Wade Rathke: Chief Organizer Blog » Personal Writings

Coming to Grips with Elite Public High Schools

Mariehurt — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 16:52:58 +0000

The original campus of Benjamin Franklin High School on 719 South Carrollton Ave., from 1957 to 1990. It is now Audubon Charter Middle School.

New Orleans Some of my class at Benjamin Franklin High School came together over the weekend in New Orleans to celebrate largely surviving over the many years since we graduated. Our class stood for something though it’s unclear how well. Our class had been the first public high school class to be integrated in New Orleans. We also graduated into the Vietnam War and mandatory conscription. Both of these events should have defined us and in many ways perhaps they did, but not always in the best of fashion perhaps.

Integration of the school system had begun in 1960 at the elementary school level and was slated to precede grade after grade until all schools were fully integrated under the court order. Franklin did not meet any “separate but equal” case because the school had been organized as the only special college preparatory school with entry based on scoring above 120 on IQ tests and over 85% as I recall on standardized achievement tests. On that basis the first more than a dozen African-American students were enrolled in our class, accounting for perhaps 10% of the entering sophomores at the time. There were not the same incidents that had accompanied integration at the grade school level, but there were minor catcalls and a boycott of our athletic teams by all other public schools so that we played against smaller private schools and huge parochial schools which were willing to stand on the same field with us.

On the other hand the elitism of the school’s ideology, especially for a publicly supported institution, was always politically controversial and made the institution a constant lightening rod for conflict which was often intensified, because the program was tone deaf about the city, citizens, and taxpayers that footed its bills and the city’s emergence as a majority African-American polity. There was a false sense of entitlement that was pervasive in all aspects of the school’s culture, and a sense that many brought to the school that it was a “ticket out of town” rather than serving as preparation for contributions to the community.

The unwavering racism of the culture ensconced in such elitism also meant that at the time to matriculate at Franklin entailed maintaining an artificially high average of over 80 (as I remember) rather than 70 as the “failing” grade. Whether because of that barrier or by exercising an exit strategy and voting with their feet, our class ended up with only one African-American graduate. Perhaps not surprisingly, the reunion committee was neither able to locate nor therefore to convince our one African-American graduate to attend.

Needless to say all that has been forced to change over the decades. IQ tests have been roundly attacked and fallen into disuse as culturally inaccurate barometers of education and intelligence. Standards on achievement tests and retention have also forced more balance in the school, though it still doesn’t reflect the district or the city’s racial percentages, it has made gradual and grudging progress over the years. Sadly, the school jumped after Katrina to brand itself as a charter school which was simply an usurpation of a huge public asset, since there was no way that a school always ranked among the top high schools in the country nationally could be seen as under-performing or endangered. The school’s administration and some of its elite backers, including malcontents on the elected school board, had bridled under the constant pressure for accountability on admissions standards and resource allocations despite having been forced by a compliance order involving all of the district’s magnet schools by the Civil Rights division of the U.S. Justice Department, something that some like to try to forget and sweep under the door.

The class, led by my old buddy, Dan Russell, now professor at Springfield College, decided on a class gift at the prompting of the development department at Franklin (a public school with a development department says quite something as well!) to try to finance building a “diversity garden,” which seems like a good thing in trying to put the best foot forward from our difficult past. Talking to Russell, it seemed likely that by sheer force of will, the project can be actualized and was gaining significant, even if not unanimous, support of the class.

If our class emerged from the civil rights movement it was equally true that it was defined on its graduation by the Vietnam War. In a rarity for a class graduating in that era, we had no deaths in Southeast Asia that I can find, and in fact relatively few veterans. This was a “2-S” class before the draft lottery was instituted, bringing some semblance of equity to that disaster as well. In fact with hardly a 10% mortality rate on the class, we have probably dodged more bullets than most of our generation.

Looking at the list of the class was interesting. I started with a bias before doing a back-of-the-envelope analysis. Had the taxpayers of New Orleans whose property taxes paid a lot of the bills for this kind of high school gotten a good bargain in educating the “future leaders of the city” as they often argued in our time or was this just a special subsidy for select individuals financed by the taxpayers? At first glance I thought it likely that New Orleans had not gotten much of a deal here. Looking at the numbers more deeply, I’m not so sure of that.

In this class the percentages breakdown this way of those still alive and where they ended up:

11% New Orleans
20.5% Other Louisiana (including New Orleans suburbs)
14.4% Texas
21.7% Other Southern States
16.3% Eastern States
9.6% Western States
4.8% Midwestern States
2.4% Foreign Countries

Some explained the obvious non-New Orleanian majority because of the accidental nature of their family’s presence in the city during the oil and space boom which imported solid, living wage and professional jobs into New Orleans. My family was part of that same relocation to Louisiana with time spent in Wyoming, Colorado, and Kentucky before New Orleans as we followed the oil industry from place to place. But none of that would have justified public expenditures one way or the other or certainly been sufficient rationale for some kind of special educational entitlement.

On the other hand given that a lot of the money that supports schools also comes from the taxpayers of Louisiana and that almost one-third of the graduates are still in-state, that’s not as shabby as my first suspected when I looked at only 13% still living in the city. Looking at the class residency 69.9% stayed in the South and therefore contributed to the South as a whole. The South needs to keep as many potential resources as possible, though this also seems positive, though it also aligns with the general industrial and jobs shift to the overall Sunbelt over the last several decades so it may reflect an echo more than a choice. Almost 70% sticking to the South in one way or another by luck, fate or the winds of fortune seems like perhaps the federal government’s contribution to the New Orleans public school system might have been a reasonably good deal as well.

Maybe by the time of the next reunion I will have a better fix on not only my own very mixed feelings about my experience in high school at Franklin back in what seems pre-modern times before history itself, and maybe not. These issues of equity and community investment in education and how they really serve citizenship and full participation in society are not easily resolved, especially within an elite structure no matter how well intentioned or how well concealed.

Ben Franklin High School today on Leon C Simon

Pulling Shots in the Service Industry

Mariehurt — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 01:40:20 +0000

2 Mardi Gras Costumers Get their Coffee at Fair Grinds Before Hitting the Streets

New Orleans Getting up at 430 AM to go to work reminded me of the days worked in the oil fields and offshore after high school where the clock started at 6AM and I had to be in the field or on the boat, or at Luzianne Coffee Company when I was 19 and 20 and had to catch a couple of buses to make it for 7AM. Mardi Gras means Fat Tuesday and all of the baristas were hitting the parades and partying down, and I was going to open until noon to support our regulars and those who might be in need of a good “cup of coffee for a change” until noon. A couple of hours playing with the cash register months ago and a quick couple of hours of training on Saturday and another hour on Monday, and I was ready to try and open up, pull shots, pour java, and make it work in some form or fashion. I was counting on some Mardi Gras good spirits from customers willing to be more patient than usual perhaps, and the fact that the tip jar was going to support ACORN International organizers in Latin America as well as anything we cleared on my time and effort. Of course as I told more than one customer, I was also in that rare position where I couldn’t get fired!

In the almost 6 hours I kept the Fair Grinds Coffeehouse open, believe me, it was hopping. I never had a break, not even a cup of coffee, from the time I poured the first cup for a tired regular that had been cleaning up her family’s parade watching spot.

