Wade Rathke: Chief Organizer Blog » Community Organizing

Organizing Plans with News from Walmart, Facebook, Spain, and Florida Voting Suppression

Mariehurt — Sat, 19 May 2012 18:24:39 +0000

Meeting of the Latin American organizers

Mexico City The annual meeting of the ACORN International board continued its meetings for a second day in Mexico City, as they conferred on fundamental issues of support for existing work, self-sufficiency and support and expansion into new areas like Sicily and Liberia. Additional reports were heard from Mexico on the Neza water campaign and received from Argentina. Planning meetings of the Latin American staff and leadership spent valuable hours at a great local coffeehouse, Denmedio, appropriately facing Solidarity Square, firming up the Remittance Justice Campaign and plans to organize coffeehouses and other enterprises in our cities to support the organizing. Other meetings consolidated the leadership training schedule and organizing plans for Local 100. Solid progress was made on all fronts topped off, appropriately, with a Friday night visit to see the Lucha Libre Mexican wrestlers!

Reading the papers on-line was almost as wild.

Florida continues to want to make a place for itself in voter suppression by gaining access to Department of Homeland Security information on immigrants so that it can data match voter lists for any slips. It seems the fears of immigrant rights advocates about the Secure Communities Act are fully confirmed as the continued Obama consolidation of this steel fist in a soft glove strategy becomes a potential Republican voter suppression tool, even as other studies like those of the Pew Center establish that the state managed voter registration systems are now in complete chaos.

Walmart seems to be conceding that the bribery problems in Mexico may be even worse than previously revealed and though hinting that there may be problems in other countries, they have not revealed bribes in China or India, which I have argued are very likely branches that have sprung from the roots of this corrupt corporate culture.

The rise of informal workers in the European economic crisis in places like Spain where a day’s work and wage is being bartered for hardly 50 euros, as reported by the Times, threatens to undermine the last of the social contract even in its last bastions of defense against neo-liberalism. Europe is the new Asia perhaps?

It seems that the arrogance of Jamie Dimon and JP Morgan Chase has led to losses of $3 billion (and rising) rather than the $2 billion earlier reported. Hedge funds have continued to profit from Chase’s problems, proving that a billion here and a billion there are still something more for sharks on Wall Street than friends across the counter. Nonetheless, Dimon’s board and shareholders looked the other way.

Finally, Joe Ricketts owner of Wrigley Field, founder of Ameritrade, and a billionaire with buffalo in Wyoming (sorry about that!), proved that haters still rule the world in some sectors with a kerfuffle even rejected by the Romney campaign that he underwrite a $10 million campaign of race baiting and race hating against Obama via the sputtering and aged rhetoric of Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Good to see that there was pushback in Chicago which is not yet located in the “new” South and he was sent scurrying. All of which is not to say that we cannot expect similar mess on the airwaves and elsewhere in the coming presidential contest, but it certainly goes to prove that other side of the coin on the old saw: “just because you are rich, does not mean you aren’t stupid,” rather than “why aren’t you rich, if you are so smart?”

Dilcia Zavala from ACORN Honduras in Tegucigalpa showcases the entry to Denmedio

Video Series: Wade Discusses Battle for the 9th Ward

jstuart — Thu, 03 May 2012 21:27:45 +0000

Pension Funds Demanding Walmart Board Step Down over Mexican Bribery

Mariehurt — Tue, 01 May 2012 15:44:08 +0000

Walmart Protest in New York City

New Orleans Walmart annual board meetings are legendary dog-and-pony shows with literally thousands traipsing to Bentonville for a Roman circus of entertainment and company spectacle. This meeting next month may have a sharper edge that not even a packed room of handpicked “associates” can stifle. It will be impossible for the board to ignore shareholders questions about how they could have not known about the corporate corruption and bribery, involving $24 million in Mexico and known and covered up by all of the top executives.

