New Orleans  

Spokespeople and statements for Komen claimed that they had created a new policy rule which disqualified Planned Parenthood:

A spokeswoman for the Komen foundation, Leslie Aun, told The Associated Press that the main factor in the decision was a new rule adopted by Komen that prohibits grants to organizations being investigated by local, state or federal authorities. Ms. Aun told The A.P. that Planned Parenthood was therefore disqualified from financing because of an inquiry being conducted by Representative Cliff Stearns, Republican of Florida, who is looking at how Planned Parenthood spends and reports its money.

On its face the so-called “rule” is ridiculous.  Virtually any organization at any time anywhere within this definition could be experiencing some kind of investigation “by local, state or federal authorities.”  Think about it.  The simplest charge before the EEOC, NLRB, DOL Wage and Hour Division, EPA, or OSHA, as well as any of the various levels of health departments required to do routine inspections and certifications of clinics, and on and on and on all could be used to claim a disqualification of an agency from support by the Komen Foundation.  Frankly, when the IRS routinely investigates the tax exempt status of Komen, technically, they shouldn’t be able to fund themselves.

The whole notion of such a rule is absurd, which inevitably lends credibility to PPA’s President and CEO Cecile Richards’ claim that they folded like a cheap skirt because of “bullying by right wing groups.”  Who will do the breast exams for poor women and others offered by Planned Parenthood under this assault?   No one, not that Komen seems to care.  The Komen operation’s sister whose own cancer supposedly inspired the organization of this pink parade would be rolling over, unfortunately, in her grave!

Further the Times seems to have a lead on the “smoking gun” leading to this attack:

…in December, LifeWay Christian Resources, which is owned by the Southern Baptist Convention, said it was recalling a pink Bible it was selling at Walmart and other stores because a dollar per copy was going to the Komen foundation and the foundation supported Planned Parenthood.

This is hateration pure and simple.

Thank goodness for Cecile standing up and shouting out.  $700,000 plus won’t cripple Planned Parenthood, but on the other hand this decision should point all of the rest of us who care about health needs and the tragedy of breast cancer some other direction than the Komen Foundation if we really care about women.

New Orleans   

Ron Lieber of the Times offered a helpful analysis of Orman’s new entry into this market and its impact on citizen wealth, but despite the fact that he seems to be bending over backwards, “vaporware,” as he calls the claim that credit giant TransUnion will actually use this data to qualify a customer for a real credit card, still seems to be the wrapping for this whole card.  A prepaid card is exactly that, a card where one a customer turns over cash in order to spend that cash with plastic rather than cash.  There have to be very good reasons for doing that, because, cash involves no extra fees, and these celebrity cards still cost money for questionable returns in a market that makes no sense unless it repairs credit or qualifies the consumer for something bigger and better.

Back with ACORN our team met extensively with Russell Simmons about his Rush Card.  We loved Russell and he had been a great friend, especially to New York ACORN, but the rap master had produced a rip card.  Promises were made and improvements were implemented, but the card still sucked, and it’s still sold in low-and-moderate income neighbors everywhere.

Orman will be moving on some other streets but it’s the same hustle it looks like to me with regular maintenance fees and transaction fees, even though there are ceilings that prevent going past the limits and some credit reports and credit reviews even though it is sound and fury signifying nothing.

If the point is something more than making money for Orman and friends, then what is the point of this for consumers.

None that I can find, and until then, if you have a little bit of cash, keep it in your pocket, rather than paying someone else to spend it for you.

N

At the least, suffice it to say, this dude is still totally out of control!

Sex, Drugs and Videotape: James O’Keefe Implicated in Barn Rape Plot

By: Gustavo Wynn

As reported by Keith Olbermann, Raw Story and NorthJersey.com, disturbing charges were leveled against James O’Keefe, the undercover “pimp” made famous in videos that informed a Congressional vote to defund ACORN (later ruled unconstitutional).

A conservative blogger from Tampa has reportedly shared details indicating she believes she became incapacitated and had her underwear stolen while she was in O’Keefe’s company.

Her October 2nd visit concerned a proposal to be in one of O’Keefe’s anti-Occupy Wall Street videos, says accuser Nadia Naffe – O’Keefe picked her up at the Newark train station and stopped off at a liquor store before driving her to his parents house where negotiations got contentious and O’Keefe became verbally abusive.