Here’s what you notice behind the coffee bar, sometimes with a bit of surprise:

I was surprised how few people I saw in costumes?
It was embarrassing how happy – and patient – most people were at seeing that we were open! One young woman blurted out how happy she was in the thick of a long winding line, I thanked her, and it turned out she had gone to school with my nephew and was another Little Rock girl!
Standing there working the bar gave a fair number of people the opportunity to mention ways in which they knew me or someone in my family or supported the work or one thing or someone we knew in common, and that was especially nice.
I did more than 100 tickets and got raves for my espresso drinks (maybe I have a future!), and I bet some 20 or 25 actually thanked me for being open on Mardi Gras, which didn’t make me less tired at the end of my 8 hours there, but did make me feel at least as smart as the average bear for doing this crazy thing.

As an organizer it can be easy to forget while crunching the numbers, evaluating job classifications, and emerging formal and informal work settings, that the service industry, growing so rapidly as a job source throughout the USA and in many places beyond, really is about service. But more than that, embedded in that relationship when it works is not simply a master-slave hierarchical situation, but a sense of shared community, a recognition of commonality that counts as currency both need and mutual dependence. Who knows where the widgets go, highlighting some of the alienation of production, but it seems in the service industry if we embrace it more fully and deeply, we have to be able to use this sense of community in both organizing and, ironically perhaps, delivering better service.

Perhaps my favorite customers were a younger couple, perhaps pushing 30 or so, that came in around 11 or so. It came out that both of them were bartenders working at different places in uptown New Orleans and they had both pulled double shifts the night before. The woman might have been pregnant by 5 or 6 months, though I’ve never been able to tell age or such conditions worth a darned. She wanted a “vampiro,” which is a beet-ginger-etc drink we make that is our most popular new, health juices addition and he wanted a cappuccino, which ended up at 4 shots, 2 of which I “comp-ed” him as it developed. My son, Chaco, had showed up to help me at the tail end of my shift and had two great quiches in the convection oven for them, and while I was pulling his shots, they kept looking at the brownies and chocolate chip cookies, and before it was all done, I had rung up their first order and their second order, and he had thrown $8 or $9 bucks in the tip jar to support ACORN International. They were service workers, too, so when we pulled the quiches out too early, they had quietly gone around the coffee bar and gotten Chaco to put them back in for another couple of minutes. As I move out to lock up the patio door, I saw they were still sitting at a table, food and drink long gone, bent forward to animated and serious conversation.

I’m rootin’ for them and a lot of other folks who shared a minute of conversation, needed their coffee and appreciated getting it hot and strong, joined our community in a quiet spot on a beautiful New Orleans day, and found a piece of peace as the parades rolled on.

Back-atcha and thanks!

Celebrating Barbara Bowen

Mariehurt — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 16:56:49 +0000

Barbara smiling in Melbourne next to the head of the Australian Labor Federation

New Orleans There is no way that anything I can write would do complete justice to the life and work of Barbara Bowen, my friend and comrade for over 40 years, but luckily I don’t really need to because her life and work was about justice and she lived it exactly that way from beginning to end.

My path first crossed Barbara’s in mid-October of 1969. I used to hear her tell the story of being sent from Boston where she was working with Massachusetts Welfare Rights Organization to Springfield, where I was working, to see if she could help out in some way during a large action demanding winter clothing for adults that was hitting its climax on the same day as the Vietnam Moratorium. The short story is that we didn’t win and all hell broke loose, but Barbara used to tell the story of breaking clear of the riot and finding a telephone booth in the middle of the chaos to put a collect call into Boston for whatever reinforcements might be available to get me and others out of jail and do whatever it might take.

In 1970 when I moved to Boston as head organizer, I lived on Rutland Square in the South End one or two units above Barbara and my other old friend and comrade over all of these years, Mark Splain, who she married around the same time. Over the many decades our paths would always be interwoven and crisscross continually.

After I left to move to Arkansas and found ACORN, she and Mark and others ended up in Chelsea founding Massachusetts Fair Share, a landmark organization in the 1970’s. When she and Mark left Fair Share, they worked in various capacities with ACORN. We all worked on jobs campaigns. We founded the United Labor Unions together, with Mark and Barbara in Boston, me and Danny Cantor, Kirk Adams, and Cecile Richards in New Orleans, Keith Kelleher in Detroit and then Chicago, and Mike Gallagher a little bit of everywhere along with many others. Barbara did stints with SEIU and the AFL-CIO. Around 2000, I convinced her to join me at the Organizers’ Forum where she worked for a decade as its coordinator until she retired at the end of 2008, as she told me then, “…because she could.”

Barbara in Moscow assembling the troops before we head to the next stop in Red Square

The other day talking to Mark about a list of email addresses, I asked him if he wanted me to edit the list and make up a shorter one, and he replied that it didn’t matter, “Barbara doesn’t have an enemy in the world.” That phrase stuck with me. It was precisely correct. People loved Barbara. She was a sweetheart. Leading delegations around the world with the Organizers’ Forum she was always willing to go the last inch of the last mile to make sure it worked, that people were taken care of, and that it all came together.

But, if that conjures up an image of a laid back, California girl who was in the first avant garde women’s class at Pitzer College outside of Los Angeles, and a “helping hand” VISTA volunteer, all of which she also was, you didn’t know Barbara Bowen or at least you didn’t know enough about Barbara Bowen. The Barbara Bowen I knew and worked with all of these years was a stickler for details with a thousand questions, both large and small. My first day on the job as her boss in Boston in 1970, she asked me to look at a flyer she had made for a meeting, something she had probably done a couple of hundred times at the point. I remember telling her she should probably be showing me how to make the flyer, rather than the other way around!

But whether it was details on the menu in Kolkata or the rooming arrangements in Jakarta, she always included me and wanted input. If she had a question you heard about it, and she forced the plans to be crystal clear so there was alignment of my big picture, “it’ll all work out world,” and her details, planning, and preparation. It was easy to appreciate why on all the houses that Mark and Barbara built in Boston, Washington, and then finally in Stinson Beach how Mark might be architect and master builder, but Barbara would be permits, general contractor, bookkeeper, and finish painter and punch list person. On the three international dialogues I have done since Barbara’s retirement in Thailand, Vietnam, and Egypt, I’ve always warned people in the first orientation that they were going to miss experiencing the trip that they would have had if Barbara had been with us….

My point is not that she was just a details person or a meticulous note taker, planner, and so forth, because that was not the core of the woman. At the heart of the woman was character and courage. Once she was convinced of the plan, had it clear, and committed to it, she was fearless and unstoppable. Once she was in, she was all the way in.

In the late 1970’s and early1980’s, US Air had something called “Liberty Fares.” For $700 for 14 days a passenger could fly anywhere throughout the US Air system from Boston or Providence to New Orleans or Phoenix or Memphis or whatever. It often meant circling back to the Pittsburgh or the Philly hub. Obviously USAir meant the ticket to work with one flyer, but as a fledgling union and community organization, we were “up in the air” and could keep various folks flying from place to place endlessly during that period just by passing them off to our fellow travelers in the hubs or wherever the connections aligned. You can imagine the stories, but the best and boldest often featured Barbara. In the post-9/11 world this is unimaginable, but Barbara would talk her way onto one flight after another with nothing but moxie despite the fact that the ticket seemed to be in a man’s name and often with little or no ID. She had the ticket, and for her it was a ticket to ride, and if she had a problem with one flight, she would walk away and jump another one.