Someone else besides me is upset that Walmart was hiding its hands behind rock in 2005 when many of us were organizing aggressively in an attempt to win real corporate accountability from the company on community and labor standards. John Liu, New York City controller and sometime candidate for mayor, was involved in pushing for an outside investigation of Walmart’s labor standards in China and other source countries through a shareholder resolution then, which was pushed aside despite a direct meeting with the board. Now, the New York City pension funds have pledged 4.7 million votes according to a story by Gretchen Morgenson of the New York Times to unseat the Walmart directors facing re-election.

Too bad for Walmart that too many of us that were straight armed with constant denials and obfuscation then are still around and asking the same questions and now knowing that the answers are different than the board and top executives claimed at the time. New York City funds may be out in front but from Morgenson’s reporting it seems clear that Illinois Retirement funds and F&C Management, which she describes as a $150 billion asset manager, are also on the record still smarting from the slap down in 2005 and laying in the gap in 2012 still looking for satisfaction.

Shareholder “democracy” is largely a joke, but my bet is that win, lose, or draw, opposition to the board will be broad and significant and this time, if these folks survive the test, they will only do so by finally giving the right answers, which will mean giving in and establishing real and objective external accountability measures for a corporate culture now proven corrupt to the core.

Side bet: when are we going to start looking at how they greased palms in India? How about now!

Effectiveness of Non-traditional Direct Action Kony Campaign

Mariehurt — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 16:11:56 +0000

New Orleans In organizing, even in the smallest space of a neighborhood, we have always argued that you have to “create a happening” where the coming new organization seems to be everywhere on the tip of tongues, laundromat posters, telephone poles, mailings, and whatever tools could be assembled. The same is true of a political campaign where immersion and momentum are essential in creating a sense of urgency, momentum, and even inevitability.

In the new world of modern communications and emerging campaign tools, I’ve kept an eye on the Kony Campaign being mounted by the young, upstart Invisible Children organization with an open mind to learning whatever is possible. I knew it was something serious not when it got millions of hits on YouTube because with all respect so do some cat pictures, but when established international NGOs started criticizing them. Then I saw a Kony 2012 campaign packet on the dining room table of some friends in Madison. I started noticing that there were different posters and exhortations on all of the community bulletin boards at Fair Grinds Coffeehouse. Something was happening here. This guy, Joseph Kony and his ragtag 300 person Lord’s Resistance Army, had to be “dead man walking!”

Now with a hundred American military advisors on the ground helping, the effectiveness of the campaign seems verifiable. And, truth to tell, this could not have been about the video piece. That’s sizzle. This group had to have had steak to leverage a bill through Congress – how many groups can make that happen these days – and trigger the authority of military involvement, which is almost impossible to achieve. The video was from 2012. But, Invisible Children managed to pass the Lord’s Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Action in 2010. The US has spent almost a half-billion in this area of Uganda now! They may be one-hit wonders, but they are teaching here, and I’m ready to be a student.

Here’s a quote from a story in the Times:

Yet no other American military project in sub-Saharan Africa has generated the attention — and the high expectations — as the pursuit of Mr. Kony, partly thanks to a wildly popular video on Mr. Kony’s notorious elusiveness and brutality, “Kony 2012,” that set YouTube records with tens of millions of hits in a matter of days. Gen. Carter F. Ham, the overall commander of American forces in Africa, has a “Kony 2012” poster tacked to his office door. As one American official put it: “Let’s be honest, there was some constituent pressure here. Did ‘Kony 2012’ have something to do with this? Absolutely.”

To me that sounds like an endorsement of campaigning strategy AND tactics.

Video Series: Wade at the Center on Wisconsin Strategy

jstuart — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 22:03:54 +0000

Click the link below for more videos.

Historians Begin to Look at ACORN’s Impact

Mariehurt — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 16:07:22 +0000

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!

Huge Obstacles to Beating Scott Walker in Wisconsin Recall

Mariehurt — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 16:10:43 +0000

We Are Wisconsin

Madison The life-and-death struggle in Wisconsin to turn back the radical and sweeping rightwing program of Governor Scott Walker being waged by progressive forces is entering another set of critical challenges. The primary to choose a Democratic opponent to Walker votes on May 8^th only weeks away with the general election a month later on June 5^th.

