Wade Rathke: Chief Organizer Blog » Personal Writings

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.

Meth and Abortion in the West

jstuart — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 20:12:48 +0000

New Orleans In the up and down saga of getting the truck out of Laramie, my buddies at Laramie Time Company (big ups to Troy Trujillo!) managed to square me away and out of Wyoming on Monday evening around 6 PM. I’ve rarely seen a more welcome sight than the sun shining in pockets through the rain between Laramie and Cheyenne on the rocks of the national monument.

Having just driven more than 3000 miles between New Orleans and the heart of the west (Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Texas, and even Kansas), if you judge by the bulletin boards in the arid heartland of the country there are only two real issues: meth abuse and abortion with abortion a long 2^nd place away. In some small towns in Wyoming and Montana it would seem like the old Burma-Shave advertisements where one sign followed another with a message because there would be one billboard after another a couple of blocks later each featuring a more horrid picture with the essential message that if you try methamphetamine, or meth as it’s more popularly known, even once, then ka-bam, you’re hooked! The billboards were graphic. A youngish looking girl would have virtually no teeth. An older woman beaten badly would be pictured with the slogan that essentially said, “I’d never hurt my mother” unless she gets between me and my meth. Lives wrecked and ruined. The campaign was so ubiquitous and effective that when I would finally see one of the “fetus” billboards paid for by “friendsofjesuschrist.com” or some such, I would assume the grotesque pictures were another anti-meth advertisement. The problem is pernicious, so hopefully these billboards have some impact (I know they convinced me!), but they are so over the top that you wonder if people just drive by after a while.

The real drug Mecca seemed to be Montana where a medical marijuana measure was approved last year with loose to non-existent restrictions on residency, and the headlines were lurid with reports of how many folks had applied to get access to marijuana legally (over 40,000 when I passed through!) claiming some kind of hookup for a Montana connection. The math is interesting. If almost 5% of the Montana population needs marijuana for medicinal purposes, there is definitely an epidemic of some kind of historic purposes afoot under the big sky.

Drugs behind every tumbleweed and ponderosa pine definitely are new phenomena. Driving through the cowboy west, I started having a picture implanted in my mind of a cowboy holding a joint pursed tightly in his lips between his missing teeth.

Second Circuit Tries Hoisting ACORN on Its Own Petard

jstuart — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 20:12:02 +0000

Laramie I may be stuck in Laramie, but I adapt and make the best of it, which is what organizers do by nature and training. I spent a couple of hours at Coal Creek Coffee downtown in no small part because generally coffee in Wyoming sucks, despite the greatness of the state, and because the stencil on the front door of the shop heartily welcomes “do gooders, malcontents, and revolutionaries” so at least some of the customers must be “my people.” I tried on a pair of Merrill’s moccasins just to see how they felt. I bought a couple of pair of Carthart jeans because I’ve always admired them. You’re getting the picture.

Maryellen Hayden, a warrior who ran the Pittsburg office of ACORN for years, posted a couple of notes on my Facebook wall ranting about the 2^nd Circuit Court of Appeals overturn of ACORN’s successful injunction at the federal district court level of the Congressional crazy stampede that produced the ACORN Defunding Act in the wake of the pimp-prostitute mess last fall and the general partisan hating on ACORN that had been unremitting for a year. I had posted a Times printing of an AP story. Maryellen’s comments seemed to be saying that the appeals court had essentially decided to reject the lower court decision because the punishment of ACORN was de minimus – not significant – because only 10% of ACORN’s funding originated with the feds. So, I thought, what the heck, I’m stranded in Wyoming chomping at the bit to drive home, I should be at the office early tomorrow, instead here I am, so the least I can do is buckle down and read the decision and see if I can throw some light out there against the dark forces.

So I read the decision this morning with a lot of head scratching. Several observers have pointed out that the appeals decision was decided 2-1 on a Republican versus Democratic split, and there may be good reason to do so, because a lot of the decision seems more “political” than legal. Inevitably this will arise when so much of the decision is based on the Appeals Court’s avowed intention in many parts of the writing to parse the degrees of punishment to determine whether or not they can be called “unconstitutionally punitive.” In that sense Maryellen is right that they certainly cite that suspending 10% of ACORN’s funding should not have been a “death blow.”

The Appeals Court’s error here is both substantive and paradoxical. In the opening arguments of the decision the judges reject the government’s attempt to pull the Department of Defense and Office of Management and Budget out of the case by arguing that it was irrelevant if ACORN never had or never would apply for funding from the DOD, and it was irrelevant if OMB had tried to paper over its initial instructions when the original injunction was overturned, because the “reputational” damage to ACORN was substantial and enduring from both the OMB and DOD actions. Word! But, then the judges, pages later, retreat to hide behind the “10%” screen. Regardless, the definition of punitiveness is inherently subjective, and here the judges want to have some credibility by pretending that ACORN’s problems were all self-inflicted and that the Congressional action was prudent rather than punitive.

