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 [...]]]>

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

New Orleans  My son subscribes to Wired magazine, the glossy, tech and computer boosting publication.  I like it and read it regularly once he’s finished.  Yesterday, it was in the pile of publications I toted to the basement of the Criminal Court jury rooms to pass the time [...]]]>

Logo of the Pirate Party in Germany

New Orleans  My son subscribes to Wired magazine, the glossy, tech and computer boosting publication.  I like it and read it regularly once he’s finished.  Yesterday, it was in the pile of publications I toted to the basement of the Criminal Court jury rooms to pass the time in my required biannual service as a citizen of this fair city.

An article by Wired contributing editor, Joshua Davis, called “Fewer Voters, Better Elections,” was breathtaking in its elitism and implicit attack on democracy.  Citing two current research studies, one disappointingly from Stanford, Davis argues for a random “statistically valid” sample of 100,000 of our 313 million citizens who would be polled on the questions and candidates of the day.  Davis deftly avoids the gaping holes in his argument against mass citizen participation by citing the litany of problems with the current system (lack of participation, problems of campaign financing, TV ads) and arguing for a system of random participation in “small group deliberations” which would have more time and ability to make “informed” decisions, which he likens to jury pools, ignoring all evidence to the problems with juries as well.

Parts of the Wired argument are not only anti-democratic but almost calculatingly deceptive.  First, Davis glances over the fact that he and the researchers want to pool their random people from a pool of “registered voters,” which blatantly reinforces a huge structural weakness in the current American system, which excludes, and increasingly suppresses, the citizen participation of minorities, elderly, and the poor among many others.  Secondly, Davis tries to conflate the Stanford “small group deliberations,” which he touts as “part of legally binding decision processes in 18 countries” as being the same or an adequate substitute for the real engagement and participation that is voting.  Small group, big group, mass meetings, whatever, let a thousand flowers bloom as pieces of a “decision” process, but that will never be the same as democracy, and no country has adopted that in this world.

Contrast this almost fascist advocacy of technology as a tool of the elite with an Op-ed piece by Steve Kettman in the New York Times on the use of internet tools to increase input in the building of more citizen participation.

But the Pirates’ generation isn’t as radical as their parents’, and they understand the value of conventional politics. They just believe that it’s stuck in the past.

The Pirates’ insight is that the Internet is both message and medium. Young Germans, who spend large amounts of time online, care deeply about government attempts to regulate or monitor their activity; at the same time, the Internet offers a way for the party to completely upend German politics.

Using a software package they call Liquid Feedback, the Pirates are able to create a continuous, real-time political forum in which every member has equal input on party decisions, 24 hours a day. It’s more than just a gimmicky Web forum, though: complex algorithms track member input and generate instantaneous collective decisions.

Of course, on some level Liquid Feedback is a gimmick, an effort to get young people interested and involved in the humdrum of German politics, outside the campaign season and even off line. Whatever it is, it works: late last month some 1,300 members trekked to the small northern city of Neumünster to elect a new executive board.

I’ve argued previously that the real and lasting contribution of the Occupy movement may in fact be their cumbersome, consensus building process because it at least attempts to build a better system for the expression of group decisions based on individual consent.   The Pirates, though an interesting minor party in Germany and several other countries, to their credit have created a tool that allows their members “equal input on party decisions.”

None of this solves the problems of the poor and the cavernous and growing gap across the digital divide, which like universal registration and mandatory voting is simply ignored in the USA, but at least these are steps towards more democracy, not less, and that makes running up the Jolly Roger flag a much easier choice than any offered by the Silicon Valley buccaneers who seem to have lost all contact with the rest of us in the 99%.

Pirate Party Internet Campaigning

Click the link below for more videos.

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.

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.

New Orleans  It was wonderful to see a rare smile on the face of Evgenia Chirikova, our friend and ally, who has been the sparkplug of the feisty, though failing, effort to reroute the construction of a highway that would cut through the supposedly protected Khimki Forest.  She has been [...]]]>

Protest at the Khimki Forest

New Orleans  It was wonderful to see a rare smile on the face of Evgenia Chirikova, our friend and ally, who has been the sparkplug of the feisty, though failing, effort to reroute the construction of a highway that would cut through the supposedly protected Khimki Forest.  She has been named one of the grassroots environmental activists awarded a Goldman Environmental Prize.  Not only does it open this small group to potential support from donors, but the prize itself comes with a $150,000 check to Evgenia, which could be a huge boost to their hand-to-mouth operation and help them with legal and medical costs incurred in the constant police actions they have endured in trying to stand in the way of the construction.

In other news, I was fascinated to learn yesterday on the Firedoglake.com Book Salon in the discussion of Global Grassroots about the work of the Coalition for Low Income Housing (CLIH), based in San Luis Obispo, California.  Having now checked out their website, I was impressed by their willingness to fly the flag and engage the battle for affordable housing in central California.  Here’s a shout out and the hope that we can lend them a hand.  They seem like our kind of people!

