New Orleans

There is something sweetly irrational about being a fan, even for something as meaningless in the “real” world as football.  I played football in schoolyards all my life and in high school until a clipping penalty on a block against me by an Archbishop Rummel tore out my knee, changing my life, and making me 4F in frequent draft physicals when I refused to do deep knee bends and thrust forward a dog eared letter from Ocshner Hospital saying I simply must have an operation, which I have steadfastly refused throughout all of these decades.  I’m the kind of ex-player, forced fan who has trouble living through the experience of watching the game.  With the Saints that has saved me from a lot of deadening pain over the years.  I will be as delirious as anyone if somehow the New Orleans team beats New Orleans native Peyton Manning and wins the Super Bowl.  I will also be shocked and surprised.  I have to live through a longer cultural shift.  The Saints, my Saints, are fighters, but they are not blessed by fate to be winners.  Somehow we usually find a way to lose.  This season has been the exception, but has it changed our genetic code?  Hmmm.  If the day comes when the Saints make winning routine and actually win a Super Bowl, then maybe I’ll be like my son, and be mad when they lose, rather than still surprised to see them win.

Have to keep perspective.  That’s the key.

Reading about “My Way” killings in the Philippines makes me think about all of this as well.  A great story in the Times by Norimitus Onishi talked about how dangerous it is for Sinatra’s standard to be sung in Philippine karaoke bars.  Falling out of tune can be a death warrant.

We grimace.  How could this be possible that so many would care so much about a song?

Then Onishi told the story of “a Thai man” who “killed eight of his neighbors in a rage after they sang John Denver’s ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads.’”

And, to tell the truth how many of us stopped as we read that with the sudden shock of recognition that there but by the grace of god go I.  How many times has the same thought crossed our mind?  In my case I would have to confess to a goodly number.

Who dat?

New Orleans

There can be quibbling and confusion around the role of the new, proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency, but the real truth is that agency is nothing more than a straw man for financial institution lobbyist to subvert and destroy reform legislation.  How can anyone believe that when you have a half-dozen financial cop agencies looking at different parts of the suspect, it’s easy to miss the mark.  When it had to do with the inability to coordinate around security, we finally “got it.”  What’s different about the need to coordinate when trying to stay even with, much less rein in, outfits worth more than $100 billion and moving gazillions through their accounts ever year?

The other day there was a similar note about “sudden” opposition to the end of the federal cash subsidy to lenders on student loans which is costing the tax payers several billion.  Once again the lobbyists are wooing the conservatives and this piece of senseless pork is now in danger of not being finally fried.

As long as the Republicans stand for banking abuse, Wall Street payoffs and subsidies, corporate power, and the rule by lobbyists, their shtick is not going to sell.

Of course that assumes that the Democrats stand for the opposite, and sometimes that’s a stretch to believe as well.

It makes it interesting to watch the Tea Party and any other new party effort to see if others might step up if these two continue to stumble.

New Orleans

O’Keefe’s employer, Andrew Brietbart and www.biggoverment.com had one of their fair haired boys, Kyle Olson, write a piece whose headline was “Sorry Wade, James O’Keefe’s Actions Don’t Excuse ACORN.”  Olson probably feels he has the right to do a “Wade” shout out, because he and I are old comrades.  He had been on Glenn Beck helping promote my book, Citizen Wealth, claiming he had an exclusive “interview” with me at the Octavia Book Store book signing.  Dressed in short pants, he and a buddy claimed that they were health care bloggers from Michigan, and wanted to get some video from me for their blog about health care reform.  The highlights of the “interview,” which consisted of Fox viewers watching me talk while signing Citizen Wealth last summer were there question about whether SEIU was working for healthcare reform and my “admission” that yes, by gum, they were (no, duh?!?) and them asking about ACORN and Health Care for America Now (HCAN), where I said I didn’t work for ACORN and asked Marie Hurt, the Louisiana director their question, and she answered in the background.  Olson and O’Keefe come from the same “school” of “journalism,” Olson is just better looking.  The rest of his piece was a rehash of whatever few remaining charges are still outstanding against ACORN back to the 2008 election and the highly documented partisan charges by the Republicans against the organization at that time.