Naffe claims she began to have trouble controlling her muscles and threatened to call the police when she felt O’Keefe was trying to coerce her to stay. As she testified in a criminal complaint, O’Keefe demonstrated an “intent to persuade me to spend the night in the barn”. O’Keefe and a pal instead drove her to Penn Station in NYC, Naffe reported, adding she lost consciousness during the ride.

After traveling on to Boston where she attends grad school at Harvard, Naffe alleged her bag had been rifled through, with panties and other items taken. She also reports O’Keefe made an unsolicited offer of money, but began harassing her shortly after she refused the cash, through direct messages and third parties. 

On Nov. 17, O’Keefe posted a video smearing “tramp” Naffe as “filthy” and “dirty”, but since removed the video. That same day, Politico reported Naffe was one of several O’Keefe collaborators “in-fighting”, noting accounts she had been treated “disrespectfully”.

O’Keefe’s Project Veritas settled one complaint with a former associate in exchange for silence while threatening other ex-associates with legal action for breaching confidentiality agreements.

Naffe responded on Nov. 21 with a criminal complaint – O’Keefe was hauled into a probable cause hearing in a county court on December 21. O’Keefe did not speak during or after the hearing, and was relieved as the case was dismissed on an apparent jurisdictional technicality. But Judge Alan Karch did pro-actively advise Naffe she could pursue civil damages.

O’Keefe is currently being sued for deceptively editing a video that led to the firing of an ACORN employee in San Diego and he is also on federal probation after a misdemeanor conviction for entering a US Senator’s office under false pretenses in Louisiana. Despite this, many, including this reporter, believe O’Keefe has received some eye-popping special privileges during his previous run-ins with the law.

O’Keefe’s generous plea deal in Louisiana knocked felony charges down to fines and misdemeanors without jail time. His co-defendant in that case, Robert Flanagan, is the son of a U.S. Attorney in Shreveport.

But even more curiously, O’Keefe was bestowed criminal immunity for violating the privacy rights of San Diego sting subject Juan Carlos Vera by then Attorney General of California Jerry Brown in exchange for providing Brown’s office the full, unedited tapes of the encounter. After viewing the tapes, Brown also advised the victim to pursue a civil lawsuit against O’Keefe — which he did.

That lawsuit has been dragging on since our July 2010 report, but has notably become a cause taken up by heavyweight Republican lawyers in DC who are funded in part by Richard Mellon Scaife and the Koch brothers’ billionaire donor network.

O’Keefe’s defense is being provided “pro bono” by Center for Individual Rights, a legal institute who is also currently challenging parts of the Voting Rights Act of 1964. CIR is co-directed by Larry Arnn of Hillsdale College, a charter sponsor of the Sean Hannity radio show.

In March 2011, Christopher Hajec, one of CIR’s lawyers, told TPM that his organization is representing O’Keefe for free because O’Keefe’s case stood out as a First Amendment issue. Eric Gressler and Michael Madigan of the law firm Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP also are helping with O’Keefe’s defense, even though their legal fees typically far exceed the $75,000 sought in the suit.

It’s strange that CIR and the battery of legal minds being bankrolled by wealthy Republican donors are investing so much in this case while ignoring the numerous First Amendment cases brought against undercover videographers who document abuse and health hazards in factory farms. Lawmakers in Iowa, Minnesota, Florida and New York have tried to criminalize undercover videotaping in farms, including by journalists.

Unlike O’Keefe and his defense team, Florida state senator Jim Norman says undercover sting videos are “unfair outside assaults” on intellectual and private property rights, incredibly, adding it is “almost like terrorism, the way they go in”. CIR lawyers seem way out of place asserting First Amendment rights in the O’Keefe case, while these important public health and animal cruelty cases languish.

This leads many to feel that O’Keefe is a ‘golden boy’, protected by wealthy conservative backers. Just as O’Keefe first came into the spotlight with the release of his ACORN “pimp” videos, the Village Voice exposed his relationship with super-rich sugar daddy Peter Thiel, contrary to O’Keefe’s claims of independence. Today, his Project Veritas discloses on tax forms that they are still in search of “major donors” to support their work.

In May 2011, we reported federal Judge Dembin rejected James O’Keefe’s assertion that his freedom of speech as an ‘undercover’ news gatherer trumps the privacy rights of California residents and the prohibition on surreptitious recordings. Though this defense seemed outrageous, it has already succeeded in wasting time and dragging out the case.