Anyone who underestimated Barbara or her toughness did so at their peril! Like I said, you had to be careful with Barbara. If you asked her to go through a wall on an action, once she was clear where the wall stood, how it worked, and that it was important, then that wall was going down, one way or another. Barbara had your back, front, and sideways! I hate to think about the number of times she went on unemployment to do the work, including once with the Organizers’ Forum. I can’t even imagine the times she maxed out credit cards or whatever. I loved that woman. There was no quit or whine to her. Ever!

It took me forever to realize that almost all of our international dialogues were too close to her daughter’s birthday and often had her doing crazy things to get home in time or in at least one case, missing the event entirely. She was an elected member of the school board in her community for years, but it took me almost that long to hear her mention it and talk about it. She was never going to put herself ahead of the program, even when it was just the two of us figuring it out.

I’m glad on the back end, especially now, that she and some of the women in Kolkata moved to a better hotel after our wild experience at the Great Eastern (now torn down!) and that she took an extra day to go to Agra when in Delhi and a couple more to see the Iguazu Falls at the border of Brazil and Argentina. For all of the times I may have taken her for granted for 30 years as a friend and colleague, I was glad that in the 10 years with the Organizers’ Forum for the most part I could feel like, I did right by her. People loved her and could appreciate her contribution at every level. She saw the world in India, Indonesia, Brazil, Turkey, Russia, South Africa, and Australia, and like all of us it made us better organizers and better people. We all became clearer about the larger community where we live and work. We had great experiences together. She was fun, and she had some fun.

Thank goodness!

In Sydney I had noticed her walking uncharacteristically slowly up a stairway near the harbor. I asked her about it then, and she just said she was being careful. The next year when she called me to say she was having some health issues, she reminded me of that conversation and how even then is seemed there were starting to be coordination problems.

Luckily she and Mark got to do some traveling in Europe and Hawaii. They visited with friends. She got to her college reunion. When I saw her last fall she was still fawning over Tera’s children and delighted over Manuel’s pending wedding.

She was a great organizer. She was a wonderful woman. She was friend, mother, wife, comrade, and sister. She had a great life, just not enough of it.

My life is better for having known her and all she did with and for me in large and small ways over 40 years. Like so many others, I will carry the flame forward for her into the future and spend the rest of my life time and work time paying back her loyalty, faith, and trust.

Over recent years Barbara and I learned together how to say and understand “hello,” “thank you,” “democracy,” “union,” “justice,” and “freedom” in many of the world’s languages. Her life and legacy has meaning in all of those words and every time they are spoken in the struggle of people everywhere. And, anywhere those words are spoken, sung, or shouted, the heart and soul of Barbara Bowen will still stand strong.

Barbara admiring the fresco in the cathedral in St. Petersburg

Force-placed Insurance and Me

Mariehurt — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 16:14:43 +0000

New Orleans I find no joy in reading about forced-placed insurance, but I take great satisfaction in seeing the farce and fraud of such anti-consumer insurance coming to light. Quoting Benjamin Lawsky, superintendent of Financial Services from Gretchen Morgenson’s “Fair Game” column in the Times,

Force-placed insurance appears to be the dirty little secret of the mortgage industry. It is a silent killer harming both consumer and investors while enriching the banks and their affiliates.

I was particularly drawn to the comments of Mark Rodgers who was flaking for CitiMortgage and claimed,

CitiMortgage does not sell homeowner’s insurance to consumers. If a homeowner does not provide an insurance policy, CitiMortgage secures a policy to protect the interest of the investor. Whenever the homeowner submits proof they have obtained insurance on their own, the lender-placed insurance is canceled.

Makes it all seem simple and straightforward doesn’t it? Well, reality with CitiMortgage, not surprisingly is a whole different thing!

Unfortunately, I know because we owned a small, beaten up and dearly loved fishing camp in the marsh and bayou abutting the Big Branch National Wildlife Refuge just 35 minutes from our home in the 9^th Ward of New Orleans. We still own 2 acres of marsh with some protruding pilings there and hopes and dreams for the future some day, but for now it is a fond memory of life before Hurricane Katrina six years ago. I think of the camp every month as I pay CitiMortgage for the memory and what is left of the place. These days that is a simple process of them sending me a notice and me trying to get them a check, but thanks to force-placed insurance that was not always so.

Even after Katrina, I never missed a payment on the camp, but within months I started having problems with CitiMortgage that continued annually for quite a spell. First they imposed homeowners insurance on the camp at great cost, even though any notion of a “home” had been flooded and flown to smithereens. I would call and explain Katrina, and they would insist on more and more documentation for me to prove that there was no longer a structure on the property. After months of payments and contention they would temporarily yield, issue a refund, and then it would start up again the next year.

And, then they would demand and force-place flood insurance. No small amount of irony here, since flood insurance wasn’t available on the camp before the storm, much less after the storm. Either way, there was nothing left to flood.

I almost wished that Citi had sold homeowner’s insurance, because at least I would have gotten kissed first. They would have at least had to ask before they demanded, assessed and coerced the payments from me, rubbing raw the open sores of already deep discontent in the wake of the loss.

They have a scheme around insurance, but they have no system.

This “dirty little secret” needs to not only be exposed, but solved!

Consumer Relief at Continental Airlines and Confusion at Amazon

Chieforgasst — Sat, 13 Aug 2011 16:54:48 +0000

New Orleans Ralph Nadar may not know anything about politics, but he still knows a thing or two about effective tactics for consumers, specifically threatening and moving to small claims court to resolve obstinate problems.

Recently I wrote desperately about problems Local 100 was having in getting a refund on a plane ticket for an organizer who was going to a meeting in Honduras and suddenly had to have major surgery so was unable to travel in what would have been her first plane trip anywhere ever. I wrote about Nadar’s tactic, as reported in the New York Times, when he was refused a refund of writing U.S. Airways for a refund and then going to small claims court, which buckled the company into doing the right thing. Orell Fitzsimmons, Local 100’s field director based in Houston, read the blog, talked to me, and zipped a letter to Continental Airlines, also headquartered in Houston (though undergoing a merger with United holding the whip hand), describing the situation, demanding full repayment, and offering them the convenience of settling the matter in small claims court in Harris County (Houston) where they could both travel by car. Continental Airlines (where I am an frequent flyer incidentally, which made this even more painful), immediately promised a full refund within 7 to 10 days, and we await it now, expectantly.

That’s the good news. Here’s comes the bad news.

Next up on our list though ironically is Amazon.com, where CEO billionaire regularly cites their customer service as the secret of their success. Social Policy has a selling account on Amazon as every magazine and book publisher has to have these days to stay in business. We have been paying for it on an American Express card on a monthly basis for years. Unfortunately we cannot access the site, nor can potential subscribers or customers do so, hurting us in “let me list the ways….” With Global Grassroots: Perspectives on International Organizing now out and Battle for the Ninth Ward: ACORN, Rebuilding New Orleans, and the Lessons of Disaster coming out within days, we once again saddled up to solve this problem. We had a handle on the problem. The site had been created by a former, long gone employee so we did not know the exact email and password in order to access and fix the problem. Good luck finding any customer service at Amazon.com!

First in dealing with Amazon Marketplace and any other possible source for a solution none of the listed emails on their website worked. Neither did the 800 type phone number. Sigh. So we called customer service to learn of course that this was not their area and then be transferred to the queue at Marketplace for what turned out to be a minimum half-hour wait on the phone, and then a frustrating 45 minute conversation with many more holds of three to five minutes, where we were essentially asked to “guess” the account number (which miraculously at the 1-hour mark we were able to do, were refused access to a supervisor (or “leader” as they call them), and were not allowed to simply close the account and start over. They finally told us they would call us back, which of course did not happen!

