Wade Rathke: Chief Organizer Blog » glenn beck

Republican Presidential Candidates Houses: Bad Taste Past the Boundaries

Chieforgasst — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 19:01:07 +0000

New Orleans Republicans, Democrats, or whatever, when something is way, way over the line, it should be roundly understood as out of bounds. A piece in the New York Times Home and Garden section this week by Kate Zernike called “The Houses of the Hopefuls” was appalling on any number of levels.

Having Glen Beck and other haters give people my home address and phone number is, admittedly, part of why I am fairly easily offended that there are simply no standards at the Times or anywhere else it would seem over about the privacy of public figures, and the Times would at least like to pretend that it is a place that sets such standards. Past privacy though, was there no editorial or journalistic judgment that would restrain them from publishing pictures and descriptions of the candidates houses in the interest of public safety and some sense of a basic human right to safety, even if they are so bold, arrogant, or principled to put themselves forward for public office.

On those grounds alone the piece was offensive from its first premise that somehow we (citizens and voyeurs?) have a “right” to peek through the windows of their houses and stalk them on the blocks where they live in order to “get to know them better.” God, how ridiculous is all of that?

But, then if readers tried to get through the piece, you would quickly be able to discover why Republican candidates of all stripes and persuasions have no problems with the “call and response” from their base about the smug elitism and sensibilities of what former Vice President Spiro Agnew once famously called the “nattering nabobs” of the East Coast corridor. The article without apology seems to see its mission as making fun of the candidates and their families, parading forward one rock throwing, self-promoting designer after another willing to take a crack at the taste and sensibilities of these candidates and their private spaces. The article was snide and “bitchy.” In this case bad taste was truly in the eyes of the beholder, because virtually the entire article reeked of bad taste compounded by terrible judgment.

The reporter and the Times think they are in a position to take potshots at the taste of the candidates because they are so old-fashioned, traditional, and tend towards the “colonial” in housing styles. Duh? Quelle shock! When George McGovern ran for President as a peace candidate against the sitting Democratic President Lyndon Johnson over the issue of the Vietnam War, he clearly stated a universal political law when he said, “those that would be most radical, must remember to appear most conservative,” as he explained his on wardrobe and lifestyle in the post-sixties environment.

Here’s the perfect example from the article. I’m no friend of Michelle Bachmann, but once one gets past that and wraps one’s mind around the fact that a large family overflowing with adopted and other children that makes its money through public and social services can possibly afford a house with a $750,000 price tag, why is it not in fact admirable that she and her husband bought a house that was part of a charity construction design and build project? To me it seems commendable in fact, though it rates no comment from the Times other than earning her a couple of body shots from a so-called professional whining about the design and line of the roof, as if Michelle and her gang were the architects and up there hammering away on the beams and shingles.

It never gets better after that, expect that the reporter and her buddies do seem to believe that you get more if you are richer so they had some faint praise for Romney and Huntsman as the zillionaires of the crew.

The Times Public Editor and anyone with an iota of routine manners and slight common sense should recoil and protest this unseemly and unsafe invasion of privacy and ad hominem attack (and that goes for Michelle Bachman , too!).

As always, let’s hope for a better new year!

Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government Admits Boo-boo on “Days of Rage”

dine — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 13:03:28 +0000

Wall Street Protest

New Orleans I admit that I check the Google alerts everyday to see how the alternative universe is doing where this other “wade rathke” lives, who is often unrecognizable to me. The most recent episode in his “life,” was some kind of “days of rage” planned for Wall Street, which was quite the buzz on Glenn Beck’s “news” website, Blaze.com. On the right they took all of this fantasy so seriously that I actually had to turndown interview requests from various Fox News outlets wanting to know more details on what I was supposedly planning for this unknown event. Most often I was linked to Stephen Lerner, my colleague from the SEIU years, who was attracting some of the right wing love out there.
I guess the “days” happened this last weekend with not 20,000 but perhaps 1000 folks in some part in New York City, none of which is surprising. In NYC more than a 1000 folks would gather for almost anything. The real shock was to read Andrew Brietbart’s Big Government report where they conceded that all of the reports of Lerner and “Rathke’s” wild and revolutionary doings here were in fact “unfounded,” and to add a cherry on top, they even zinged Beck and Blaze for the fabulous fiction.

