester Institute of Technology nailed a critical part of the ACORN history as a “misreading of the role of conflict in making social change” which allowed too many of its critics to advance and too few others to move to protect the organization failing to understand how conflict creates change and challenges power.

Gary Delgado, former staffer and author of the still classic book about ACORN, Building the Movement, rattled off a number of observations collected in his 40 years of close observation of the organization.  He worried that the “vacuum” created by the organization shuttering its doors in late 2010 had not been filled and proving difficult to fill because there were not other “national” organizations that had “centralized” operations that could be effective and “were not afraid to make enemies.”  The use of direct action and the singular voice for poor people were also now missing.  Delgado found agreement in nailing the fact that the attack on ACORN had been “racialized” and the opposition that mounted around its voter registration work was rooted in ACORN’s effectiveness in registering African-Americans and Latinos to register and vote.  At the same time he noted, perhaps controversially, that times had changed and ACORN was unprepared for the “air war” when attacked and his own view that “boots on the ground are necessary but not sufficient” to protect the organization.

In my remarks I responded to the question posed by Professor Chappell about how organizing strategies at ACORN had changed to address alterations in the way state power worked by detailing our expansion program designed to adapt to the devolution of federal resources and decision making to states.  I also told the stories of our living wage initiatives and victories that greater statewide capacity and infrastructure allowed, citing the statistics in my Citizen Wealth chapters.

The discussion had been engaging and the questions way too brief, but the presentations had resonated with many, so perhaps there will be fruit borne in the future from the seeds planted in Milwaukee.  John Atlas in his Seeds of Change began and ended his remarks noting forcefully the unreliability and inaccuracies of the New York Times and other media outlets in being able to understand or interpret the ACORN story.  There seemed to be consensus in Milwaukee that the first draft from newspapers absolutely needed to go to rewrite!

Milwaukee   I couldn’t resist an invitation to speak at a panel on ACORN and community organizing this weekend at a conference of historians largely because it was being held in Milwaukee and it gave me an excuse for several days to see what was really happening here at ground zero in [...]]]>

Recall effort in Wisconsin

Milwaukee   I couldn’t resist an invitation to speak at a panel on ACORN and community organizing this weekend at a conference of historians largely because it was being held in Milwaukee and it gave me an excuse for several days to see what was really happening here at ground zero in the class war that the right has declared on workers and regular citizens in Wisconsin and throughout the country.  Social Policy just came out with a Special Report on Wisconsin One Year Later which had piqued my interest and given me a thorough introduction for just how devastating this has been beneath the headlines.  Join me in reading the reports currently on the website.

There is a recall election set now with the primary only weeks away in early May and the general election for Governor in early June.  The speed of the recall has made this a strange campaign.  Watching the road from the airport into Milwaukee was curious because there were no yard signs visible, no billboards, and in fact no sign that there was anything out of the usual happening in Milwaukee.

The offices of SEIU Healthcare Wisconsin are in a re-purposed Baltz Brewery and are new and well put together with pale yellow walls and subdued purpose trim and doors everywhere.  There are names on all of the doors and cavernous conference rooms though it is largely quite as a small training for the election is happening around a large table in the open atrium.  The several stewards and volunteers are being told how “right-to-work” really works and why SEIU has endorsed their candidate for the Democratic primary.

The action is in the field, not the office, and that’s the good news, but predictably there is a breath exhaled after the giant recall effort that still has to be inhaled deeply for the second wind to test the full mettle of whether or not Scott Walker can be stopped here at the sharp point of the conservative surge in the Midwest.

Philadelphia     What used to be a dead zone not far from Center City in Philadelphia was hopping on a Friday night with people all over the streets as I was dropped off in a mad rush from the airport as Jasmine Rivera, the regional organizer for [...]]]>

Talking Citizen Wealth & more at Moonstone in Philly

Philadelphia     What used to be a dead zone not far from Center City in Philadelphia was hopping on a Friday night with people all over the streets as I was dropped off in a mad rush from the airport as Jasmine Rivera, the regional organizer for ACTION United, drove off to find a place for the car.  We had a good crowd at Robin’s Books and Moonstone Arts Center thanks to Craig Robbins of ACTION United and his team, old and new leaders, old and new organizers, and friends and bystanders.

Once again it didn’t take long after describing the books for the ACORN post-mortem to begin, and these topics were covered in depth, but some of the more interesting questions involved the potential for community-labor coalitions, where I heartily agreed though answered that I thought the jury was out on whether or not these were real partnerships or simply transactional alliances where the community components were very much junior partners.  In Pittsburgh and Philadelphia one gets the feeling with both One Pittsburgh and Fight for a Fair Philadelphia that these are the labor equivalent of grass-tips organizations, which is ironic since the capacity for real partnerships seems remarkable in both places.  Something worth more investigation, I think.  Visiting with some of the organizers afterwards they regaled me with tales of the Fight for a Fair Economy street theater in front of Wells Fargo, which produced good humor, but I had trouble following the point or where it was producing any pressure or building much, so I need to find out more.