The next day we steeled ourselves and started all over. To spare you the pain I suffered, I’ll cut to the chase. They assigned me to “leader” named Ryan. He talked to me. It looked like we had a plan. He told me he was going on vacation though in 30 minutes, and I would be called back by another “leader” named Spencer. For two days I never was able to actually talk to Spencer. He called a couple of times, but of course there was no callback number and the number he called from in Seattle did not work for incoming calls, because believe me I tried. The final message from Spencer was that they still had not found our account.

So Friday we gave up. We created a new account for Social Policy to offer our magazines and books. Sometime today we will be able to see the account. We gave them another credit card number. Of course we also immediately upon setting up our account saw our old account under Social Policy Magazine come up – that’s the one that Amazon.com cannot find, right? – offering our first book, Lessons from the Field, for sale.

God knows what it will take to ever get Amazon.com to admit it is there, take it down, and reimburse us for those charges on the inaccessible site? And, more than likely we are now paying for two sites on two different credit cards.

If this is customer service, kill me now!

So our next step is…? You guessed right! Small claims court in Orleans Parish.

Ironically, one of the email addresses that did not work for this all-about-the-internet company was resolution@amazon.com which the company advertises as a way to settle disputes with them before ending up in court. Ha!

It also turns out, and we are no longer surprised, that when you start Googling around, yes, Amazon.com had good service ratings for the biscuit cookers, the individual customer accounts, but terrible ratings for everything else. It seems that they are notorious for creating and killing email addresses and phone numbers, leading customers in an abyss rather than forwarding them to the new paths for solution.

I love Amazon.com guiltily for its speed, pricing, and the Kindle, but it’s unrequited it appears. But, hey, they can explain that all to a Judge at this point, and see how it works out for them.

Try this small claims court. You won’t like it, but it works!

A Rating System for Public Scandals?

jstuart — Sun, 12 Jun 2011 23:51:52 +0000

New Orleans Reading this “opinion” piece in the Pilot, which must be a small but feisty newspaper in the descriptively named town of Southern Pines, population a shade over 10,000 folks in North Carolina pushing towards the South Carolina border, I couldn’t resist passing this pearl on. I’ll be darned if I don’t really believe that we need a “science for scandal” much like that created by Bill James for baseball, so that we can start applying some perspective on all of the mischief of contemporary public life. This piece gets at that by offering a starter point system so we ought to thank Dusty Rhoades for some real thought as well as a great sense of humor. Ok, you probably think Dusty Rhoades probably has to be a put-on as well, don’t you? Who knows, but the Pilot says he’s a lawyer in their neck of the woods, and either that’s true, or we ought to be willing to give both Dusty and the Pilot some points for that.

Needed: A Scandal-Rating System

By Dusty Rhoades

I confess, I really hadn’t been paying too much attention to the troubles of New York Democratic Congressman Anthony Weiner, who was accused of sending risqué messages to women via the online messaging service Twitter.

For one thing, the story was being promulgated by online muckraker Andrew Breitbart, who’d already been caught pushing supposedly scandalous videotapes of ACORN officials that turned out to have been “heavily edited,” according to the Brooklyn DA’s office and the attorney generals’ offices of both California and Massachusetts.

None of those offices found any basis for the allegations of criminal activity alleged in the videos, but by then the damage was done and ACORN was out of business.

Breitbart also was the dude who was pushing the video excerpt that got USDA official Shirley Sherrod fired for allegedly racist comments — until the entire video was played and the USDA offered Sherrod her job back, with apologies.

At this point, Breitbart’s credibility with me is such that if he tried to pay me in cash, I’d still ask for two forms of ID.

But lo and behold, it appeared that even a blind pig finds a truffle now and then, even if the swine in question is Andrew Breitbart.

Weiner broke down and tearfully confessed to sending “inappropriate” Internet messages to a variety of women over the Net. By Tuesday, he’d officially advanced to “disgraced” status, as news organizations began attaching the d-word to the title “Congressman” at all times.

Inevitably, people began comparing the burgeoning scandal to other congressional peccadillos, such as the story of Republican Congressman Christopher Lee, who resigned after sending a shirtless photo of himself to a woman he’d met on Craigslist, or Democrat Eric Massa, who resigned after a male staff member accused the congressman of “groping and tickling” him.

But how does that compare with former Democratic VP candidate John Edwards and his “love child,” or former Republican Sen. John Ensign and his affair with a staffer who was the wife of another staffer?

It occurred to me that maybe what we need is a ratings system for these things. Therefore, I’m working on a Bad Behavior Rating Protocol, or BBRP. The BBRP assesses points for various factors. The higher the total score, the worse the scandal. It’s still a work in progress, so feel free to make suggestions. I’ve broken the points assigned down into various categories.

— The act itself:

Flirtatious e-mails, 2 points. Slightly risqué e-mails, 3 points. Slightly risqué e-mails with pictures, 4 points. Sexually explicit e-mails, 5 points. Sexually explicit e-mails with explicit pictures, 10 points. Groping, 15 points. One-night stand, 20 points. Long-term affair, 25 points. Long-term affair resulting in child, 50 points.

— If the acts were unwelcome or unsolicited: Add 25 points.

— Marital status of the perpetrator:

Single, 1 point. Married, 25 points. Married to spouse suffering from terminal or debilitating illness, 50 points.

— Age of other party:

Underage, 50 points. Of legal age but young enough to be daughter or son, 25 points.

— Gender of other party:

Opposite sex, 5 points. Same sex, 5 points. Opposite sex, but politician blathers a lot about “traditional values,” 50 points. Same sex, and politician has anti-gay-rights voting record, 50 points.

— Reaction when story breaks:

Immediate mea culpa, minus 5 points. Immediate tearful mea culpa, minus 10 points. Evasion until confronted with irrefutable evidence, 10 points. Lame excuse, 15 points. Excuse so ridiculous it’s mocked by two or more late-night comedians, 25 points. Excuse so ridiculous it passes into common usage (e.g. “wide stance,” “hiking the Appalachian Trail”), 50 points.

So Weinergate, as it’s inevitably been dubbed, has a BBRP score of 59, to wit: Slightly risqué e-mails, 4 points. Multiply that times 6 different women for 24 points. (There’s some talk of more explicit e-mails and pics, but at the time of this writing, they’re still just rumors).

He’s married, so add 25 points. His wife’s a major babe, so I feel like there should be some added points there, but I’m trying to keep things scientific. He did do the tearful mea culpa, but he started by denying everything, so 10 points there.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has called for an ethics investigation to see if Weiner used government computers or facilities to send his raunchy Tweets. The investigation will probably cost millions, which raises the question: Will Eric Cantor and John Boehner demand deep cuts in Medicare to pay for it before the Republicans will agree? Stay tuned.

Dusty Rhoades lives, writes and practices law in Carthage. Contact him at dustyr@nc.rr.com.