On the other hand I got an email yesterday from Michael Gaynor, a conservative blogger often all over ACORN as the devil incarnate, who took me to task for being too soft on O’Keefe.  Gaynor is a lawyer, so he may take these lawbreaking high jinks more seriously as a member of the bar, but he thought my description of O’Keefe’s lame quasi-apology as “weak tea” was WAY TOO KIND.  A call from the Michael Volpe, who writes the Provocateur blog, wondered why I even cared about O’Keefe, and wondered if I was losing my focus.  I was able to reassure him that I was mainly exercised over bad, pretend “organizing” which was nothing more than a mask for self-promotion no matter the costs and consequences.

I’m not even mentioning the folks who have written about O’Keefe and his bungling buddies who are not conservatives.  Whoa!  Some of the suggestions about what is likely for this callow youth in our nation’s prisons were way too gross for me.   I’m sure that if O’Keefe ends up in the calaboose that he’ll figure out how to implant a camera somewhere and make prison reform his very personal issue sometime in the future.  We’ll welcome his help on that often overlooked issue where most firsthand reports are not filmed and not heard.

            Primarily Indian metalworkers paid brokers up to $20,000 USD, which is literally a king’s ransom in rupees, to undertake the work.  They expected and put up with the terrible living conditions common in a labor camp in the shipyard, especially in the post-Katrina.  What they also expected was that promises of a green card which would allow them to continue working in the USA would also be delivered, since that was so clearly the line that recruited them to the shipyards.   Unfortunately, as any reader would know, that line was a total line.

            As the 500 workers agitated about their conditions, circumstances, and the injustice of it all, supported by assistance from the Workers’ Center and national advocacy by NDLON, the National Day Labor Organizing Network, and its leaders, Pablo Alvarado and Chris Newman, the boss according to the court papers and an article by Julia Preston in The New York Times, saw the Indians as “whiners” and wanted to target and remove the ringleaders.  Where did the boss go for advice in this area?  Well, right to agents of ICE, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement outfit so notorious throughout the land.  

The advice was a classic labor busting technique more reminiscent of the old organizer tales of the Wobblies tarred and feathered and ridden out on the rails than anything else.  The agent according to the boss said, “Don’t give them any advance notice.  Take them all out of the line on the way to work; get their personal belongings; get them in a van, and get their tickets, and get them to the airport, and send them back to India.”

It didn’t work out so well in this one situation since folks like the Workers’ Center were all over this bad boy, but I have to wonder how many thousands of times this advice would have yielded exactly the expected result?  This situation may see some justice through the courts, but this is rare. 

The notion that we can build a “guest worker” program on the backs of desperate immigrant workers, almost classically exploitative labor contractors and recruiters, and still make a big deal out of the Statue of Liberty and any core values of the United States as a nation of immigrants, is the cruelest irony underlying all of this.

New Orleans

The Wyman calculations were based on credit bureau data and derived from the number that went from being “current on their mortgage to default, rather than making spotty payments.”  Accurately this is a walk away profile, abandoning any pretense of looking for remediation based on inability to pay.  These are homeowners that could and had been paying, but who looked at the bottom line, read the paper, and realized it was going to be decades before they got their money back.

Wall Street continues to walk away.  Big time real estate operators are walking away.   The spinners are trying to say the feds won’t bail out the homeowners, but the truth is that the feds are bailing out the banks and letting them not restate the value of the mortgages that are underwater yet.  Somebody’s getting paid, just not the little guy – again!

The banks are still in denial reporting on 1991 statistics that indicate that people do not walk away.  Hello!  They knew in 2006 and 2007 that people were paying their credit cards before they paid their mortgage.  Get the message?  People no longer see the mortgage as life and death when they don’t have much skin in that game and were playing for the uptick of the value to refinance on a 2-28 or 3-27 or an ARMS.