In October 2011, we reported that Judge Dembin compelled Andrew Breitbart to disclose all communications between he and O’Keefe as well as undercover ‘ho’ Hannah Giles. About the same time, SEC filings showed Breitbart had just received $10 million in funding from two undisclosed donors.

It is not clear what Nadia Naffe’s next step will be – O’Keefe did settle one earlier ACORN lawsuit out of court, but nothing he was accused of in the past approached anything like the date-rape scenario Naffe’s court filings suggest.

It’s also not clear whether O’Keefe obtained required permission from his parole officer to travel to Manhattan to transport the impaired blogger as described in the account.

If Naffe presses charges implying O’Keefe was involved in drugging her and weakening her senses in order to detain her, it could become an extremely serious matter for a federal parolee.

While it’s also possible some or all of Naffe’s story is fabricated or mistaken, O’Keefe hasn’t officially denied it yet. The site BigGovernment where both parties are listed contributors has whitewashed the sordid tale completely as if it’s not really happening.

New Orleans              

In the current fight in New York City an oft cited study that buttresses the case for coupling public investment in private development with living wage improvements on such projects was written by T. William Lester and our old friend and comrade, Ken Jacobs from the University of California at Berkeley’s Center for Labor Research and Education.  The study, “Creating Good Jobs in Our Communities:  How Higher Wage Standards Affect Economic Development and Employment,” put together a list of cities that had enacted “business assistance living wage” ordinances and created a database to compare them to a similar set of cities to determine in a unique way whether or not cities had hurt their growth and job development with such policy initiatives.  The cities  had a good dose of California in them, not surprisingly, but also included a good smattering from around the rest of the country, making the work truly national in scope.

The results contained good news for all of us who have advocated and organized for such policies to be enacted in our cities:

“Economic development wage standards are one tool that a city can use to create jobs of greater quality. We have compared two sets of cities in order to assess the effectiveness of such laws—those with enforced business assistance living wage laws and those without—and found that there is no loss in the number of jobs due to the living wage requirement. It appears that, even during hard times, economic development wage standards are an effective tool for increasing wages in a city without sacrificing the number of jobs.”

This work builds on the path breaking work done by Dr. Robert Pollin of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst that had established in Los Angeles and later, working with ACORN in both New Orleans and Florida, that the any adverse impacts were at worst negligible, and at best wildly positive.  Walmart ran from ACORN’s big-box proposed ordinance in Chicago in 2006 which would have coupled business assistance with their development and pulled up stakes in Sarasota, Florida when we won an ordinance requiring living wages on such developments in that city, but these studies seem to conclusively argue that they simply left money on the table, rather than allowing cities to develop in equitable and sustainable fashion.

With the first hints emerging that we may be coming out of the recession, we need to dust off all of these reports and initiatives and move more aggressively to reassert these agendas in North American cities and around the

 Little Rock     

          Good things grow in the hardscrabble of Little Rock.  Things like ACORN and perhaps things like Occupy Little Rock, because there’s a chance this could be one of the last encampments or plantons still standing when all is said and done.  Whether through a stroke of luck, good organizing, or just the special magical access of Little Rock, the Occupy folks had made a deal with the police chief.  If they moved from the grounds of the Clinton Presidential Library to some open space behind the post office where the old Downtowner Motel used to stand, then they were welcome to stay.  Even though I arrived in the night and rain, the Occupy encampment looked orderly and well laid out to me.  There was a police fence around the property so that you could only enter through the front (4^th Street) entrance.  Which is not to say that people were relaxed and that this was just a camporee, because when I approached through the rain and stopped to take a picture of this large, well lit, domed tent before jumping into the Occupy world, two or three folks met me at the door as if I might be looking for trouble and asked for the password.

The tent was warm and inviting and fairly easily seated 20 or so between the various chairs and couches although there were 25 folks were .  A young, red headed fire cracker ran the meeting as tightly and smoothly as just about any organizer or leader I’ve ever seen handle a meeting, and effectively proved that consensus could be welded into shape easily in a meeting this size (keeping in mind there were reports of huge difficulties and endless meetings around the country when 2 or 300 people are involved).   The GA marched through the business, the bulk of which had to do with getting an agreement to spend a couple of dollars for propane fuel or reimburse folks for out of pocket supplies for action preparations or one thing and another.  The Plumbers’ Union and the AFL-CIO had been supplying the gas.  Outsiders would have been surprised to hear the conversations in the GA about where they could get flags for the Army, Marines, Navy, etc since so many of them were veterans and wanted to fly their flags outside.  There was also a long conversation about how they were sewing revolutionary war Continental Army uniforms for a “winter soldier” action that would take place in a couple of weeks.