Whistleblowers and Wiki-leaks: Hater Talk, Half-Step Walk

jstuart — Sat, 11 Jun 2011 16:00:23 +0000

New Orleans Reading the long story in The New Yorker recently, it was clear that Thomas A. Drake was no dream employee at National Security Agency (NSA), but it was even more obvious that trying to convict him of the Espionage Act was ridiculous, so seeing him plead out on a misdemeanor deal is probably largely an example of his inability to muster the resources to weather a trial and embarrass the Obama Administration. I’ll be darned if I’ll read all the gee-whiz stories about Sarah Palin’s emails, which I have to bet are 24000 pages of the paper pushing done by governors in small states which make them do crazy things like run like the dickens for vice-president. All of this makes me wonder what’s happening with Julian Assange and Wikileaks, who were last year’s scourge of society and humankind?

Thankfully, Assange has finally gotten the message that if he wants to save the value of Wikileaks and keep his own keister out of the calaboose, he needs to finally put a sock in it and try to hide some of his more obnoxious and paranoid personality quirks (which is not to say some of his paranoia is not warranted!). Smartly, Wikileaks and Assange have now expanded their partnerships with even more media outlets around the world, which has meant that now a long time after the original dumps of information we are still reading citations almost daily somewhere in the world to Wikileaks. It is categorically true that their movement of this information to the press and the people has been an invaluable resource all over the world, and one that continues to keep on giving.

The New York Times seems prissy and hypocritical in still wanting to use soon departing executive editor Bill Keller’s ham-handed and mean-spirited ad hominem slaps at Assange to give cover and comfort to all manner of forces confused over the difference between the messenger and the message. Almost daily I read somewhere in the Times a reference to information they have gotten from Wikileaks, so who cares if they want to eat dinner with Assange and how often he showered? Are they on the high school football team, still looking for a way to make fun of the class nerd or what?

Even more hypocritical is the continued savage curtailment of whistleblowing, news leaks, and public spirited public employees with the bullyboy bluster of the Justice Department and its irresponsible prosecutions of anyone committed to transparency and truth. There are hardly any other areas other than immigration and foreclosure modification policies where what the Administration says is so different than what it does.

I don’t see any apology coming soon to Wikileaks from our government or others much less news outlets with diminished capacity who are relying on Wikileaks like lifeblood, but is it too much to expect that some of them might at least finally say, “thanks!”

Treme for Tourists: The Shell of the City Set to Music

jstuart — Mon, 30 May 2011 15:23:58 +0000

New Orleans Henry Butler, the well known New Orleans piano player, and his music were featured on the Treme episode in the regular HBO Sunday slot. Early in the show, he said it was “good to be home.” In the real world of post-Katrina, Butler had showed up with thousands of others on the porch of the ACORN building at the time on Elysian Fields near the corner of St. Claude. He had waited his turn. ACORN was one of the few places open and able with crews of workers and volunteers and running a home “gutting” program that ended up handling close to 6000 houses before all was said and done. There was no FEMA money, city money, federal money, or anything but what people put forward or what ACORN had raised. Butler got all of this. He didn’t mince words. He wanted ACORN to do the gutting, he knew his place on the list, but was desperate to get home and be sure that his house was declared more than 50% damaged and therefore ineligible for recovery monies from the state Road Home disaster. The real cost of gutting each house down to the studs so it could dry out and be prepped for rebuilding was $2500. Butler paid it gladly and the day the work was finished came by and gave CD’s of his music to all of the workers and staff around the building. He has been quoted frequently by reporters and others speaking about how much ACORN, the gutting, and its work fighting to rebuild the city meant to him. This will never be a part of the story in the tourist version of Treme.

I loved David Simon’s The Wire, set in Baltimore. I was never confused that it was “real” or some kind of docudrama about Baltimore. It was good drama in an urban setting that was filled with straight talk, bent angles, and people from unions, politics, crime, and throughout the city that were multi-dimensional, complex, and felt real. ACORN organizers and some other commentators in Baltimore felt slighted by the show because it didn’t depict the part of the world that included community organizing. I got that, but I was a fan.

I’m having a harder time with Treme. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad the show is on the air, and I’m delighted to see it set in New Orleans. When they film in front of my house at Fredrick Douglass High School or elsewhere in the Bywater neighborhood where I live, I’m happy to move my truck out of the way. I’m friendly to the caterers, truck drivers, security and duty cops. I shake hands and give the thumbs up at local bars and restaurants featured as background for the action. On that score it’s all good and thanks, Mr. Simon.

With The Wire I knew it was all just made up stuff, but I liked the gritty slices of the Baltimore we knew being part of the action. Simon doesn’t know New Orleans, but in Treme he tries to compensate with more “historical” and “contemporary” references to substitute for the real New Orleans, the city he seems to like, but can’t quite grip, except from a tourist perspective, which just grates on me. Even as great as New Orleans music is and as much as I like the exposure given to some of the local players as a stalwart citizen of the hometown, I often have trouble with the one-dimensional minstrel show aspects of all of this, which sometimes are just painful to watch.

One of the things that worked in The Wire was the nuanced and complex way that Simon, a former police and beat reporter up there, handled the bad guys. They were real people. He drew you in. You rooted for some of the guys and against other guys. There is no day in the streets of any city where I wouldn’t want to make sure that Omar had my back and was a block or two behind me.

New Orleans is a violent city, even more so that Baltimore, but after a year a half it is amateurish how Treme deals with this intrinsic part of the patter n of the city. One of the main characters is the Indian chief whose struggle and cultural rectitude is supposed to attract some of our sympathy despite the fact that he is invariably a cranky son-of-a-bitch. In the first season we watched him lay in wait and then beat up a young fellow within an inch of his life, and possibly to his death, who had stolen his tools. Nothing more on that…it was all just left hanging and random. In Treme the cops are plastic, tinny, and nothing more than crooks with a badge, save for one hero, who seems largely our hero because he gets along with the sniveling, heart on her sleeve lawyer, who is so committed to the truth that she can’t tell her teenage daughter about her father’s suicide.

The violence this season was a grisly rape and general beatdown of one of the main characters, a woman bartender, as she moved to close up. Where was Simon on this story? None of this was real. Watching the “tourist” Treme, we’re supposed to believe that there is a bar in the hood in our fair city that doesn’t have a shotgun or some kind of firearm behind the counter. We’re supposed to believe that our woman bartender wasn’t packing heat, mace and more. We’re supposed to believe that there’s a woman or man barkeep in the City of New Orleans that blithely packs the day’s money in their purse or pocket and stands in the dark to lock the door. Maybe all of that happens in Disneyland, some college town or Toronto or perhaps even Baltimore, but that’s not New Orleans, friend!

I don’t want to seem unkind about Treme, but the tourism tinge of everything also pulls everything about race out of kilter from the real city. In a service industry where more than 50,000 people were employed in the hospitality industry before the storm and restaurants were unable to open for years because public housing was closed and affordable housing was out of reach for the largely African-American service workers trying to return to their jobs. Despite the fact that this is the New Orleans industry, it is a afterthought seen through a story of white woman chef whose black sous-chef has a French accent? I don’t even want to touch the character that is a white former DJ, trying to be a rapper in our city which is famous for our hip hop and rappers. One of the truest notes in the show slipped out this season when he admitted he had gone to Newman, an exclusive, uptown prep school, which to hometown folks just about said everything about this dude! It also says yet more about Treme’s losing struggle to come to grips with the reality of race in the real city which can only be ignored in the tourist’s ghetto of New Orleans, where Simon and his team seem lost.

