Tahrir Square

Paris We have a big, diverse and significant delegation traveling with the Organizers’ Forum for our 10th International Dialogue, this time in Cairo.  We are all in the air moving across the time zones now with great anticipation to meet with our counterparts and get a sense of the social changes and revolution [...]]]>

Tahrir Square

Paris We have a big, diverse and significant delegation traveling with the Organizers’ Forum for our 10^th International Dialogue, this time in Cairo.  We are all in the air moving across the time zones now with great anticipation to meet with our counterparts and get a sense of the social changes and revolution everywhere in the streets of the city now.  For me it’s a relief to finally on our way, because navigating the details of housing, transportation, and the agenda for the program itself has been wildly difficult this trip.

At one level that is exactly as it should be.  Who has time for 22 visitors wanting to hear all about it with our million questions in the middle of a revolution?  We get it…there are more important things to do!

At the other level the difficult lies in the very uncertainty of these times for activists and others.  The election is now set, but there are also tensions everywhere around the role of the military, the emerging political formations, and whether or not activists themselves are being targeted and in danger.  This general concern is coupled with added strains around the role of the United States in the Middle East, especially Egypt, at this historic juncture.

Whatever hand the US might have had, was hardly played well.  First, Secretary of State Hilary Clinton was widely quoted as lining up with the Mubarak “stability first, rights second” team and arguing in the middle of the revolution for the status quo, which significantly downgraded our standing.  Then after an 11th hour reversal of field by President Obama that seemed more opportunistic than anything else, we joined the winning team only to embarrass ourselves almost immediately as the dust cleared by offering $40 Million in money and attracting long lines of NGOs and others to some kind of weird, ham fisted effort to try and buy a seat at the table.  Now while tensions are huge between Egypt and Israel over a recent killing of Egyptian soldiers, which is unraveling years of an alliance, we have the issue of Palestinian statehood and Obama’s threat to veto that at the UN Security Council to contend with as well.  Let’s just say that I’m wearing my ACORN Canada t-shirt to fly into the airport!

And, all of this makes it more difficult for organizers on the ground to weigh whether or not a meeting with our delegation of Americans, Canadians, and Italians is the smartest idea or whether they should find a conflict on the calendar.  Nonetheless, our schedule will end up packed and exciting even with this as a backdrop.

Just being there alone will be worth the price of admission to this Organizers’ Forum dialogue.  How often do any of us get to be anywhere nearby the ground level of massive social changes in our lifetimes, must less game changing revolutions?  With hard work and great luck many of us never have the opportunity and only the most fortunate can count the times on one hand, but all of us will have the experience now.

Case in point:  Within hours of our landing several unions have announced strikes around both political and economic issues including health care workers and teachers.  Our first day we will get to witness the strikers rallying in front of the Cabinet building in the new tradition of the mass action in Cairo.

Priceless!

I hope to be able to report while we are there, but I already know there are internet issues and potential problems.  We’ll see what we see soon!

Hunger Striking for teachers

Tegucigalpa Before 8 AM on Monday morning we were greeting Jaime Rodriguez, the President of COPEMH (Colegiio de Profesores de Educacion Media de Honduras) in the parking lot of the Colegio and teachers’ union.  Even as the lights left us in darkness drinking our sweet coffee in a sky lit [...]]]>

Hunger Striking for teachers

Tegucigalpa Before 8 AM on Monday morning we were greeting Jaime Rodriguez, the President of COPEMH (Colegiio de Profesores de Educacion Media de Honduras) in the parking lot of the Colegio and teachers’ union.  Even as the lights left us in darkness drinking our sweet coffee in a sky lit waiting room, he told us stories that were shockingly current and contradicted the notions that the civil wars of the Honduras-Michelleti golpe government had ceased against its own people and their social institutions.

During the coup to usurp the elected government over the last several years in Honduras, the teachers unions had been among those in the forefront of the resistance and demand for a return to democracy.  This period, hardly more than a year ago, saw several teachers involved in the almost daily marches in Tegucigalpa killed, one right on the street where we had exited the cab for this meeting.  More recently in March in a protest against the government’s announcements of educational “reform” four teachers in march were brutally beaten by police.  These were fresh wounds.

Rodriguez explained that the so-called reforms essentially were an effort to privatize the state educational system.  Despite the constitutional guarantees of education and their definition of the state’s responsibilities to provide it, the government had ordered the educational system to be decentralized to the municipalities.  Most municipalities not having the experience, resources, and capacity to actually provide education for the children would be forced to subcontract or privatize the system.  A similar scheme had been seen several years before around water resources leading to privatization of water in many areas (see blogs from San Pedro Sula earlier this year).  Around this same time teachers were already raw about millions that turned up missing from their pension programs being maintained by the government.

In the protest against these “reforms” 302 teachers were fired.  In reaction teachers’ unions have launched a rotating huger strike maintained by five strikers at all times.  We visited with the hunger strikers and listened to their moving stories, while standing under a tent where they were living, now evicted from their homes as well, but firmly planted in front of the Congress buildings.