“It is time for Japan to find a new model for its economy,” said Masatomo Onishi, a professor of business at Kansai University.  “We can follow the United States into a more postindustrial economy, or we can follow Germany into high-end manufacturing, but we shouldn’t be trying to compete with China in mass production.”

We’re not so sure how this post-industrial, service economy thing is working out over here, so be careful before jumping on this path!

Pittsburgh     Hit the United Association of Labor Educators conference running in Pittsburgh and then connected with Maryellen Hayden Deckard, former ACORN office director in Pittsburgh now doing the same for ACTION United.  In no time we were visiting with CWA and other [...]]]>

Some of our group in Pittsburgh, oldest leader still in the fight at 102

Pittsburgh     Hit the United Association of Labor Educators conference running in Pittsburgh and then connected with Maryellen Hayden Deckard, former ACORN office director in Pittsburgh now doing the same for ACTION United.  In no time we were visiting with CWA and other union workers rallying at Verizon to support their contract fight, and then sitting down for lunch at Mexico City with a bunch of labor cartoonists.  It was going to be that kind of wild ride in Pittsburgh!

In the afternoon I stumbled into two very interesting developments.  Both are undoubtedly worth further discussion in more detail later, but give a sense of the excitement and potential in important directions these days.

When you first hear the term Clean River Campaign, it runs right by you.  Must be another environmental thing, so good luck to them, next please!  A long conversation with Barney Oursler, the executive director of Pittsburgh United, who is the driving force behind this campaign reveals something much, much different in my reckoning.  For years I have said that any organization that comes up with comprehensive solutions to “loose dogs, bad drainage, and crummy trash pickup” might just have the formula for creating power everywhere.  Well, the real deal on the Clean Rivers Campaign is coming to grip with the issues that lie at the heart of sewer, drainage, and wastewater systems.  Pittsburgh, like literally hundreds of other cities around the USA, is confronting EPA compliance agreements which require billions of dollars worth of infrastructure investment to appropriately assure clean water and upgrade deteriorating infrastructure suffering from age, lack of maintenance, and design problems.  In Pittsburgh, not unlike many other cities, the problems are magnified because of the three rivers but also the 526 different municipalities and other governmental structures that are in the watershed and have water in this race as well.  Barney and his partners, including ACTION United, are contending over coming years with pushing aside bad plans but also getting a good program which is “green,” provides community benefits, and is affordable, all of which are high barriers.  From experience fighting water privatization triggered by EPA compliance agreements, including in New Orleans where we are still in the throes of this mess, I think this is worth real study and investigation.

Discussion at Big Idea

I also ran into a team of organizers and canvassers with the Working Families Party who are now expanding into Pennsylvania.  This is fantastic news!  The Working Families Party in New York, Connecticut and elsewhere has emerged as an important ballot-line effort giving real tools to progressive issues and low-and-moderate income families.  This would be a wonderful development in Pennsylvania.  Need to find out more about this and see if you can get this Party building in a neighborhood near you!

The fun part of my day in Pittsburgh was two back to back discussions about politics, organizing, and the state of movements for change in these days and times first in the late afternoon at the Big Idea Bookstore & Café, which is a workers cooperative operating over the last 10 years and expanding, and then a more informal discussion with leaders, activists, and organizers with ACTION United in their offices over pizza.  The excuse for both of these great events were talking about my books, Citizen Wealth, Global Grassroots, and Battle for the Ninth Ward, but the conversations were fascinating on a variety of topics.

Just to share some of the pleasure at the Big Idea several folks around the circle had been active in the Occupy movement in Pittsburgh, and we had a provocative discussion about the emerging role for anarchism emerging in progressive work.  There was still a lot of mourning for the death of ACORN as well in these times when change is increasingly high on the “demand” list.  I was optimistic that a new formation might be possible, but not that we would ever be able to get the genie back in the bottle.  Similarly at ACTION United, there was deep interest in “citizen wealth” campaigns around credit card debt and collections and student debt.  People could palpably feel the future slipping away and see lives of running from debt collectors and harassment as central parts of their future.  They were groping for organizational response.

No such meeting is complete without a discussion of Fox News of course, and the first reaction when they heard I had agreed to be interviewed for a voting special they were doing on the issue of voter suppression, was that I was “crazy.”  Once I had conceded that point as factual, I made the case that we still had no choice but to try and communicate whenever we could and advance the right and just positions on issues as important as full citizen participation and the prospects for democracy.  How could we ever refuse to take the side of democracy in the debate when so many were so arrogantly now arguing for repression?

I left with lots to think about from my discussions with my new and old friends in Pittsburgh, but I left them thinking about some “big ideas” as well.