Using Wendell Pierce, a New Orleans native from Press Park, the first African-American suburban development in the city, as perhaps the key character doesn’t give Treme the cover it needs in Treme. He’s a trombone playing, good times, skirt chasing scamp, and he plays it to the hilt, but that’s simply a caricature. For some reason Simon chose a cartoon figure rather than a someone who felt like a real working musician from the city. You want to be a serious musician in tourist-Treme, then you need to be based in New York, speak Dutch, play the violin, or something. Phyllis Montana, the real daughter of a former Indian chief, is one of the few touches of reality anywhere near all of this, and her line about Pierce getting a “job job” rather than all of these gigs was a lightening shot of reality in the show. I can still remember having organized carriage drivers in the French Quarter and their endless arguments about whether there work was a “job” or a “hustle,” and all that went with that including unionization, benefits, respect and dignity. This is real!

Speaking of caricatures, all New Orleans politicians are corrupt and incompetent. Yawn. This is the rap, not the reality. It’s the uptown club view and the outsider’s assumption. The Simon of The Wire knew better. It’s time for that Simon to come back to work on Treme.

The references to Katrina are too painful in a tourist-Treme. I know someone who couldn’t watch a show the first season without crying. The show does pull some heartstrings for locals, although in my view Katrina is just a docudrama reference and little more. The real life drama in every family of return, rebuilding, rejection, or recovery just doesn’t make it into Treme. In real life the resilience of the city and its population to come back and remake the city is one of the great and lasting dramas of heroism of low and moderate income working people of all races and backgrounds. It hurts me and is painful for me to have to watch every show and think about how much is missed.

Working with ACORN in New Orleans, we had a front row, frontline seat in that struggle, but like everything that has to do with real people in the city, working and lower income people that have been and will be the majority of the city, those fights and victories that prevented the hijacking of New Orleans, its neighborhoods, and people will simply stay another story for the real citizens rather than tourist-Treme.

I was driving to the gym yesterday in my truck. I still have a “Call ACORN – Hurricane Recovery” sign on the back. I will always ride for the brand. A car came up Rampart as I drove up the Treme neighborhood boundary line and started honking. The passenger window was down, so that when he caught up to me, I looked over. A guy was grinning with his thumb up, and I could see him mouthing the words, “Yeah, ACORN!” as he signaled and turned right on Esplanade.

Treme is better than nothing about New Orleans, but there’s a great show about the real city and its people that is still waiting to be made. Sadly, Treme is not that show. At least not yet.

Politicians Slip and Fall: Oliver Thomas’ “Reflections”

jstuart — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 15:11:50 +0000

New Orleans Contrary to popular opinion, it is actually a very, very rare event for a New Orleans city politician to go to jail for some kind of corruption, regardless of our reputation. The hometown paper, The Times Picayune, campaigned mercilessly for investigations and convictions of Mayor Marc Morial and his troops, largely to no avail, and in one of the rich ironies of politics and life, the biggest pillar to fall was their once lavishly touted fair haired boy and tech-reformer under the next Mayor Ray Nagin, who they had promoted as Mr. Clean. One that did not get away was Stan “Pampy” Barre, a former cop, all around fixer, and owner of a popular politician hangout spot. He fingered the even more popular – and populist – Councilman at Large Oliver Thomas for taking $20K to help grease a parking lot deal.

And, that was a shock. Oliver was a friend and supporter. Mayor Morial’s blessing and Oliver’s work on the inside when I ran the multi-union project, HOTROC, for SEIU, the AFL-CIO, HERE, and the Operating Engineers, ended up being the big success of our inside “leverage” campaign with the Piazza de’ Italia public corporation that built the Lowe’s Hotel, the only major post 9-11 property, and now the only union hotel in the city. Earlier Oliver had been the key we needed when he cast the deciding vote preventing the privatization of the Sewerage and Water Board. He has been one of our most vocal champions when we fought to raise the minimum wage. Believe me, if he had been for sale, developers, hoteliers, and the privateers all would have paid way more than $20,000 chump change to take him out of those fights. So of all the trees to be toppled and fall, the looming, large Councilman Thomas was the surprise never expected and the disappointment most deeply felt and impossible to replace.

When caught with the cookies, Oliver manned up, pled guilty, didn’t rat, and did his time. We got some letters from him from the fed penitentiary in Atlanta that were moving and well thought out. Big believers in redemption, when the bizarre news came out that he and his old friend, Anthony Bean, director of a community theater uptown had written a play about all of this, called “Reflections: A Man and His Time,” I immediately went on line and bought six tickets so we would be well represented from the top (Local 100 ULU’s President Mildred Edmond) to the bottom (the rest of us organizers).

The play was sold out and my guess is that the theater should have cleared $6000 conservatively the night we attended, and that’s a very good contribution and says something about rehab right there. What do I know about the theater? Not much, but the play was sprightly up to the intermission. Some of it was even funny. The crowd got a tremendous kick out of the satire around the preachers advising and arguing with Oliver before his public announcement. The second half focusing on his prison time was preachy and boring with one good song, which might mean it was realistic, but it didn’t offer much to most of us already off parole.

A politician slipping and falling and then doing something as public as a play to try and “explain” himself is a rare thing, so it’s hard to judge. Having read Oliver’s prison letters, I don’t doubt his sincerity, yet watching all of this on a stage inevitably and by definition takes some of the reality out of both insight and contrition. The sense of “I did wrong” was never diluted, but the play allowed there to be curious mitigations around the inadequate pay in politics, the puny level of the bribe, the generosity shown to needy constituents, the lack of benefit to his family, and the couple of times that problems with racetrack gambling floated out in snippets of dialogue without explanation or amplification, as if the very mention was a trial balloon for an alternate reality.

Some things can’t be explained and Oliver and Bean were sharp enough to not try to defend something that was just plain stupid. The play also left the future cloudy and confused for our friend and now banned politician. The very drag of the second act made it hard to believe that there as a clear path for Oliver working with young people, which was part of the hint drifting there.

New Orleans is not like other cities. Thank goodness! Former governor Edwin Edwards just came out of jail after a decade as the play was hitting the boards. Here he maintains a reputation after four terms in office as delightful rouge regardless of the evidence. In our city Oliver can still be an advocate what needs to be done. A son of the lower 9^th ward and a long time representative of uptown housing projects and neighborhoods, Oliver can still find a voice speaking truth to power. He did wrong, and he paid his debt to society. Now he needs to find a new stage and talk about what he really knows and what really matters. Maybe that will be with young people, maybe it will be a broader role in helping cement the coalition that continues to try and build real power for the majority of people in this city.

After a slip and fall, what’s most important is finding a sure path to continue on making progress as you make your way.

Fifty Years Since the Freedom Rides

dine — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 17:18:57 +0000

NewOrleans Thanks to my new library card, I stumbled onto the library’s homepage last weekend to learn how to order books on-line, and what do you know there was an announcement of a event commemorating the 50^th Anniversary of the Freedom Rides of 1961 complete with a traveling exhibit and speakers, so I trundled down to the dimly lit main library in the pitch dark of this abandoned stretch of the CBD with what turned out to be 30 others. What a treat this was thanks to Dodie Smith-Simmons joined by several other civil rights veterans of those days who shared their stories.