#OccupyWallSt: Just a Saturday Stroll Through the Park…
by LaborUnionReport
It was supposed to be this:

On the 17th of September, we want to see 20,000 people to flood into lower Manhattan, set up beds, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street for a few months.
Instead, as they say about the best laid plans, it was something entirely different. It was, frankly, a stroll through a park—Zuccotti Park, in lower Manhattan, to be exact.
A Non-Union Non-Event

Over the summer, on the heels of Arab Spring, an anti-capitalist group called adbusters established a campaign to occupy Wall Street, beginning on September 17th. Whether coincidental or not, September 17th also happened to be Constitution Day. While there had been some unfounded unfounded speculation a few weeks ago that the SEIU’s Stephen Lerner and ACORN founder Wade Rathke were behind the OccupyWallSt movement, there were never any signs that the Marxist-Anarchist protesters had any formal union backing—nor has there been anything posted on union websites about the occupation of Wall St.
This morning, protestors did, however, call for “revolution”.

Big Government then linked back to the Blaze below.
The alternative universe of the right is a scary, scary place though. The original Blaze article may not have gone viral, but it did get traction. More than 6000 righters had “liked” it and moved it to their Facebook walls. The story had been tweeted 513 times and there were 739 comments most of which would have stripped paint off of cars.

And for all of the good work that Color of Change and others had done to get advertisers to boycott Beck during his Fox News time with Rupert Murdoch’s empire, it was disconcerting to see ads on the Blaze story from Orvis, where I’ve bought more than one fly rod and reel, and Green Mountain coffee promoting fair trade coffee, which will leave me head scratching a good part of the day. What’s up with these guys?
US Who Is Behind the ‘US Day of Rage’ to ‘Occupy’ Wall Street this September 17th?

What, exactly, is a “US Day of Rage?” Well, on September 17th we may find out for certain, but until then, The Blaze is revealing what information does exist about this very nefarious-sounding campaign.

A US Day of Rage is the title given to a day of ostensibly “non-violent” civil disobedience orchestrated by a group of radicals — that reportedly include SEIU’s Stephen Lerner and ACORN founder Wade Rathke (who, coincidentally, formerly served as president of SEIU’s local New Orleans branch) — targeting Wall Street and U.S. capitalism. It’s worth noting that the title of the movement — if its intentions are indeed non-violent in nature — appears to contradict itself slightly.

But what is perhaps even more interesting than its title is who is allegedly behind the movement.

You may recall that back in March The Blaze exposed Lerner for stating his aspirations to destroy JP Morgan Chase and cause the collapse of the entire stock market.
Now, the US Day of Rage protests, staged by a collective of activist groups allegedly in conjunction with Lerner and Rathke, are planning the actual “occupation” of Wall Street September 17, complete with a tent city set smack-dab in the middle of Manhattan’s financial district. Similar protests are purportedly set to take place across the nation — and even world — at the same time. Some Day of Rage organizers are even calling on activists to squat in Manhattan’s financial district for months at a time.
The Blaze’s report on Lerner, who serves on SEIU’s International Executive Board, caught the union agitator stating:

So, a bunch of us around the country are thinking about who would be a really good company to hate? We decided that would be JP Morgan Chase. …. And so we’re going to roll out over the next couple of months what will hopefully be an exciting campaign about JP Morgan Chase that is really about challenge the power of Wall Street. And so what we’re looking at is in the first week of May, we get enough people together – we’re starting now – to really have a week of action in New York with the goal of … I don’t want to go into any details because I don’t know which police agents are in the room, but the goal would be that we would roll out in New York the first week in May.

Then, like clockwork, some 400 activists brought Lerner’s dream to fruition and converged on JP Morgan Chase’s annual shareholders’ meeting in May — this time in Columbus, Ohio rather than New York. The group that staged this particular protest, the National People’s Action, reportedly confirmed it was there as part of its “Showdown in America” campaign against the big banks. Since the location of JP Morgan Chase’s meeting was surrounded by a moat, the activists, who likened themselves to Robin Hood, even brought a collapsible bridge to “storm the castle.”

It is also perhaps worth noting that in March, The Blaze reported Rathke and Lerner called for “days of rage in ten cities around JP Morgan Chase.” Rathke mentioned some of Lerner’s key assertions:

While labeling Lerner an ex-SEIU official who was signaling that unions and community organizations were “dead,” also reported hook-line-and-sinker that in May, according to Lerner, there would be days of rage in ten cities around JP Morgan Chase signally the beginning of the anti-banking jihad.

