New Orleans

Importantly in Vancouver there was a commitment from the chief staff person in the Finance Ministry to meet directly with ACORN Canada leaders to see what needed to be done to vet the issue and move forward.  With a new Premier taking office this week, members are crossing their fingers that they might actually be heard on this huge issue dealing with money transfer organizations like Western Union, MoneyGram, and others.

Members in Toronto were literally locked out in the cold by police at the behest of the provincial government in Ontario at Queen’s Park.  There seems to me more interest in the Hollywood concept of The King’s Speech than in Queen’s Park listening!  Police and bureaucrats claimed the demand to meet with the Minister of Finance and present an “unauthorized” letter was past the pale, forcing the members with flags, bullhorns, and chanting to call out to supporters passing by and post the letter to the minister from in front of the government’s own building.  “Hey,” politicians seem to be saying in Ontario, “what do we care about the problems of a bunch of new Canadian immigrants?”  Indeed!

The report from ACORN Ottawa head organizer, Jill O’Reilly, elegantly and concisely describes what nearly 30 members faced at the federal level in pressing the demands:
“CUPW joined us with their national president. SEIU Canada local 2 staff joined us as well
We got press in Ottawa Metro, major free daily paper. We got local press in the Ottawa EMC, which publishes Thursday.

Leaders Michelle Walrond and Adrian Profitos went up with no trouble to commissioner’s office Ursula Menke at the FCAC. She wasn’t in or the deputy commissioner. So we spoke with their media relations person who tried to shove us off to the minister’s office. But members stayed firm and they promised us a meeting and to look at our info. We asked them to pass on the message to Ursula and her office that she needs to recommend a 5% cap on banks for remittance fees to the minister, etc.

The woman we dealt with was a little shaky and the press came up and took some good shots. the building management called the cops on top of the cops I already spoke with this AM. We turned out approx 11 cops. who were super nice and pissed that the building management called in more of them when we already notified them.”

All in a day’s work as other countries in the ACORN International federation also move to step forward with the same demand in the seven other countries where our members face the same issues.

Another step forward, as momentum continues to build around the world for remittance justice and it becomes clear there’s no stopping us now!

Kamloops

I’m not sure I have ever been in Calgary, but think of a gleaming city sprouting up on the western plains with the Canadian Rockies majestic in the distance to the west, a mini-Denver, just newer and more compact, and you have the visual imprint.  Quite dramatic with a newish, confusing four concourse airport and the statues of wild horses and the rest of what sends those of us with western roots wondering how cold are the winters and what the price of real estate might be.  Leaving for Kamloops over the ridge, the propeller pilot lets us know that there may be cloud cover in which case they will bring us back to Calgary, but we get there fine.  His next announcement is that there is a “traffic jam,” so we’ll need to wait on the runway for a bit because the two gates are both filled up.   We have a minute to look at the dry, brown mountains outside the small propjet windows.

After almost a month on the road my bag was stacked with a dozen magazines that needed to be plowed through to catch up on what’s been shaking.  A half-dozen Newsweek’s produced a cartoon reprint of a Cleveland Plain Dealer political cartoon of Obama appointing Eliot Spitzer as his “new prostitution czar” to “investigate ACORN.”  Ha-ha.  More thought provoking was a piece by Ellis Cose in another issue entitled “ACORN, Heal Thyself:  The group’s problems like within” in which, regardless of the points he gets both right and wrong, hits the mark in the final sentence:  “But in the end, ACORN’s ruin may not be the radical right, which can hurt its funding but can’t take away its 400,000-plus members.  Its biggest problem may be itself, and its inability to see its own potential.”  I keep rereading the sentence throughout the trip and wondering how much of the membership is being protected in ACORN’s current bunker mentality and meltdown especially given the contradiction of what also seems an mystery attack on the strong New Orleans membership.

The other Newsweek piece I found myself tearing out and re-reading asked the question:  “Was Russia Better Off Red?”  Clearly they were reaching for reaching for relevance and trying to stir some controversy with research done by Ian Yarett from sources at ILO, UNESCO, WHO, and even the Russian government itself, none of which were lefty folks with a vantage point to sell.  Three years a delegation from the Organizers’ Forum had visited Moscow and St. Petersburg, and this had been one of the questions we had heard raised repeatedly by Putin critics, some scared for their very lives with good reason.

The list:

Then Now

Population:                  147 Million                                          142 Million

Life Expectancy          67.8                                                     67.5

Divorces                      639,200                                               703,400

Disease Diagnosis       91,296,000                                          109,571,000

Hospitals                     12,600                                                 6,800

Economically Active   76,174,000                                          73,248,000

Recorded Crimes        2,761,000                                            3,210,000

Ag Land (acres)          520,403,933                                        414,148,619

Forestland (acres)        1,999,116,140                                     1,998,090,660

Drinking Per Person    7.5 liters                                              10.5 liters

Cinemas                      2337                                                    1510

Time to go out and beat the dawn and see how early a place called “Cowboy Coffee” opens so I can keep from scratching my head too often before visiting with my union friends in a couple of hours here in Kamloops.