It was great to hear the progress being made on the campaign in Philadelphia to win sick days for workers in the city.  Last year ACTION United had led efforts to win sick days through the Council to be vetoed by Mayor Nutter.  This year they are gearing up to win a larger majority that could resist the veto.  The basic proposal seems to be 5 sick days for establishments with 5 or more workers.

Critically on the “citizen wealth” and “self-sufficiency” agenda, it was delirious to hear that ACTION United has now taken the first steps to move its tax preparation service to a fee-for-service basis.  Even at the introductory level of $30 per return, they have already brought in over $10,000 demonstrating the potential in this area is significant.

More disappointingly, I ran into Bruce Dorpalen, who had been with ACORN for many years and a key player in our housing programs and chief architect of the amazing housing counseling program we had run which allowed hundreds of thousands of families to obtain housing.  He confirmed rumors that they had shut their doors, unable to right-size the operation to the funding resources available.

Nonetheless, exciting things are in store in Philadelphia.  Seeing old and new leaders still wrapping their arms around the organization and trying to chart the path to the future, gives great hope.

More of the Moonstone Crowd

New Orleans    Blaming the victim may be more American than apple pie at this point.  Apple pie is less and less a staple of the American diet, but blaming the victims seems to be the default mode for institutions large and small that are unable to correct their cultures.

It is inarguable that the [...]]]>

SNAP action

New Orleans    Blaming the victim may be more American than apple pie at this point.  Apple pie is less and less a staple of the American diet, but blaming the victims seems to be the default mode for institutions large and small that are unable to correct their cultures.

It is inarguable that the Catholic Church is an historic institution with a mass base of adherents that has been beset by a cloistered culture which has tragically shielded bad apples guilty of abhorrent, unspeakable abuses by some of its priests of some of their parishioners, including children.  Some dioceses have gone bankrupt and many have paid multi-million dollar settlements to victims of abuse.  Many of us have hoped over the years that the Church was mending its ways and its culture as this tragedy has tarnished this institution and its abuses of people and power in country after country.  Now unfortunately the news is unavoidable that the Church is changing strategy once again to its long discredited posture of attack and cover-up.

The Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) founded and directed by David Closhessy over 20 years ago is an organization I have followed closely over the years.  Dave was an excellent organizer for ACORN first in Boston, then Memphis, and later in St. Louis.  He was never especially easy to supervise largely because he is stubborn and straightforward, both of which are excellent qualities for an organizer.  I would usually run into these two character traits when trying to get Dave to commit to longer service and greater responsibility with ACORN.  I was sorry to lose him, but proud of what he went on to later build with SNAP and the great good its accomplished and the change I thought he was bringing to the church as an institution at a great personal price.  I know his family.  I count him as a friend.

Part of this new culture of resistance to righteous claims according to the Times seems to be driven by a church advocacy and front group called the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights.  Its president is quoted as claiming that “leading bishops” had “resolved to fight back more aggressively against the group:  ‘The bishops have come together collectively.  I can’t give you the names, but there’s a growing consensus on the part of the bishops that they had better toughen up and go out and buy some good lawyers to get tough.  We don’t need altar boys.”  Where has this dude been the last few decades?  Did he not get the memo that the Church has shielded pedophiles and criminals who abused children?  Does he not understand that perhaps the reason the Church doesn’t “need altar boys” is because they seem unable to categorically protect them from priests!

The good news is that SNAP is not a defendant in any of these suits or a direct party to them.  The bad news is that a smaller, fledgling nonprofit like SNAP is ill-prepared to defend itself.  It is a little understood injustice embedded in the inequity of our legal system that resource imbalances can cripple the smaller parties to proceedings.  I can remember a $100,000 bill for copying and presenting records on a witch hunt involving our local union during the first George Bush administration.   David’s operation seems to only spend in the mid $300K range annually, so the legal strategy seems to be to bleed them down to a weakened state.

This is not a strategy that will work.

Without talking to him I can tell that David seems to have taken a page from the Planned Parenthood playbook and realized that he had to abandon his quiet behind the scenes strategy for SNAP and go public with this attack just like Cecile Richards did on the Komen for the Cure fiasco.   Knowing David, he would have probably preferred to walk barefoot in the snow in his St. Louis neighborhood asking for donations than allow a photographer to take pictures of garage at home where boxes of records are stacked up as he tries to respond to the subpoenas.  David is appealing to his base through the Times and getting the word out to people of good will throughout the country including millions in the Catholic Church who believe in their dogma and want to believe that their Church has changed and is not the Church of these retrograde bishops and the errant advocate.   I hope he is planning to ask for donations for the SNAP legal defense from these vultures and apologists just as Cecile did to replace the Komen funds.  I may not be Catholic, just as I was not a woman, but I know when a wrong is being done, and the easiest thing to do is send a check to help guarantee a fair fight and a fair shake.