When I asked later, they reported that people had been unceasingly generous and every day something showed up by way of money or donations or supplies or whatever.  On a raising of hands about half of the folks were “residential” and the other half with jobs or families or both came and went between their houses and the encampment.  The Occupy Little Rock group was diverse in its own way.  There were young and old, veteran activists and young, grungy “travelers,” a young couple with their sleeping child, a couple in Cartharts and some in khakis, and generally nothing out of the ordinary.

When I spoke, folks were excited to have someone with a deep connection to ACORN.  They enjoyed my report that the Local 100 United Labor Unions board had passed a solidarity resolution for them and the other Occupy forces in our cities.  They listened politely about ACORN International’s work in the megaslums.

The questions though were more interesting.  Some were Little Rock “inside baseball” types, with one guy wanting to know where his monthly bank draft dues payment was going if ACORN had gone out of business and another wanting to know if everything was good between our old radio station KABF and the ACORN successor organization:  I was clueless.  The more interesting questions had to do with advice they sought on whether or not they should incorporate and “form an LLC [limited liability corporation]” which caught me by surprise, though it was good to hear that they were thinking down the road.  They asked for advice, and I offered it for what it was worth, essentially lobbying them to start thinking about how to use the encampment as a symbol, prepare for the future, ally their program to others, and build their base.

The Occupy Little Rock folks were good people trying to do great things here.  In a couple of months they could be among the last folks still firmly established in a planton.   I urged them to prepare themselves then to speak for the entire movement.  It would be a serious political and organizing error to not take them all very seriously.  From my time in the cold and rain with them, I would trust them to do a good job of it.

The Saints won handily without my help.  I may have a cold to take home with me now, but at least I know I went where I was needed.

Little Rock      

I threw a stink bomb out in the room by asking people to discuss the similar populist appeals of the Tea Party and the Occupy movements.  I didn’t realize how close to home I had come.  It seems in Little Rock Occupy there has been a steady presence and enthusiastic presence of the Ron Paul wing of the Tea-people complete with their own “Don’t Tread on Me” flags, tents and paraphernalia.

After much conversation, book signing and buying, and so forth, Kathy Wells of the Greater Little Rock Coalition of Neighborhoods wanted to discuss and get some advice on how to deal with a project being promoted by Deltic Timber around the Lake Maumelle watershed.  This was interesting stuff because Lake Maumelle is the water source for much of the drinking water for Little Rock so anything out there has major impacts on everyone.  After 35 years or so this is the first time since the reorganizing and downsizing of the Pulaski County Quorum Court (the county government including Little Rock and North Little Rock) in the mid-1970’s (yes, ACORN was all in the middle of that!) that the now 15-member body has been forced to use the land use powers – and responsibilities! – it has over the unincorporated areas of the County.

A lot is at stake.  Deltic Timber has pushed a proposal to develop thousands of acres in the watershed that would allow subdivision and construction of about 9000 houses jolting the population up significantly in this west of the city.  The now infamous, billionaire Koch Brothers and their cats’ paw operation Americans for Prosperity has been agitating the Tea-people on the argument that the “only good land use controls are no land use controls.”  Some of the Quorum Court Justices of the Peace are scared to death of Tea Party organizing in their districts with elections on the horizon next year.  The long time County Judge Buddy Villines has been dealt a bad hand where he can take it or leave it, and leaving it seems to mean anarchy prevails out there, which would be bad for everyone.

Wells has a multi-pronged program including grandfathering in the use of existing residents and other well reasoned points that are supported by a wide range of environmentalists and the Occupy folks, who are willing to agitate around these issues to provide a stronger strike force.  Unfortunately, listening to the arguments back and forth, the votes just didn’t seemed to be there for any better than Deltic Timber has indicated they would agree to in the first place, which was better than nothing, though not a huge deal better.  Neil Sealy, veteran community organizer and director of Arkansas Community Organizations, the successor organization to ACORN in Arkansas, indicated that his conversations with some of the JP’s who were old ACORN members, told him that they might put forward some amendments, but didn’t see good prospects for them and felt they had to put all of their bets on passing anything they good.

