Wade Rathke: Chief Organizer Blog » Community Organizing

Where is Community Organizer in Chief?

jstuart — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 17:12:59 +0000

Baltimore Catching up on reading on the plane was disturbing in big and small ways. How in the world has Obama so badly lost his groove?

What happened to the understanding and instincts of an organizer, being able to listen, forge the rap and flyer that works, and lead through others? A piece by George Packer in the March 15^th edition of the New Yorker on Obama’s lost year was troubling and devastating on the President’s inability to connect with the American people. In an editorial coup the Packer article followed a profile on Treasury Secretary Geithner, who seemed committed to not listening, not hearing, and not caring about the impact on people and politics, as a matter of policy. Hauntingly the Packer piece seemed to echo some of the same themes where “responsibility” as policy was replacing the need to communicate and gain support of the public. Egads! This is fatal!!

Perhaps more devastating was Packer’s thrust that the President’s advisors seemed more committed to the man than the policies and a sense that he had no core. The comparisons to Reagan were depressing, but one admiring quote after another from fawning Democratic strategists like Paul Begala expressing not just admiration, but a clear reckoning that you could only make change if you had an ideology. Obama in one critique was spending too much time and energy hoping to cast himself as Roosevelt and not enough thinking about what he really wanted to achieve at rock bottom.

There is irony here of course. The right is constantly attacking him for his supposed ideology, yet unmistakably it seemed clear that part of the problem was his relentless, tone deaf search for the middle, lacking any central, personal convictions and principles, which is another way of thinking about ideology. How many wake up calls do they need here? What happened to the organizer.

In a small way I was also reminded of this problem while reading a story in the Times about the credibility problem President Caulderon of Mexico is having in Juarez and elsewhere because his military-might anti-drug strategy, bankrolled by more than a billion by first Bush and now Obama was not bringing security. In a footnote almost the reporter talked about a visit by a Mexico-based official of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) who was in Juarez this week meeting with community groups to talk about how to support community development, essentially some butter where guns were not working.

At the least we could have expected an ex-community organizer and now President to have known that and directed such programs at home and abroad as matters of policy, and maybe even as part of his personal ideology that community empowerment and development make sense in all situations.

Nick Von Hoffman on Alinsky

jstuart — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 18:52:36 +0000

New Orleans Driving back from a union bargaining session at the NASA Michoud facility I just missed a call from a 207 area code. Returning the call, it was a pleasant surprise to find the caller was none other than Nicholas von Hoffman, who is somewhat known to people now for his journalistic and broadcasting career, but to me always as a place in the pantheon as perhaps the best of all the organizers to work with Saul Alinsky back in the day.

Nick had some small questions for the introduction of a book he was finishing for Perseus which he described as something of a homage to Alinsky. He wanted my opinion on Alinksy’s legacy. We talked about the several times that Alinksy had done sessions with my staff at Massachusetts Welfare Rights in early 1970 and various other things that we dispatched quickly.

More interesting to me was my quid pro quo. I wanted to ask Nick a couple of questions from his time about Alinksy’s real views from his perspective as opposed to the views that have been carried forward by the acolytes to the present.

One was whether Alinksy’s hostility to “movements” as opposed to “organizations” was tactical or fundamental. Von Hoffman replied quickly that in his view there had been a lot of false attributions in his name. He claimed that he had not heard Alinsky make this argument, and told me a story, that I thought I had read in an Alinsky biography, about when he was organizing The Woodlawn Organization (TWO) in Chicago and some of the TWO leaders wanted to invite some of the Freedom Riders to come to a meeting. He was not too excited because in the past when they had pushed for similar meetings and they were lucky to pull 25 folks. This time there was a huge crowd! Nick said that he was talking to Saul, who was in Carmel (CA) later that night after the meeting, and told him about the meeting and that there was a real movement afoot. Saul asked him to send him a memo, because this was worth attention. Nick claimed he had never heard Saul movement bashing, and expressed surprise based on this story.

Of course I had heard Saul on this rant myself and it is well reported, but von Hoffman’s insight was valuable, because it might reveal something closer to Alinsky’s real opinions and curiosities rather than how he felt he had to handle his business in public. Nick also told me there had been a serious debate, led by Saul, about putting the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) out of business and retooling to a wider range of projects, including an attack on the Daley machine in Chicago, but with his death that didn’t happen obviously.

Similarly I thought from the Alinsky book on John Lewis that his view of movements should have been different from his arguments there, but I also assumed the labor federation structure had fueled the “organization of organization” structure used in the Alinsky organizations in the 1950-60’s particularly. Von Hoffman also pushed back on that and argued that Alinsky would have been much more open and flexible about the ACORN structure and membership base, and cited the work done with Fred Ross and the Community Service Organization (CSO) in California.