The other reason that this strategy will not work goes back to the character of David Clohessy and those two obnoxious traits that I often confronted:  stubbornness and straightforwardness.  He would always unnecessarily go out of his way to make sure there was no way that I could possible characterize him as saying I had a commitment from him, until and unless he was good and damned ready.  I can imagine him being a piece of work in a deposition for exactly the same reason.  I hope the Church lawyers put him on the stand with a jury.  They may not like him every minute, but any jury anywhere in America will believe Dave is telling the truth and not some priest or some high priced lawyer.

And, then there’s the stubborn.  The Church could break SNAP like a twig, but this is a lifetime commitment for Dave.  The kind of commitment that I couldn’t get to ACORN, but that he embraced personally and professionally to reform an institution that he cared about that had done wrong.  It’s not about money or publicity or anything else for Dave.  They could bankrupt SNAP tomorrow, and it will just be another day at the office for Dave in dealing with victims who need his help and advice.    There’s no stopping David Clohessy on this mission.

The tide of history is with him.  The Church needs to learn to surf and stop believing there’s any dam they can build that can stop the flow of justice to those who have been abused.

You have an extra $10, $20, or $100 hanging around. Click on this link:  Send it to Dave Clohessy and SNAP today!  

There are two ways to approach looking at these numbers around the country, and both perspectives can offer some insight to US political views.

On the one hand it lends some vague sense of [...]]]> New Orleans  The Times ran a story that tried to put a face on the 1% and encourage us to embrace our inner percentage.

There are two ways to approach looking at these numbers around the country, and both perspectives can offer some insight to US political views.

On the one hand it lends some vague sense of understanding of why such whacky percentages of Americans sometimes respond that they are richer than anyone factually might believe them to be or in other words why so many modest income American families still identify with the rich.  There are some people who might look at the household income figures in their communities where $200000 or $300000 or even $400000 might indicate the upper elite of the 1%, and say to themselves and to others like pollsters and Republican politicians, “hey, I can get there too with some luck or a break or two.”

On the other hand people like me are amazed that that the real meaning of such numbers proves how widespread relative poverty is in these same communities.  If you can be a one-percenter in Laredo at hardly $200,000, since it is a percentage that means people on the whole are desperately poor in Laredo and something should be done about it!  In my New Orleans $362,000 puts you there, and that’s a lot of money, and I’m not sure how folks would be making that here.  Little Rock is only a bit over $300,000, similar to Billings, Montana or Albuquerque or Boise or Panama City, all of which speaks a bit to the slightly more populist nature of some (much?) of the South and West.

The real story is not in the shading of the percentages but in the gap as the Times story indicates, as well as advantages that come from both chance (birth) and structural rigidity (access to job networks):

The top 1 percent of earners in a given year receives just under a fifth of the country’s pretax income, about double their share 30 years ago. They pay just over a fourth of all federal taxes, according to the Tax Policy Center. In 2007, they accounted for about 30 percent of philanthropic giving, according to Federal Reserve data. They received 22 percent of their income from capital gains, compared with 2 percent for everybody else.   Most 1 percenters were born with socioeconomic advantages, which helps explain why the 1 percent is more likely than other Americans to have jobs, according to census data. They work longer hours, being three times more likely than the 99 percent to work more than 50 hours a week, and are more likely to be self-employed. Married 1 percenters are just as likely as other couples to have two incomes, but men are the big breadwinners, earning 75 percent of the money, compared with 64 percent of the income in other households.

As interesting to me was playing with the formula that allowed a family to find their “place in the percentage.”   For example $100,000 family income puts a family in the top 21%, and if that family were fortunate enough to be living in New Mexico, where I have long thought about living such a family could be in the top 12% or in Montana, where we like to camp and wet a line, you would be in the top 14%.  Of course you still have to figure out how to bring $100,000 into your family, but I’m just saying…

When I left ACORN in 2008, starting wages were about $26,500 for a field organizer, which even today in 2012 would put an organizer ahead of the bottom 25%.  If they were living with another organizer or bunking in and sharing household costs, boom, they would have been in the top 50%!  We always would hear about how low our wages were, but mostly we were hearing from funders who lived in places like New York, where more than a half-million puts you in the 1%, or San Francisco where that starting wage would have put you in the bottom 17%, or Boston in the bottom 20%.

I can remember starting ACORN in Arkansas and finding that 70% of the people made less than $7500 in 1970.   Now to get to that 70% for household income, you would be knocking on the doors of families making about $100,000 around the USA.  A lot has changed in 40 years, and it’s not just inflation.

As I say, embracing your “percentage,” really depends on where you stand and how far up or down you gap is huge and growing, and the distribution is way out of plumb.

Ps.  Want to figure your place in the percentage?  Here’s the link to the calculator.