The Democratic primary is generating very little interest it seems and Walker has already spent millions with a huge bank account raised in readiness assiduously around the country as progressives and unions were mounting the recall petition campaign against him. My casual observation about the invisibility of the campaign concretized as part of the mountain campaigners are trying to climb to arouse interest in the campaign.

I sat through an earnest and fascinating meeting at the Blatz Brewery building where Caroline Murray, organizing director for Van Jones’ Rebuild the Dream and veteran community organizer and friend, was meeting with union representatives, the League of Young Voters, community-based organizations connected with the Gamaliel network, Wisconsin Citizen Action, and Voces de Frontera and various DJ’s, artists, and others connected to the Milwaukee community, to try and figure out an event between the primary and the general election that might motivate “millennial” young voters to actually connect with the importance of getting out to vote by combining art, culture, and politics. There was lots of head shaking assent about the importance of motivating these newer voters and a willingness to try new things, but skepticism on the level of buy-in from the community and whether the impact would be equal to the effort.

Talking later to Bruce Coburn, former head of the Milwaukee AFL-CIO, long time AFL, SEIU staffer and friend, as I cadged a ride in the rain to the bus, he was still guardedly optimistic about the residual impact of the We Are Wisconsin movement that had grown up during the initial struggle and recall effort. He was encouraged by what he had seen of the sustainability and robustness of the efforts in Milwaukee and several other cities, though recognized that energy was flagging in many Wisconsin communities overtime, as is often the case. He believed the fight was all in, but it was clear that he was deeply worried about progressive prospects for victory in the gubernatorial election. Nonetheless there was real optimism and hope when he talked about the real opportunity he saw for “independent” political action once the state and federal elections were over at the end of the year, which I could heartily support.

Hard work was being done everywhere and commitments were deep, but this looks like a fight to the wire where once again the odds are against us and every bit of support anyone can muster and offer is needed and necessary.

Scott Walker

Coming into Wisconsin at Ground Zero of Class War in America

Mariehurt — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 17:23:26 +0000

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.

Right Wingers Continue to Play “I Spy” to Terrorize Citizen Action

Mariehurt — Sat, 07 Apr 2012 14:41:15 +0000

Little Rock These days it’s pretty clear that if you are going to run an activist nonprofit that might make waves someday and therefore unsettle conservative sailors on their good ship “Lollypop,” you simply have to increase the paranoia training for staff and leaders alike. The sting and scam model that the scurrilous and unprincipled James O’Keefe and his confederates have practiced (perfected would NOT be the correct word) in trying to attack one progressive institution after another (ACORN, NPR, teachers’ unions, New Hampshire’s election observers, and Planned Parenthood) has still not run its cycle. The good news perhaps is that the press might finally be getting embarrassed at swallowing the bait and bull, and might be wary of being caught in the scam just like the unsuspecting front liners at nonprofits.

There was another report this week of a conservative trying to walk into a community organizing office in Manhattan and Brooklyn and seeing if he could get advice on how to organize a union and “shake down politicians for more money.” Such bizarre and fantastic propositions are ludicrous on their face, which makes this kind of ham-handed effort easy to detect, but it does give a pretty good indication of the desperate hunt for publicity and relevance that the conservative second and third stringers feel. And, despite the fact that all of this has become a parody of politics on the order of a drunken college prank concocted in a late night dormitory room, it means that anyone involved in citizen action or community service is now fair game for these fools, until the cameras are finally turned off and the reporters put down their pins.

The easy part of preparing staff for these ideological idiots is developing the simple BS barometer on these simple scams. The harder part remains when organizations are involved in constant interaction with the public, particularly in direct service, similar to some of ACORN and Planned Parenthood programs. Staff are trained to offer assistance and engage in problem solving. As too many videos have shown, staff can go a long way down the road in trying to be helpful, which even in the most ridiculous circumstances can be easily misconstrued, and stray over the line of good judgment.

The chilling impact of targeting nonprofits with these “I Spy” rightwing tactics is that too many organizations are faced with the dilemma of either providing services from counseling to voter registration or abandoning such critical work in the face of tremendous need, simply because the “optics” might break badly if under attack.