So it might add up now that Klein Online reported Rathke’s efforts are being organized by Lerner, who, as part of his planned protests, called for “a week of civil disobedience, direct action all over the city:”

The planned Sept. 17 day of rage seems to be the culmination of Rathke’s efforts.
Those efforts are being organized by Stephen Lerner, an SEIU board member who reportedly visited the Obama White House at least four times.

The aim, according to Lerner, is to “destabilize the folks that are in power and start to rebuild a movement.”

“How do we bring down the stock market? How do we bring down their bonuses? How do we interfere with their ability to, to be rich?” Lerner asked rhetorically in March.
So, it appears, Columbus could have been one of the ten U.S. cities en route to New York for the “big day.”

Glenn Beck Going Down

dine — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 13:22:25 +0000

New Orleans We have finally reached bottom. I heard the splash, so we can measure exactly how far it is from normal to wacko crazy at Fox News finally when Glenn Beck and his maddening fantasy and conspiracy tour turned out to be even too much for Fox to handle. Turns out according to the behind-the-back whispers that neither Fox News nor Beck was ever happy, and they shed big fat alligator tears all the way to bank as they both made their deposits off the hate and hurt they inflicted on the American people and their viewers.

Heck, I know I’m broken up about it all, too. I hope they sell “no sympathy” cards at the drugstore now.

Big props to Media Matters, the Color of Change, and scores of other groups though on this one! Finally, our team gets to count coup, because despite all of this touchy-feely baloney from both Beck and Fox, the real story is that when 400 advertisers tell Fox, here’s my check but don’t spend it with that dangerous clown, they even understand that in Australian dialect that Rupert Murdoch can follow no matter what spin they put on it.

Unfortunately, Glenn Beck as the Charlie Sheen of the “news” room, isn’t out of business by any stretch of the imagination, and instead will just be moving his wild parade and carnival show down the road to another channel. Beck is still a big timer, just not a Fox friend. With 1.5 million viewers he had a base, his radio show is still a hit, and his weirdo books sell like hotcakes. The hate train is still rolling across the country and the whistle is blowing loudly at every stop.

My bet is that Beck, if anything will only get worse, now that he’s driven (or jumped?) even more underground where there is no governor on his conspiracy accelerator or muzzle on his mouth. The blackboards were killing him on TV. School is boring! Whoever convinced Beck that play school would be more attractive than the horror we all remember.

Let’s celebrate this victory and remember, as the coaches always say, we still have to keep winning the games scheduled today and tomorrow. Glenn Beck is a player. We have be ready to go with our “A” game every day with this dangerous dude!

The Big Troubles of James O’Keefe and His Sponsors

dine — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 14:40:23 +0000

New Orleans It turns out that just like the song says, “it’s hard on a pimp” or a “punk” or a “pretend pimp,” which turns out is the case for video-sting-man James O’Keefe and his futile attempts to “come clean” and pull off his greatest ironic caper: boy journalist.

You know it’s a dog pile when something as staid, boring and nose-in-the-air as The Chronicle of Philanthropy takes a look down at your problems, but sure enough, O’Keefe wants to make sure he gives his right-wing buddies a tax break for supporting his chicanery, so he’s applied for tax exempt 501c3 status for his paradoxically named “Project Veritas,” which used to be Latin for truth, but who knows what O’Keefe thinks it stands for. But here’s the Chronicle’s cut:

“An attempt to visit Mr. O’Keefe at Project Veritas’s official address in Washington—2100 M Street N.W., Suite 170-241—was also unsuccessful. Suite 170 is a UPS store and No. 241 is a small mailbox that rents for $35 a month.

Project Veritas’s first step in getting an exemption is to file an application with the IRS known as Form 1023.

As part of that application process, Project Veritas must meet key requirements about how the group is organized and operated and spell out what charitable mission it will pursue.

Organizations must also prove that their assets do not unjustly enrich board members or officers and that board members do not pursue business activities unrelated to their tax-exempt purpose. Applicants must also show that they do “not engage in activities that are illegal or violate fundamental public policy.”

…Mr. O’Keefe pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor crime after he and three others entered the office of Sen. Mary Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana, last year pretending to be telephone repairmen.

The fact that Mr. O’Keefe has stated in public that he would do it again, albeit “differently” would probably be the biggest stumbling block to gaining charity status, said Marc Owens, a Washington tax lawyer who formerly oversaw the IRS division that monitors tax-exempt groups.