All of this led me to my second real question about the why Alinsky organizations were so apolitical and anti-political despite the discussions about power. My theory had always been that if that were really Alinksy’s viewpoint, it came from the environmental experience in Chicago and the power of the Daley democratic machine then. Von Hoffman scoffed at all of this. He believed the only reason any of the Alinsky or IAF had to strictly with funders and the ease of getting funding to a tax exempt organization. He said he and Saul talked about politics all of the time and none of what ACORN had done in terms of moving political action would have been anything but applauded by Alinsky.

Who knows at this point? It’s nice to have someone like von Hoffman looking after the Alinsky legacy and willing to broaden Alinksy’s vision and work to encompass much of what has grown up and proven successful in the last almost 40 years since his death. I hope someone does as much for me 40 years after I’m dead!

It was such a pleasure to have the conversation after all of these years with Nick. I remember what he actually wrote about ACORN decades ago when he was a columnist, but didn’t bring it up, since he had already joked about not remembering much of what he had written in the past himself. One thing about the right’s new – and perverse – interest in Alinksy’s books, is that it probably made room for something that von Hoffman would get to write now with this new audience, so that’s a contribution I should thank the Glen Beck people for myself.

207 turns out to be in Maine, so once there’s a spring thaw, I’ll start looking for this volume, and Nick was delighted that I was interested in an excerpt in Social Policy, so this is all good.

Wages of Work and Welfare

wade — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 14:46:30 +0000

New Orleans Newspapers over the weekend from London to Washington and New York are full of stories about the increasing wages of the top dogs in the financial industries on Wall Street and the City of London. The estimates range from 10% to 25% hikes. Meanwhile we continue to struggle to figure out the most accurate and pragmatic rates for the minimum wages for workers in New Westminster, British Columbia, and Ottawa, Ontario. Where’s the justice here?
The bankers and their running buddies are merely trying to get around the new (and worrisomely, perhaps, temporary curtailments of bonuses), so are jacking up their pay envelopes within mere days and months after some of them were hang dogging around Washington and elsewhere, as if they had learned something from all of the greed and excess of the last several decades. A friend overheard, King Milling, a top officer and director of Whitney National Bank here in New Orleans, talking in a social setting about returning the TARP money, because there was no way he was going to be able to live on “only $500,000 a year.” Laugh, laugh. How quickly they try sneaking around and rewarding themselves at what is now often the public trough.
Such stories cast a cloud over conversations we are having across Canada and the USA with our allies and researcher friends about how to set the fairest living wage standard in major communities in Canada where these campaigns have not been as ubiquitous as the states. Should the wage be for an individual or be “family-based,” including childcare and other costs? Is $15 CN per hour the right wage in Ottawa? How much higher or lower in BC?
At ACORN International we sweat the loonies between $30K and $35K per year, while we read about our pockets being picked by folks who are driving the ships into the icebergs without a clue. Our friend at Whitney was having his chuckles within days of last week’s announcement that the bank lost over $11M during the first quarter.
Justice is coming!

Continuing Development Wars

wade — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 17:10:05 +0000

Austin       Austin still has the feel of a city on the bright side of the recession. Unemployment has hardly hit 6%.   The airport is new and busy. Developers are still trying to build and finish projects, and community fights against them are real and important.
   I caught up with the fight to shrink a Wal-Mart proposal from 200,000 on down at Norcross in central Austin which has been engaged for some time. Though the high-jinks in court has delayed the project, it did not produce a win, but even without winning the project is now on a slow negotiations where Wal-Mart has already shrunk down to 97,000 square feet. Furthermore, Austin has a big box ordinance restricting at 100,000 feet now, so the issues are pretty set.
   The last time I was in Austin I met proponents of an initiative to block a $60,000,000 subsidy from the city to a development. Our long time and erstwhile attorney, Doug Young, has been involved with all of these efforts. His report this morning was hard to hear. Delays and an expensive campaign had put the measure on the ballot last November where the City of Austin campaigned improbably on the slogan that a “deal was a deal,” no matter how stupid or expensive I suppose, and somehow in the confusion had managed to win the election by 52-48 when the balloting was complete.
   After a almost 2 years of drought conditions and little relief, the earlier Wal-Mart proposal to build on the aquifer was dead-on-arrival, but perhaps has led to the wink and nod on some of these other measures. Environmental impacts around growth, water, and resources, could become bigger tools for fights in the future.
   Austin continues to have committed cadres of activists and community residents willing to fight for their neighborhoods and their sense of the value of the Austin community as something more than a “market” for whatever, so this city could still be a place worth watching on the fights to bring accountability to development and developers in the United States.