Only standing strong in the face of this bullying will make it stop. And, realizing finally, an injury to one is an injury to all. Maybe it’s time for putting all shoulders together so that we can put an end to these high jinks from the right?

Why Not Coffeehouses in Latin America to Support Cooperatives and Organizing

jstuart — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 14:33:18 +0000

Why not ACORN International / Fair Grinds Coffeehouses" in large Latin American cities?

Miami The more we talked to coffee producer cooperatives in the Marcala and San Juancito mountains of Honduras and tried to piece together a plan to directly trade coffee to the USA and Canada and especially our own Fair Grinds Coffeehouse in New Orleans and its monthly support of our offices in Central America, the more it seemed a natural to think about opening our own small mini-coffeehouses in places like Tegucigalpa and perhaps Lima, Buenos Aires, and Mexico City. The notion would be to open café cooperativas for ACORN & Fair Grinds that would only serve coffee and other products directly obtained from cooperatives operating in the home country. The proposition would to reverse fair trade into the home countries and keep the “buy local,” “buy organic,” and “buy fair trade” right there rather than something that happens in rich, developed countries.

Would it work? Could “coffee cooperatives” work and compete, especially with the local market? Not sure about that. Ironically in places like Honduras where great coffee is grown the local market, like so many places is driven by price. A lot of what is sold in places like Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula is coffee beans cut with a variety of other substances to lower the costs.

But, we don’t have to compete with Starbucks, just duplicate the “mission-driven” ACORN International / Fair Grinds model sufficiently to pay the coffeehouse bills, support the cooperatives by opening up a better market, and do well enough to support the local organizing with a local self-sufficiency plan. Why not? Could work!

Environmental Funders Backing Losing Top Down Strategy

Mariehurt — Sun, 11 Mar 2012 07:20:36 +0000

New Orleans Somehow I had missed the report when it first came out, but Robert Nunn in Little Rock connected me to Peter Montague’s explosive summary in The Huffington Post laying a huge weight for the failure of the environmental movement to win anything of major significance in recent decades squarely on the shoulders of big foundations and donors investing in top-down strategies. Peter’s headlines might have been more provocative but reading the actual report, Cultivating the Grassroots: A Winning Approach for Environmental and Climate Funders, that Sarah Hansen had written for the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy was if anything, more damning.

The conclusions in the executive summary were stark:

This funding strategy will require a dramatic shift in our philanthropy. In 2009, environmental organizations with budgets of more than $5 million received half of all contributions and grants made in the sector, despite comprising just 2 percent of environmental public charities. From 2007-2009, only 15 percent of environmental grant dollars were classified as benefitting marginalized communities, and only 11 percent were classified as advancing “social justice”strategies, a proxy for policy advocacy and community organizing that works toward structural change on behalf of those who are the least well off politically, economically and socially. In the same time period, grant dollars donated by funders who committed more than 25 percent of their total dollars to the environment were three times less likely to be classified as benefitting marginalized groups than the grant dollars given by environmental funders in general. In short, environmental funders are expending tremendous resources, yet spending far too little on high impact, cost-effective grassroots organizing.

Perhaps nowhere has the failure of the top-down strategy been starker than on the collapse of the climate change initiative at both the national and global level. At the other end the feistiness of grassroots, community groups and some of the more campaign-based environmental groups has been instrumental in bringing attention to both fracking and halting the Keystone X project’s projected pipeline and curtailing work in the Tar Sands.

The popularity of the environmental issue, and the billions of dollars in funding over the last decade which the NCRP report tags as now the 6^th most popular funding category are staggering, so the calls over the years that this emperor is buck naked have been incessant. Rarely though has the blame been placed so clearly on a wrong-headed funder-driven strategy.

The report argues for more funding and more community organizing. I’ll admit that I’m biased here, but they are right, so that eliminates and disclosure on my part. The report is worth a look.

Equally worrisome to me is that we are seeing the same failed strategy not only at the environmental level but also in the failure to win immigration reform where there was also a forced Beltway strategy which yielded nothing. Housing policy is the same. Equity and community development = ditto. Over and over again the need for foundations and their advisors to find the soft berth and their own landing pad seems to obscure any real metrics around real effectiveness or a theory of change that works.