All of this was coupled with frontal attacks on the union itself.  In the “reform” effort the government declared a “state of emergency” in the educational systems thereby asserting extraordinary powers similar to what one would find in general martial law.  In this emergencia the government suspended the right to strike (allowing it to fire strikers like the 302!), stopped all dues checkoff in this process on the transitional claim that the teachers were no longer state employees, and took other steps to defund and break the teachers’ unions.  Rodriguez explained how the membership had dropped from 25000 in March 2011, hardly two months ago, to less than 2000 now who were paying dues by hand at the window next to the waiting room where we were huddled in our meeting.

Shockingly to Rodriquez and others, their story has not gotten attention, making their fight even harder.  ACORN International’s board will take up a resolution of support on Friday and hold a press conference to announce our decision, if affirmative, but in the meantime this is a crisis that needs investigation and action.  Now!

When Obama was working at the neighborhood level

New Orleans According to a fascinating article by Damien Cave in the New York Times the families that have hunkered down and stayed in the Ciudad Juarez warzone in Mexico directly across the Rio from El Paso in Texas are frequently headed by generations of women [...]]]>

When Obama was working at the neighborhood level

New Orleans According to a fascinating article by Damien Cave in the New York Times the families that have hunkered down and stayed in the Ciudad Juarez warzone in Mexico directly across the Rio from El Paso in Texas are frequently headed by generations of women and their children, welded to jobs and livelihood, they are now called familia anclada – a family anchored to the city.  Despite losing more than 200,000 people or 20% of its population to a Katrina- like tsunami of crime, such families have seemingly stabilized Juarez at over 800,000 as part of the linked metropolitan complex we so often ignore with El Paso which has a population of around 650,000, the 21^st largest city in the United States.  This is all fairly amazing in many ways and speaks of the tremendous resilience of families in the face of adversity often ignored.

In the celebration of the “power of weak links” which undergirds the fascination and impact of social networking tools like Facebook and Twitter to link people who kinda, sorta, maybe know or want to know each other and create somewhat of a personal “affinity” group, something like the familia anclada should once again remind us of the stronger values found in the power of strong links and deep engagements between people.  Maria del Socorro Velaquez Vargas, a sociologist quoted in the same article speaks plainly saying, “People don’t have faith in government.  They have faith in their neighbors.” In some ways that’s a pretty fair definition for the root strength of community organizing methodology and practice over the last 50 odd years.

In the celebration of the new and the justifiable excitement over the prospects of new tools found in technology, communication, and activism, something like the daily swelling numbers in Tahrir Square in Cairo should be a stark reminder of the power of people, the force of action on the street, the passion that defines youth, and the anger that triggers liberation.  The combustion of these elements is not some electric flash from a computer screen or a beep from a mobile phone but the connections made in the streets of Egypt, in the neighborhoods in Juarez, and in communities big and small where organizing is going on every day around the world.

It is probably important to remember that this has always been so.  I might even argue that this very strength of community engagement is perhaps what has been the most radical and unique of all American political contributions.  We certainly did not invent representative government or democracy, but we did seem to have modeled how to build the power at the grassroots level, whether we are talking about the Populists or the Tea Party people.  Community organizers were somewhere between smart, shrewd, or dumb lucky enough to understand that the community and constituency level is where change has to be constructed in order to win and be sustainable.

Using house meetings, organizing committees, and the constant connections of the community all came to mind thinking about the most exciting part of T. H. Breen’s writing on the role of “committees” in building deep engagement of the base in his recent book, American Insurgents, American Patriots. He painstakingly details the way “faith in neighbors” replaced “faith in government” in 1774 and 1775 even before the outbreak of full on armed struggle against the British.  The organization of hundreds, if not thousands, of locally based committees of safety and whatever operating in plain sight to force the most direct accountability at the community level welding ties between “Americans” more deeply and isolating sympathizers with the Crown essentially outside of the community norms, uprooted the British at ground level rendering their attempt to govern a dead letter even before troops were massing across the land.  These very local committees dealing with local people and local issues were the practicing crucible of real government based on the Articles of Correspondence way before there was a Declaration of Independence or thoughts of a Constitution.  Those flowery documents were constructed on what was built by arguably the most successful community organizing we have ever seen in this country.

Hannah Arendt, the conservative political philosopher, argued that the single most important contribution of the American Revolution was found in the decades following independence in the construction of the “ward” as the basic unit of government.  For modern Americans the notion of the ward and ward government as revolutionary must seem like heresy and certainly there could be some conservative headaches trying to assemble rationalizations here, but Arendt’s point that constructing government on the most basic building block that allows maximum participation by people in the most connected and engaged community at the most local level possible through wards is in fact very radical, and therefore, American in the truest sense.

Community organizations operating at the very level of participation and engagement that governments have mostly abandoned  have created the bonds of steel that allow families to (for example) rebuild after Katrina or remain anchored in Juarez or fuel change all over the world, which proves daily that the excitement over weak links should never let us forget the power of deep engagement and strong ties in creating both change and the possibility of full democratic participation by all people.