Dodie Smith (at the time) joined the NAACP Youth Council at 15, largely as she said, because her older sister was going, and she wasn’t going to stay home, and joined the marches and sit-ins in New Orleans at the time which were being led by Rudy Lombard and Jerome Smith. When the “adult” branch of the NAACP came and met with the Youth Council and told them that they would not bail them out if they got arrested, she told us last night, “that’s when I knew this was for me!” As the beat quickened she got involved with CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality, because that was where the action was, and became secretary of the local chapter under the now legendary Oretha Haley.

CORE, joined by SNCC and others, had announced the Freedom Rides in 1961 to challenge the fact that despite the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) having directed that bus transportation between states had to be integrated fully at every level, it was not being enforced despite several court challenges which had been dismissed. This was a classic campaign opportunity where the “handle” legally was crystal clear and the critical ingredient of “moral rightness” was transcendent, so the tactic of a Freedom Ride on buses beginning in Washington, DC and ending in New Orleans was brilliantly devised to create maximum pressure on the new John F. Kennedy White House.

In many locations there were few difficulties, but in places like Birmingham and Anniston, Alabama the dogs of hate were off the chains. Dodie still remembered with regret not being allowed by Haley to go on the Rides that then originated in New Orleans to reinvigorate the Freedom Rides in Mississippi. Hundreds of the riders were dispatched to New Orleans for non-violence training before being allowed to travel. It was Dodie’s job to do the training, so she was stuck behind the lines. In Mississippi the powers-that-be decided that the Alabama violence was not going to happen there, so they immediately arrested the reinforcements putting literally hundreds, including James Farmer, the head of CORE, first in the Hinds County jail in Jackson, and then moving the whole bunch of them to Parchman Prison.

All of this was vivid to me, and frankly, personal. I knew Parchman Prison well and had often been on the grounds. Parchman was notorious as a prison hell-hole made famous by Leadbelly, but it was also smack dab in Sunflower County in the heart of the Mississippi Delta cotton country. About a dozen miles down the road was then small town of Drew, which is even smaller now, with the sign “Home of Archie Manning” now long faded. My mother and uncles were born and raised in Drew, and my Grandmother and one of my great aunts lived there until they died. My Aunt Sue was the postmistress in Drew, where my Grandmother also did a number of years at the mail window. When my family transferred to New Orleans around 1957 after stints in Wyoming, Colorado and Kentucky, every Thanksgiving and a week or so in the summer found us not in the big city of New Orleans, but visiting old ladies in Drew. One of the rituals of these trips was driving with Aunt Sue to deliver the mail to Parchman Prison. She drove a 3-hole Buick and the most dangerous part of the ride was not Parchman, but the fact that she drove the whole way with one set of tires on the pavement and the other on the dirt shoulder. My brother and I would jump out of her car when she stopped on the prison grounds like we were on a jailbreak!

Fannie Lou Hamer, the great civil rights legend, lived down the highway the other direction from Parchman in Ruleville. Her cousin took care of my grandmother at home during the last years of my grandmother’s life. Even as boys there was no avoiding the constant conversations with adults in Drew caught with the world changing all around them, but in New Orleans it was even more evident despite our youth, since change was all around us whether we got in trouble sitting in the back of the bus, because “we liked it” and didn’t understand “the screen” – the movable wooden sign inserted in the seat that said “colored only” — or liked the soda fountain at Woolworths and didn’t care if it was integrated or not, because as we were often told we “weren’t from here, so we didn’t understand.” Luckily, we never understood in “that” way.

Dodie talked about how important SUNO and LSUNO were as factories for the protests from the young. Others added the names of so many that helped lead the civil rights struggles from New Orleans and how important, and overlooked, the role of the city as part of the crucible of civil rights.

A choir was there singing “Jacob’s Ladder” and other spirituals, and moved with Dodie when she led us all in singing “We Shall Overcome” to open and close this rare and special meeting. It was good to say “thanks” to some of the veterans and listening to these stories of courage and often pain of beatings and jail time told with humor and spirit, and realize how much change we have seen, how big our debts are, as well as how much still remains to be done.

Craig, Zach, and Ed’s Unique View of Vietnam

dine — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 21:12:20 +0000

Bangkok I hate the Bangkok international airport. It’s an overpriced mall with planes in the parking lot. A cup of coffee can cost $3 to $4 bucks USD, and I’m stuck here for 8 hours on the cheap route from Hanoi to Delhi, so making the best of it. Leaving a new country after an Organizers’ Forum trip it has become something of a tradition for me to list out the random notes about what made the country unique and special to answer the question my dad, Ed Rathke, used to ask me when I would see him after one of these trips and he would start the conversation by asking what I thought “he would most want to know” about the country. My dad passed away a little me than two years ago, but his question never leaves me in the notes I scribble on these journeys. Craig Robbins in Philadelphia and Zach Polett in Little Rock used to tell me that these were their favorite blogs, so to keep it light rather than tinged with the maudlin and morbid, we’ll answer my dad’s question by making it a “popular demand” blog from Craig and Zach.