This is refreshing. Maybe NCRP is looking at a series that finally brings some accountability here by speaking truth to power. Unfortunately, there is still no reason to believe that any donor will change their minds and get on a winning track, which means more hard work for the beleaguered forces on the ground.

Anti-Immigrant Attacks on CASA de Maryland Way Off Mark

Mariehurt — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 16:42:31 +0000

Gustavo Torres, Director of CASA

New Orleans Reading the playbook, we are currently seeing the rightwing equivalent of a “Hail Mary” pass in their desperate attempt to somehow smear CASA de Maryland, one the largest and most effective state-based immigrant rights advocates in the country. Although it is no doubt an expensive distraction for CASA, it important to see that this “attack and smear” scenario seems not to be getting any traction with virtually anyone in Maryland or elsewhere. Thank goodness!

A marginal conservative outfit with the preposterous name of “Accuracy in Media,” first put out a hit piece of allegation, innuendo, and red-baiting, entitled, “CASA de Maryland: The Illegals’ ACORN.” I’m not precisely sure, but I don’t think that was NOT meant to be a compliment? The author of the report was cited as being well known for his previous pieces on things like the Cloward-Piven “conspiracy,” which gives an informed reader a pretty good window to look into this garbage can.

What do they allege CASA has done wrong? Frankly, reading the screed, it was hard to find a real allegation other than the fact that these folks are organizing a “hater brigade” and a lot of the demons that disturb their sleep they attempt to link to CASA. Who? Saul Alinksy, SEIU, Hugo Chavez, Venezuela, CITGO, Cubans, the DREAM Act, commies, and the like, that’s who. Oh, and of course, they try to bring ACORN into this as much as they can as the bogey man of the rightwing whackos, and, oh yeah, me, based on compelling evidence of mischief like the fact that Gustavo Torres, the outstanding director of CASA, is on the advisory board of the Organizers’ Forum, that I chair, and that (you have to love this!) he is connected to me on Facebook.

The “friends” connections, however, establish this to be Torres. Among them are CASA de Maryland, friendly Maryland legislators and significantly, ACORN founder, Wade Rathke.

Yawn! And, that’s what seems to have happened to this report in the REAL world. On the rightwing they had 6000 Facebook “shares,” but in the bright light of day, this was a trial balloon that crashed and burned.

The latest effort in this anti-CASA campaign was to file a voluminous set of allegations (they claim 1500 pages worth of “evidence”) with the Maryland tax people and the Internal Revenue Service attempting to instigate investigations of CASA’s tax exempt status in both jurisdictions. Good luck with that hater team! Those are two slow boats going nowhere. The hardest blows seem to be about whether or not some campaign in Maryland might have listed CASA or Gustavo as endorsers. But, the whole thing read like a “who is on first, what is on second,” with no one having a real clue and at worst it boiling down to a clerical error. Regardless, the right needs to figure this out. If it seemed important enough for a candidate to cite Gustavo and CASA’s support to try to win, then there is political currency with the public that comes from CASA’s love light, which also means that these investigations are going nowhere.

There is a real fear these folks have of CASA though. They fear it will continue to be successful and in fact become more powerful.

Maryland is a secure base of operations for field-testing a new kind of community organization. In discussing his New Americans Initiative, CASA Director Gustavo Torres recently said: “My goal is to build 200,000 members in the next five years”… [And to someday] “build a powerful … movement of immigrants and other minorities including the African American community to fight for justice—and they decide what justice means.” (Emphasis added.) CASA wants to become the illegal immigrants’ ACORN. And Torres has a good teacher: ACORN founder Wade Rathke, with whom he has become fast friends.

I’m rooting for CASA and Gustavo Torres and proud to be associated with both of them. I hope everyone in Maryland and the DC area where CASA and Torres’ work is known and respected learn something from these textbook ACORN aspersions and allegations, and stand as tall with them as I have been honored to do.

CASA's "radical" connections