The stampede to get away from these bad deals will crush a lot of these Wall Street cowboys and push them over the cliff, as people swim hard to get back to the surface and right size their investments.  Unless there is real help, which no one sees on the horizon yet.

New Orleans

It’s hard to be happy even with a small victory because there is so much more.  Even with the online capacity being installed for Scotia customers, the costs are still way out of line with the reality of the bank’s costs, making this a huge profit center, and therefore almost certainly predatory.

Scotia now trumpets that it will charge $9.00 plus 1% on any transaction.  On $100 bucks the minimum charge would be $10.00 or 10% of the total transaction.  Oh, no, that’s not right!

On the Scotia website they advertise the savings:

• $10.20 from Toronto to China on a $580 remittance
• $16.80 from Montreal to USA on a $420 remittance
• $4.00 from Calgary to Philippines on a $100 remittance
• $7.80 from Toronto to India on a $320 remittance
• $7.70 from Vancouver to Jamaica on a $130 remittance

Since most of this is being done via Western Union, the real revelation when you examine these new Scotia transfer cost savings is how much Western Union is charging for what should be trivial transfers within the region, like the ones from Montreal to the USA, which is next door, or Vancouver to Jamaica which is right off the Florida coast.  Normally, a transaction would have cost another 3% from Canada to USA and another 6% to Jamaica.  Of course there is another 4% they are making on the Philippines without this new Scotia reform.   The savings in the other countries are fairly trivial, though not insignificant to China and India, but as Scotia’s advertising folks boost the level of the remittance to $300 and $500 plus, all of us can tell what is going on.

But, let’s celebrate the small victory with Scotia, since there are many large banks that have not yet conceded this much, and let’s keep in mind how long we – just like this money – are still forced to travel to really win significant savings.

Western Union is obviously at the heart of this issue!

In a nutshell part of the problem seems to be that donors who make their money from business want the charities to work on the same business principles and performance standards as they deliver services.  Is this really always possible?  Or, are we to conclude that there is really no such thing as “charity,” and that services that don’t pay off, whether housing or mental health or long form journalism, just suck and out to be killed.

That seems to be the position of Diane Aviv, head of the Independent Sector, as she’s quoted in the Journal:
“Like in the animal kingdom, at some point, the weaker organizations will not be able to survive,” says Diana Aviv, chief executive of Independent Sector, a coalition of 600 nonprofits.

Maybe this is simply Darwinian, but I’m troubled because I think it’s more complex than that really.  In fact the whole basis of the tax code and the IRS exemption given to charities providing education, health, and other community services is in fact the assumption that they simply not going to be profitable, which is by definition why they are charitable.  Yet at the altar of what most would have thought in the midst of the current Big Recession is the discredited worshipping of fast buck, private sector greed and entrepreneurship, it seems many are still parroting the language of business without grasping its loss of credibility.

There needs to be a sense that charities deserve support because they are providing a real service, often irreplaceable, and doing the right thing, not just that small businesses operating on weak margins.

In our kind of work building organizations that contend for power, fight for justice, protect fundamental rights, and try to build ladders to dreams, there is never going to be much charitable giving and support, so the challenges are huge if we envision a more just and equitable future.  To expect that the rich and foundations will finance such a fundamental restructuring is naïve and misguided.  So, we are forced to have to come up with new and different resourcing and sustainability models that depend on our constituencies and which they can more directly manage and control.

Nonetheless I still worry about the “pure” services that cannot be paid for by the beneficiaries and have to either be provided by government (meaning all of the people) or by charities (meaning the tax deductible with surplus income and wealth).  The government is cutting back, and the rich are not stepping up, it seems partially because it’s not good business and additionally because they are re-evaluating their own sense of sufficient wealth.