This may be one time when the Great Recession and its devastating impact on housing finance and construction is a friend, especially to people in central Arkansas, who don’t want to drink pig spit and horse wallow and whatever runs off with it.  Taking the best bargain available could give them a chance to get the elections right and the issues aligned, and put some teeth along the gummy mouth of whatever passes for land use “controls” in Pulaski now, and still get it done before the Deltic boys can sell mess and get going on their dreams for more where best would be less.

These Deltic folks are hardly “good corporate citizens” and land stewards and has a long record of shameful behavior behind them on these issues, so they have to be brought in line.   Nonetheless it is fascinating in a place like Arkansas to see a future battleground building between the Occupiers and the Tea-people where not only “hearts and minds” are at stake, but so results in coming election.  Let the games begin!

New Orleans

The next half-hour of messing with this was interesting.  First, there were not a huge number of callers, which at least proves that some Fox News viewers have some good sense or a modicum of manners.  Secondly, most callers hung up as soon as I picked up the phone on the old principle I suppose that if a man answers, hang up!  I think they were taken aback to have gotten lucky and had me on the phone.  One engaged me a bit and wanted to make sure I was “Wade S. Rathke, the ACORN thug who was organizing the Occupy movement.”  I told him my middle name was Wade and that he had his “S” was in the wrong place, and I hung up.  The calls were from Allentown, PA, and central Jersey, and that neck of the woods.  Fox News and these losers probably don’t realize that you can immediately dial back after a call and get the number of the caller on modern phones, so we could collect their numbers to turn into the police.

It was funny to me that they used the Fair Grinds number, rather than calling my office at ACORN International or Local 100 United Labor Unions or Social Policy magazine, all of which would have normally given them a better shot at talking to me.  Do the Fox News crazies not only think – preposterously – that I’m somehow “organizing the Occupy movement,” but also working as a barista at our great new Fair Grinds Coffeehouse?  Even funnier is that we are still in the death throes of trying to get Cox and Verizon to port the cellphone numbers that were used since Katrina at the coffeehouse over to a land line we installed two weeks ago, so bully-boy callers would have gone right to voice mail over there.

Frankly, it’s not cool to see that Fox News is back up to these kinds of shenanigans even with Glenn Beck long lost and gone.  This is the kind of thing that brings out the whack jobs as we all saw in the Oakland incident and gunfight about a year ago with a deranged dude looking to wreck mayhem on the Tides Foundation because of its connections with me, progressives, and others.   On Facebook a number of my friends’ advice was to lawyer up, but as much as I appreciated the sentiment, we have freedom of speech here, and once you have morphed into being a “public figure” because of the work you do, there’s not much that lawyers can do but send you a bill.  As for calling the police in New Orleans, read the papers, Google New Orleans police, and you will understand why I would feel safer NOT calling, thank you!  I’m glad I got a shotgun for my birthday and am in the process of getting myself a new dog for the yard since Cheyenne passed away, but these things only mark the boundary line of the property.

The real boundaries have to be marked by a civility of discourse and dissent, which allows us to vigorously debate our differences including organizing aggressively and protesting loudly, but still respects basic democratic principles and fundamental societal norms that do not deliberately attempt to silence and intimidate.  It won’t work with me, but, frankly, it should be tried with anyone.

Toronto

Ironically, the Unreasonable Institute itself though turns out to be supported by foundations and donations.  They bring wannabe entrepreneurs into Boulder, Colorado for an intensive 6-week program for 26 folks in figuring out how to raise private capital to support social response businesses providing solutions in the developing world.  I will overlook the fact that capacity building in for-profit sector and hopefully successful and profit making business ideas are being nurtured by private philanthropy, which means that while the Unreasonable Institute is promoting entrepreneurship, they are depending on donations for the Institute’s existence and for attendees who are raising money themselves to be able to get to Boulder.  Investors and business have no shame.

Nonetheless, Epstein is both unreasonable and right in developing a program to expand the base to support creative solutions in international work!  ACORN International’s experience dovetails precisely with his analysis.  Funders don’t take many domestic risks, and they are going to take proportionately less risks in international work (see a longer argument in Global Grassroots:  International Perspectives on International Organizing www.socialpolicy.org).

