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 [...]]]>

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, 4^th 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 4^th 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.

New Orleans   May Day may have begun as a celebration of the coming of spring many years ago, but since the Haymarket Riots in Chicago in 1888 around workers rights, fair wages, and the 8-hour day and the commemoration of May 1st adopted by many in 1890, unions and [...]]]>

Helene O'Brien SEIU Local 21 LA

New Orleans   May Day may have begun as a celebration of the coming of spring many years ago, but since the Haymarket Riots in Chicago in 1888 around workers rights, fair wages, and the 8-hour day and the commemoration of May 1^st adopted by many in 1890, unions and progressive movements have made the day an opportunity to demonstrate solidarity and keep hot the fires of struggle.  In the United States and Canada the day is more confusing to some, because we won legislation making Labor Day the first Monday in September, more a celebration of the coming of fall than the beginning of spring, but I won’t linger on that irony.

In 80 countries around the world, including most of Europe, May Day is our labor day and time to shine.  Working with ACORN International you could tell the difference when greetings ran out between our offices and organizers in solidarity and commemoration, first from Rome and then picked up by Mumbai, echoed in Buenos Aires and around our world.  The notion of solidarity and support for workers is harder won here, which prompted the monthly Fair Grinds Dialogue  and invitation to local labor leader, Helene O’Brien of SEIU 21LA  to speak on the subject.

Though O’Brien’s local largely represents public employees in the City of New Orleans and East Baton Rouge Parish, she wisely focused on the plight of some of her lowest paid members, school cafeteria and janitorial workers that had been contracted out to huge multi-national companies and were being exploited viciously despite the efforts of the union.  The workers were largely privatized after the storm and organized by a controversial multi-union program when Sodexho took over.  Now the contract has flipped to Aramark, which though party to the original deal, has proven a rougher customer for the workers, firing 13 this week solely because they were at the end of their probation and the company could do so with no questions asked and no answers offered.  Interestingly, Helene revealed Aramark was now owned by the giant squid, Goldman-Sachs, where they hardly make calculators that could figure the distance between a lunch lady’s paycheck and the CEO of Goldman!  Helene also told a story of workers with Janicare in Baton Rouge that were being imported from Bolivia, housed 8 and 10 to a trailer, told to claim they were from Puerto Rico, and working as a subcontractor of another subcontractor to clean some schools in EBR.

Where solidarity became the theme is that O’Brien indicated that they were taking the initiative to organize a campaign in New Orleans called Justice for Support Workers and trying to enlist others to support them.  She told of the difficulties in trying to create community-labor alliances in the past, which she attributed to “lack of capacity,” but obviously felt a more specific focus on workers in need and requests to support a specific campaign being undertaken by her union might be more successful.

Let’s hope so!  The questions at Fair Grinds returned again and again to the fact that the public had no clue what was happening to workers.  These were obviously folks inclined towards solidarity and listening for a way to help.  On May Day anything seemed possible.

Solidarity Dialogue on May Day

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

New Orleans  We told you so!  We just couldn’t be heard clearly enough over the roaring engines of the corporate spinning machinery of Walmart in September 2005.

Let’s set the stage exactly.  In Florida at the sharp point of the organizing engagement at Walmart as the curtain was being pulled down [...]]]>

Walmart Store in Mexico City

New Orleans  We told you so!  We just couldn’t be heard clearly enough over the roaring engines of the corporate spinning machinery of Walmart in September 2005.

Let’s set the stage exactly.  In Florida at the sharp point of the organizing engagement at Walmart as the curtain was being pulled down by all of the top corporate management from Lee Scott, the CEO on down, we were convening the first Sitefighters’ Conference in St. Petersburg, Florida bringing together Walmart Watch, Wake-up Walmart, and all of the other key players around the country to strategize on how to bring community, workplace, and political pressure to force some accountability on the company.  Walmart Watch, a coalition driven by SEIU, and Wakeup Walmart, the UFCW’s effort to tackle the company on the web, were nicking the company regularly in the papers, and our efforts through our community-labor alliance, WARN (Walmart Alliance for Reform Now) and direct organizing of workers in the Walmart Workers Association were showing good results.

At that same time in September 2005 when Walmart was trying to garner good publicity for its logistical response to Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast, the internal reality was “duck and cover:”

In September 2005, a senior Wal-Mart lawyer received an alarming e-mail from a former executive at the company’s largest foreign subsidiary, Wal-Mart de Mexico. In the e-mail and follow-up conversations, the former executive described how Wal-Mart de Mexico had orchestrated a campaign of bribery to win market dominance. In its rush to build stores, he said, the company had paid bribes to obtain permits in virtually every corner of the country.