I’ve never been primarily a services guy, but I hate to imagine a world in which the conclusion is simply that “services suck” and welcome to the law of the wild and survival of the fittest.  There’s a lot of evidence that such a strategy doesn’t have a happy ending for millions of people.

New Orleans

At one level it’s a case of life imitating art and thinking it is life imitating life.  What the O’Keefe’s think they are taking from Alinsky, according to their statements on web interviews quoted in the Times is a sense of tactical extreme or taking a contradiction to its outer limits.  Most of these favored stories in Rules though were exactly that:  stories.  They were well timed and pointed tactical threats, boring on a common organizing principle (though I can’t remember if this were a “rule”) that the “threat is always more powerful than the action.”  Many of these colorful and oft told tales of Alinsky actions from Rules were only tales that demonstrated what might have been or backroom threats at what could have been, and certainly never were what actually happened.  It’s one thing obviously to threaten that you will bring busloads of African Americas to the Chicago Symphony or whatever after having filled them full of beans, but it is a whole different thing to actually organize people to do such a ridiculous stunt that most would find demeaning and even racist.  Never happened, captain!

What O’Keefe and the rightsters are missing is the power of the threat and the force of irony and paradox, both of which Alinsky understood exceedingly well.  Theirs is a misreading of the text.  They have taken bad jokes and turned them into wrongheaded tactics, as the Landrieu debacle well illustrates for one and for all.

What surprises me as an organizer is not just the bad reading of Alinksy, because who really cares about that, but the fact that these are bad tactics because even for the rightwingers involved the tactics seem chosen not to create change, but simply for narcisstic self-aggrandizement of the worst kind.  Threatening to monitor Landrieu’s office’s handling of their complaint calls – and generating more of them – might have actually moved Landrieu to do something.  Now, if anything, they have made her a warrior for health reform, which is something the left was never able to do in Louisiana or in Washington.  They have written her a free political pass and allowed her to move forward on health care in a protected bubble forever.

Alinsky in his own desire to popularize at the time asked for some of this problem of misreading.  He would fill the college halls and retell the stories over and over as if they were gospel for the sake of his evangelism.  He fervently believed that the ends justified the means, which is both wrong, and now a banner easily unfurled by the right as well.  Furthermore, he used to continually say – to my chagrin and others – that he didn’t care where the organization went once it was built, he was simply the organizer, which was a weak defense for the racism that erupted from the famous Back of the Yards, but was an ideological weakness that had to be corrected in building ACORN and so many other modern community organizations.

But, even if Alinsky in some ways asked for this kind of trouble, there is no excuse for the bad work now being done in his name.

Clown-on-the-nose boy, as Breitbrat has referred to the them now, offered a rationale that they were trying to establish that the phones weren’t being answered for health care complainers. This is weak tea. They would have done better videotaping some of the whiners trying to call in and either getting a response or not (of course if they had recorded the Senator’s office, they might have been in deep stuff on that one) or they might have not had much to look at on the video if the phone was answered, which is why they went out as bungle babies.

They still don’t get it though. Either Breitbrat or O’Keefe.

His quotes are classics.

“On reflection,” Mr. O’Keefe said, “I could have used a different approach to this investigation, particularly given the sensitivities that people understandably have about security in a federal building.”

Let me help show how this works, James. “Could” is a different word that “should,” as in “I should have used a different approach”…and so forth. This is not an apology for a massive mess-up. This is a vacillating gallon of spit being thrown on a raging forest fire.

Senator Landrieu was more caustic. She didn’t miss the fact that the little sniveler was still skating around. Her comment was essentially: tell it to your lawyer, the FBI, and the judge – and good luck, Chuck!

Dishing it out may mean learning how to take it, too, but in this case, these guys have wasted their 5 seconds of “fame,” so let’s go fry bigger fish and leave these minnows to their own piece of the swamp.

He’s been ordered back to his parents’ house. Maybe they can take another crack at teaching him how to say, “I’m sorry.”