The plane fares might be pricey, but once you are there Vietnam is way cheap. Tell me the last time you could get a decent beer for a buck at a restaurant? We bought beer at the Circle K next to the hotel in Ho Chi Minh City for about 70 cents. I bought the popular Hanoi beer obviously in Hanoi on the street for 14 dong or about 75 cents in the tourist district. In the hood I bet it’s 50 cents or less a beer. It’s not the 99 cent six-pack special I remember for Jax beer over at the Times-Saver on Paris Avenue 40 years ago, but it’s damn close. A special note for Rick Hall in Nairobi: a Jameson’s on Ngo Huyen was about $1.25, book your ticket now.
If I could get the internet now ($8.50 for 60 minutes!) I would check but Vietnam is screaming to be a priority country project for the Bloomberg Foundation given their emphasis on reducing deaths from smoking and traffic. People smoke everywhere and all the time, including in restaurants obviously. There were 10000 traffic deaths last year according to some of the folks we met with. Traffic is pretty wild, more scooters in Ho Chi Minh City and more cars in Hanoi. Like India lives are saved largely by the fact that the traffic snarls up preventing folks from reach top speeds, though it is much faster moving in Vietnam than any Indian city. The government decreed that motorcycle riders had to have helmets, and most complied with $2 plastic helmets similar to what a baseball player wears. Better than nothing, but….
There was a small item in the Hanoi Daily News today (the English language paper) advertising for the government the need for 80,000 workers through the rest of the year, including part-time for the seasonal push. It was a news story, but it would be one helluva want ad in anybody’s paper!
My other favorite item several days before was a long piece in the business section about the toothpick trade wars with China. Toothpicks are on every table at every meal. For years it seems the bamboo sticks were a Vietnamese specialty, but cheaper Chinese bamboo toothpicks in a variety of styles had flooded the market and were pushing Vietnamese toothpick purveyors out of business. Serious stuff.
Here was a another Vietnamese puzzle: real estate values were sky high in both Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City! Small, new places of around 800 to 1000 square feet (though everything was meters) were running around $300000 USD. With a $65/month minimum wage, cheap prices everywhere with low wages, how could afford those numbers and where was the demand coming from? China? Foreigners? No, foreigners are not allowed to own property though there are 60-year leases and supposedly some ways around this, but still, who was buying the property that every source acknowledged was rising rapidly in value? Some of our interpretors intimated that these were Party favorites and special business folks, but we never felt like we had a grip on this one. A similar contradiction existed about hotel lodging rates which were extremely reasonable even though to buy a hotel property would be ridiculously expensive. What kind of real estate bubble is this unsustainable?
All school children learn English now in primary school. We met some excellent English speakers who had no experience outside of the Vietnamese school system, yet all of them spoke with a British accent. Why? Our impression was that just as work was a 6-day affair, so was school Chaco and I tried to go see the Hanoi Botanical Gardens (closed for the 1000 year anniversary celebration and acting as a military bivouac) and saw a huge school across the street in full session and fury at 2:00 PM on a Saturday.
It’s impressive the number of women wearing short shorts. I had never thought about this until reading something recently that detailed the exercise regimen of the woman start of HBO’s “True Blood” complaining about the short shorts the waitress at Merlotte’s wore. In Vietnam it often seemed there were simply no fat people. The population was not gaunt like one would find in Korogocho or Dharavi, but small, wiry, and healthy despite the beer and cigarettes.
Ice is the deal. Beer is served with ice cubes. Coffee is served three ways, but the most popular is with ice cubes and condensed milk. You figure? The coffee though is very strong and almost chocolate-y in Ho Chi Minh City and there it was made with an aluminum contraption that was offered an ingenuous way to make a stout cup of personalized brew. (Yes, I bought 4 of these in various sizes to bring home!)
We heard a lot of talk about the “envelope” system which most seemed to relate to us in an unconcerned fashion as ubiquitous, but somehow livable because the sums tended to be fairly trivial. It seemed commonplace that when interfacing with the government or other state managed businesses and bureaucracies that there was such an exchange. Pay for government workers rarely made it past $100 per month, and the expectations were not harsh, but ever present. We had our own experience with this system in amounts that were less trivial, but manageable as part of the price of doing business with the government.
Facebook is blocked from normal IP addresses, though surprisingly from some hotels it can be accessed if you got through a number of security codes (I finally got on late in my stay but failed the first security test on photo recognition because I didn’t spot the side of Sean O’Brien’s face until too late!). Access to Google was blocked at the Moca Cafe, one our favorite hangouts in Hanoi.
The 1000 year celebration of the founding of the city of Tranh Long (Rising Dragon) or Hanoi was the real deal. Coming back from Ha Long Bay on Sunday evening with Ignacio Carrillo, the last of my Organizer Forum delegation to head home with a plane to catch at 1130 PM, we were off loaded on the wrong side of the Lake in the center of the old quarter and right in the middle of the big celebration with people and scooters packed everywhere. We had to struggle upstream against the crowd flow and it was like one of those wild chase movies where the cars are careening against traffic. I’ve only been in such a scrum of humanity a couple of times like the one at the Durga Puja festival time in Kolkata with the Organizers’ Forum a couple of years ago and another time at the Puerto Rican Day Parade along Central Park with my family during the AFL-CIO convention when Sweeney was elected. These are not things that I forget! But, the crowd was mellow, and young! With population increases more than tripling in the last 35 years since the end of the war, half of the country is below 20.
The older people are only let out on the streets of Hanoi for exercises at dawn on the Lake. Even at 5AM this morning, there were hundreds and normally there are thousands doing tai chi, dancing, and walking.
The streets are blocked then because the trick quickly taught and learned for crossing the streets in the scooter traffic is to bull over without stopping while slightly waving your hand at the scooters and cars that you are coming through. They are supposed to respond to the bluff by not killing you, and largely this worked while we were there, but god knows how.
My daughter once took a class in “industrial tourism” at Hampshire and loaned me her text book, which had a profound impact on me. Cu Chi Tunnel and the tours to beautiful Ha Long Bay, both world UNESCO heritage sites, were classic examples of industrial tourism with a smile and a hustle, but nonetheless good value. On Ha Long for $14 (admittedly Ignacio found us a good deal!) we got a $2 ticket to the boat and the caves and a great lunch with 50 cent beer on a 6 hour drive during a 13 hour day. The tunnel was a half-day $10 trip with a snack. It was well organized and in both cases there was no way that any of us individually could have duplicated the experience for a fraction of that price.
Tipping is not expected and often simply written into the service charges everywhere, which says something good about a “socialist market economy.” The cab driver to the airport this morning refused even a nominal tip. Ignacio was calculating that it would be cheaper to bring his whole family over to Vietnam for the holidays even given the pricey plane tickets than to fly more cheaply to Mexico for example and pay the higher “inclusive” costs of hotels, food, and transportation. He has an excellent point once you do the math. Both cities where great and huge (both in the 8 million range) but of the two, Hanoi is the older, more interesting, more authentic, less modern, and more attractive.
In the street at dawn every morning in Hanoi I would watch women washing clams. They were delicious. So was the fresh fruit, including dragon fruit, which we all loved in China. Passion fruit ice cream turns out to be one of the great treats of our time.
The bread survives as a vestige of the French period and every morning there are fresh baguettes for sale everywhere.
We never encountered any anti-Americanism though we were often asked where we were from and America was always warmly greeted. Someone said this had to do with the dominant cultural impact of Buddhism and a more forgiving tradition. That may be the case although the fact that we are in a whole different generation that the war generation I suspect has much to do with this as well.
I could go on, but my dad would be interested in the fact that we saw a lot of places where they buried people above ground, like they do in New Orleans, so I’ll end there.

I may never be back, but if, as Drummond Pike said, “someone sends me a ticket,” I’ll be there in a minute. Vietnam was an amazing country and for a change we caught it before the transition to its future is completed, when everything is moving and exciting, and still unsettled and puzzling. This is a country worth watching.

Moving the Money: Kartina Plus Five

dine — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 22:33:06 +0000

Vanessa's picture in the Times Picayune by David Grunfeld

New Orleans These things all take time.

I finally am bothering friends and family about how to make our fishing camp on the bayou abutting the Big Branch National Wildlife Refuge a mile up from Lake Ponchartrain useable again without rebuilding. A pontoon and pulley operation rather than a bridge, decking with temporary structures or tents or yurts, rather than a house-like thing, and adding ducks to fish as part of the attraction, are finally real discussions and plans.

I finally am starting to clean out the damage in the garage this weekend. Throwing away or salvaging tools that the water seeped in and rusted in the tool cabinet. Putting wrenches and sockets where they belong. Looking at the whole in the overhang floor and getting out the tape
measure to face the problem head on.

I’ve got a lot of feelings about the tons of articles, films, and whatever on the 5th anniversary. I’m mulling. I’m worried. We’ll cover that later.

I looked long and hard at the Times-Picayune’s picture today of Vanessa Gueringer, the
leader of A Community Voice in New Orleans, a pillar in the Lower 9th, and a woman whose
courage, conviction, and true grit have made her a personal hero of mine.

In a meeting in the lower 9 with city officials only a few days ago, Arnie Felkow, one of the city wide elected at large members of the New Orleans City Council, admitted that over the last year he and others on the council had moved recovery money that was earmarked for rebuilding the lower 9 to Algiers of all places, which was basically untouched by Katrina. How could that have been done? Why was it wrapped in silence? How can city officials be offended at the anger and attack of Vanessa, her neighbors and her organization, when they feel, correctly, that they are still being abandoned?

The big things are like the little things. Just like my work in the garage, rebuilding has a lot to do with removing layers of dirt and grime, and putting things back in their right places, throwing some things away and keeping others, whether it be finding justice for murders covered up in the water and chaos or even today keeping eagle eyes on every dollar to make sure it finds its proper path to people, there’s more to do than has been done, and we’ve only just begun.

Five years is forever and just yesterday when thinking of Katrina.