The lengthy New York Times piece by David Barstow gives an amazing inside look at how Walmart was working from the bunkers of Bentonville and the impact our work was having:

Under fire from labor critics, worried about press leaks and facing a sagging stock price, Wal-Mart’s leaders recognized that the allegations could have devastating consequences, documents and interviews show. Wal-Mart de Mexico was the company’s brightest success story, pitched to investors as a model for future growth. (Today, one in five Wal-Mart stores is in Mexico.) Confronted with evidence of corruption in Mexico, top Wal-Mart executives focused more on damage control than on rooting out wrongdoing.

In one meeting where the bribery case was discussed, H. Lee Scott Jr., then Wal-Mart’s chief executive, rebuked internal investigators for being overly aggressive. Days later, records show, Wal-Mart’s top lawyer arranged to ship the internal investigators’ files on the case to Mexico City. Primary responsibility for the investigation was then given to the general counsel of Wal-Mart de Mexico — a remarkable choice since the same general counsel was alleged to have authorized bribes.

The level of bribes?  $24,000,000 has been documented.  Most were paid through an elaborate network of fixers (gestores). 

All of the top brass at Walmart knew the score.  Lee Scott slowed the investigation down and punted it back.  Michael Duke, who was their international man at the time, and the executive of our ACORN International’s India FDI Watch Campaign was checkmating in India to stop their expansion there,  knew the whole deal and is now the Walmart CEO.  The head of the “ends justify the means” team for Walmart in Mexico fueling the fire of corruption, Eduardo Castro-Wright, is now the retiring Vice-Chairman of Walmart.

Lee Scott

As the whistleblower allegations finally found traction, the company filed a vague “play pretend” notice with the FCC without identifying that the problem was in Mexico and still claiming there would be no “material impact” to its results.  Now of course there will be full scale investigations in Mexico and in the United States for violations of both countries laws.  In the US these bribes by Walmart are clear criminality under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.  It is hard to imagine a clearer case of situations where top executives should be held accountable (Scott, Castro-Wright, Dukes, etc) and face criminal charges and potentially jail.  In Mexico the detailed annotations on the invoices indicating the officials who were bribed could absolutely lead to jail time as the scandal widens.

An international corporate culture based on bribery also makes us wonder whether the same system has been active in their work to expand and find a foothold in India where their efforts and others to modify the restrictions on foreign direct investment in multi-brand retail have been huge political issues in recent months, bringing government to a standstill at some points.

All of this is huge and demands sweeping action.

Click to read the entire  Times story.

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 8th only weeks away with the general election a [...]]]>

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

New Orleans   I had not been paying enough attention to a random piece about students rallying in Montreal until my coattails were pulled the other day by a friend and colleague, Eric Shragg, who is a professor, author, and activist in that city.   In a brief email he mentioned that the [...]]]>

Student Protests in Montreal

New Orleans   I had not been paying enough attention to a random piece about students rallying in Montreal until my coattails were pulled the other day by a friend and colleague, Eric Shragg, who is a professor, author, and activist in that city.   In a brief email he mentioned that the increase in US-terms was not catastrophic, but that students with lots of community support were reacting in record numbers – more than 200,000 hit the streets in late March – because they saw the tuition rise as the sharp stick of neoliberal retrenchment poking them – and their futures – in the eye.  The increase in fact was over $1000 and represented a 75% hike in what had amounted as extremely reasonably priced higher education.

A video link from Eric on YouTube was an impressive organizing “flyer” for increasing the pressure even more this coming Sunday, April 22.  It’s worth checking this out:

In Canada students are widely organized and represented by their own associations, and, if anything, this is almost truer in Montreal and Quebec in general.  Three different student organizations have taken the lead in organizing the protest where 170,000 students are currently boycotting classes.  Shrewdly they have adopted the color red for their activity, symbolizing debt (“going in the red,” obviously – brilliant!) and the color enlivens all of their activity.  According to yesterday’s news the government and the students are still miles apart but entering discussions of sorts with the large demonstration looming ahead this weekend.  Quebec Premier Jean Charest  has also refused to meet with CLASSE, the largest of the striking student groups, by trying to claim that they have encouraged vandalism and violence, essentially the standard response in trying to reframe the government’s position to tactics rather than substance to distract the public from the tuition increase.

This is not “occupy.”  This is action, and it is worth following and taking seriously.