The story Seligson reported on Ben Lyon in Kenya who has started something called Kopo Kopo Inc which has devised “a mobile payment app that helps people make purchases in areas where banks don’t exist or where fees are too high for the poor to open accounts.”  Those areas are everywhere!  Count on the fact that ACORN Kenya will track him down to help in Korogocho…how about something for remittances Kopo Kopo?

On some of the others, who can tell?  More troubling was whether or not investors are really ready to buy, which also unfortunately agrees with our experience as well as we have tried to pitch recycling business models in Dharavi (Mumbai) and other cities as well as proven fundraising programs that are easily adaptable to developing megacities.  An investment director at something called the Investor’s Circle, which finances “businesses with a social or environmental impact” still seemed skeptical based on the distances and the payout possibilities.

Whatever?  If we are going to get traction, we are going to have to move a different direction.   While I’m trying to get my arms around a coffee house and bio-diesel operation, I can guarantee its high risk and hard to make happen, but what choices do we really have?

Outside of the family dramas that were likely bridged for Goldman by Bethany Bultman, an old family name in New Orleans uptown society, who is now head of the New Orleans Musicians’ Assistance Foundation and a cultural anthropologist, the interviews that hang truest were with a housekeeping “technician,” as she called herself who was part of a small organization begun in 1973.  We had tracked them down in 1978 as well and their finest hour was past them when we met with them.  She looked no more than in her 30’s and talked about the tensions in the job.  Her children were even more articulate as they both acknowledged the relationship their mother had with her employer’s children and the contradictions presented in their own lives by her work.

We heard these stories by the hundreds.  We had assembled a list from early morning leafleting and contact at streetcar and bus stops dropping off domestic workers Uptown and along the Lakefront.  We had also mined Polk’s and the crisscross directory for names of women who self-identified as maids or domestics.  We had a simple issue that triggered the organizing because for the first time domestic workers had gained coverage under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FSLA) and had to be paid the minimum wage.  January 1, 1979 was the trigger, and it was obvious that a form of “don’t ask, don’t tell” was being imposed on many of the estimated 5000 domestic workers employed in New Orleans at the time.  Early on the bus stops the workers were doubtful that employers would pay what many of them called the “top wage” which was really the minimum wage.  Talking to the workers we found many were hardly making $1 per hour even if one credited lunch and transportation which were allowable offsets commonly paid and expected.

[It was painful for me to watch one segment of Yes Ma’am where a maid and her “friend” employer started the day with coffee au lait, knowing that it might have been effectively deducted from her wages!  It was disappointing that Yes Ma’am missed the almost the entire boat on wages and livelihood as they focused on the relationships almost exclusively so the fights about social security payments and minimum wages were not part of their shoot, which I obviously regret, even while appreciating what was revealed.]

We were careful to always frame the HWOC as an organizing committee and an association or co-op for household workers and decidedly not a union, since we were so often asked if in fact that is what people were building.  At the first meeting of some 50 domestics the women on the organizing committee elaborately drew the distinction.  The HWOC organized a march in the center of the Lake Terrace neighborhood that attracted more than a 100 people, starting at a park space in the middle of the upper middle class suburb, while every door was leafleted with information demanding compliance with the newly instituted minimum wage of $1.65 per hour.  We ended up suing the IRS for not forcing compliance with the minimum wage and not informing the DOL Wage and Hour Division of tax returns where domestics as having been provided social security payments (also a legal requirement), and settled that well.  There were other highlights that had to do with calling out employers like the Gambino’s of the well known bakery family for paying peonage wages in violation of the FLSA.

Behind the forced cultural conformity there was fire though.  I will never forget a march we did from our office at the time at 628 Baronne Street a couple of blocks away to the DOL’s office in the old post office federal building in Lafayette Square with about 40 or so of the household workers to present the HWOC demands for enforcement of the minimum wage in New Orleans.  In the pre-meeting the ladies had practiced what they would say to the DOL and how they would describe the organization and its aims as an improvement association for housekeepers and so forth.  They marched through the door and demanded to meet whoever was in charge.  The director emerged finally.  I was at the front so could hear the whole exchange.  He asked the spokeswoman who they were and what was going on?
She looked him in the eye and in a loud voice for all assembled to hear announced that, “We are a UNION of domestic workers and we want to be paid what the law requires!”
I learned an organizing lesson that moment that I would never forget, and which all of these movies remind me of vividly, if bizarrely.