The judges pile a lot on the molehill of a relatively recent decision (cited several times) in which HUD has made a determination that that New York Acorn (as they call it) is a separate corporation and not related to ACORN, therefore it could now receive funding from New York State to NY Acorn under a contract that was funded by HUD. Frankly, all of this is so confusing and contradictory that even rereading the sections of the decision several times, I felt befuddled, which still leaves me in better shape than the judges who I believe allow their handling of this corporation to be slickly deceiving and deliberately intellectually dishonest. The description provided in the decision of New York Acorn is of the New York ACORN Housing Corporation. I had heard that NYAHC had been renamed (rebranded?) as MHANY (Mutual Housing of ACORN New York) Management, Inc. The actual cover page of the decision acknowledges that the name change has occurred from NYAHC (which I think they misstate with the “c” as company rather than corporation, but who cares since facts don’t seem to matter here) and is now MHANY Management, Inc., but from that point on in the text of the decision the judges simply lump all of this post-facto (after the defunding decision) survival mode activity into something they call “New York Acorn.” By doing so they are then allowing themselves to pretend that something that was always a separate and distinct corporation in New York State is the same as ACORN, and therefore its ability to slip the noose and access the NY State funding makes this all hunky-dory. That’s just wrong!

Furthermore I would bet money that the facts, by which I mean the politics and not the law, undermine that as well. A New York Times story some months ago documented clearly the difficult problems that ACORN’s new management had in navigating the old New York relationships with officials in the Obama Administration. Shaun Donovan, the head of HUD, always had a close and productive working relationship with Ismene Spiliotis, the head of NYAHC and the head of MHANY Management, Inc dating to his time as a New York housing czar. In the story it was painful to read how Ismene, who was always a great ACORN staff member and manager and widely acknowledged to be one of the best nonprofit housing developers in New York, was being victimized by the fact that one of the primary gotcha tapes from the pimp-prostitute mess was right under her nose involving a housing counselor for NYAHC. As the saying goes, “all politics is local,” and a wrong was finally righted by restoring justice in New York that the kangaroo court of media and the Congress had not allowed earlier. A restoration of that kind should not be a justification for the Appeals Court though, espcially so long after the fact.

All of this is the tendency of the decision throughout which is a not so subtle attempt to simply “blame the victim” for the unconstitutional actions of Congress by applying ambiguous standards to ACORN that would be unacceptable to any other corporation or entity. If one reads this decision one thinks that ACORN has been convicted of fraud, financial misuse and misappropriation, and any number of crimes, none of which is true, yet all of which are used by the Appeals Court to justify allowing the defunding of ACORN.

The majority judges also cite in a number of instances what they call ACORN’s “admissions of significant mismanagement.” None of this is cited or referenced of course, and being a pretty close follower of this story, and quite frankly, for 38 years as Chief Organizer, probably the principal manger here, I read all of this with an eagle eye. The judges only cite the fact that there have been “reports” (largely overheated, inappropriate, and inaccurate) that the ACORN “family” of organizations involved more than 200 different corporations, which must hardly bring a nod from most corporate heads given the common practice of separating real estate and development projects and nonprofit versus tax exempt organizations into separate corporations and is hardly illegal much less suspect. They don’t like the fact that the structure and relationships were “complex.” If they had asked me (which no one anywhere ever has) I would say that we structured the organization smartly from jump and that recent events have proven the rightness of that strategy and the mistake of not holding the line and protecting the walls between various entities.

As for these so-called “admissions of significant mismanagement” in fact where are these admissions and what might they have been? Obviously Bertha Lewis, who emerged in the year after I resigned under the new title of “chief executive officer” would promise to do things differently, nail down any loose boards, and tighten any wobbly screws. Frankly, that’s what all new managers do when they replace someone, either with a deft touch or a loud scream. It was hard for me to ever take personally. It’s part of the common politics of transitions, and hardly an admission of “significant mismanagement,” nor given Bertha and her teams long history in ACORN’s management would there ever be a credible “admission of significant mismanagement” unless there was a suicide pact to self destruct their own credibility and ACORN itself.

My best guess would be that the judges are relying on the botched, discredited, confidential, slapdash hack job done by attorney Beth Kingsley and commissioned during the upheaval of new management being selected amid the internal power struggles involving the board and staff about the control, direction, and resources of the organization in the months after I resigned. And, they are certainly relying on that less than the repeated references to it after it was leaked by members of the rump ACORN 8 caucus to the New York Times as they tried to advance their leadership coup. Probably the only thing the ACORN 8 ever did that I had to agree made sense was attempt to censure Kingsley for unprofessional and ethical violations before the DC bar, though unfortunately they were doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. Kingsley was overmatched for the job and out of her arena by hundreds of miles, and wrote a political document relying on an embittered, alienated, and disillusioned staff member, that basically offered hip shooting opinions and allegations to cover up any substantive examples of problems or mismanagement other than to say that it was too complex for her and she didn’t like it. (Wade, what did you really think of that “report”? I thought even some of the “and’s” and “the’s” were lies!)

But, who knows, since the bottom line is that the Appeals Court judges just continue the allegation walking on whatever thin ice is beneath them, yet it’s substantial, since they use it to cover the heart of the crime here: “Although the appropriations laws may have the effect of alienating ACORN and its affiliates from their supporters, Congress must have the authority to suspend federal funds to an organization that has admitted to significant mismanagement.” By doing so the judges exercise their political will beneath the judicial screen by essentially arguing that even if Congress erred, ACORN asked for it. That’s a dangerous legal precedent for the future if allowed to stand.

Yet, it will probably be allowed to stand as poorly reasoned and as erroneously based. I wouldn’t bet on the Supreme Court being willing to hear the case in the future, and I certainly would never bet on the odds of justice at the hands of the Roberts’ court in the future.

This may be a sorry ending, but it is likely the ending of the last legal lifeline for ACORN.