“If he is proposing to do something that is, in fact, illegal, can the IRS believe, with any degree of credibility, what he is saying?” Mr. Owens said. “Is he going to continue to enter government offices illegally? He pled guilty to it once and said he would do it again. It’s reasonable to conclude that the organization may be engaged in criminal activity in the future.””

Bottom line: They are not sure you should get tax free donations when you announce that you may break the law with the money. Geez, they have kind of a point there.

It’s probably only a minor aggravation for O’Keefe that the student paper at his alma mater publishes a piece that says essentially they are embarrassed by him and his exploits. The web-magazine, Colorlines has documented with frequent stories O’Keefe’s problems with race. As they said of his New Jersey teachers scam: “What’s perhaps most notable is that O’Keefe, once again, found a way to racialize his hit job. ” Organizations involved in racial justice or with members of a darker hue than he carries — are probably also just water off a duck’s back to him, because I’m sure he’s comfortable in his own skin and only that skin indeed! Of course ostensibly racial bias is also the opposite of the “fundamental public policy,” which in fact should be something worth the IRS looking at when they determine whether or not to give a tax exemption to foster O’Keefe’s brand of race hate and race bait through his work and caricatures.

Michael Gaynor, a lawyer and conservative blogger, who establishes his “right” credentials by trumpeting on this twitter bio the fact that he brought the Cloward-Piven “strategy to “Glenn Beck’s attention,” which is one heckuva claim to fame, looked closely at the San Diego legal problems posed to O’Keefe and Hannah Giles “acting” as the prostitute in that ill begotten scheme, and thinks there may be big problems not only for them but for their lifeline sponsors and outlets, Andrew Brietbart and his biggovernment website and the Fox News friends:

“So, make no mistake, in Maryland, California and Pennsylvania, Ms. Giles and Mr. O’Keefe are in legal peril, even more so in California and Pennsylvania.

Given the importance of the information contained on the videos, it is not reasonably disputable that the Constitution permits BigGovernment.com and Fox News to use them, at least if they are “otherwise innocent.”

If, as reported, Mr. Breitbart serendipitously first learned of the videos when Mr. Giles brought them to his house and Fox News was not involved in the sting in any way until it reported on it, then both BigGovernment.com and Fox News were within their rights in using the videos, the Maryland statute notwithstanding.

In Bartnicki v. Volper, which involved both the federal and Pennsylvania laws against surreptitious recording, the United States Supreme Court held that a publisher who has lawfully obtained information from a source who obtained it unlawfully may not be punished by the government for the ensuing publication based on the defect in a chain.

Bottom line: BigGovernment.com and Fox News appear to be safe, because, in the words of the majority opinion in Bartnicki v. Volper, the interest in “removing an incentive for parties to intercept private conversations–does not justify applying” a statute prohibiting surreptitious recording “to an otherwise innocent disclosure of public information.”

If BigGovernment.com and/or Fox News are NOT “otherwise innocent,” then Ms Giles and Mr. O’Keefe will have company on the legal hot seat.”

O’Keefe probably needs that tax exemption to raise money to pay the settlement that may be coming his way from losing the California suit for his shenanigans.

This guy seems is a heat seeking missile heading for trouble and exploding everything around him. The Landrieu probably seems to have taught him nothing, but been mere rocket fuel for his mischief.

Press clips may be addictive, but they don’t pay the bills, and O’Keefe is due to learn that his was no free ride.

Glenn Beck and William Kristol Brawl over John Birchers and Middle East

dine — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 15:55:02 +0000

New Orleans When William Kristol of the intellectual right, Weekly Standard, is coming to your defense against Glenn Beck of Fox and other platforms, it would be a mistake to believe that everything is “right with the world,” since it is more likely the equivalent of a no-punches-thrown schoolyard shouting match. But, sure enough in a Ripley’s “believe it or not” moment, that’s what we have in front of us.

David Carr, the New York Times media wizard, opined the other day about the fact that Glenn Beck’s time at the top of the ratings was over and that he had now jumped the shark and was headed down. He noted the fact that Kristol had called Beck out for his ranting about the Islamic hot spots sweeping the world and that this was “marginalizing” Beck. What a concept? How could he be more marginal?

The real slap down delivered by Kristol was much more of a gut punch:

“When Glenn Beck rants about the caliphate taking over the Middle East from Morocco to the Philippines, and lists (invents?) the connections between caliphate-promoters and the American left, he brings to mind no one so much as Robert Welch and the John Birch Society. He’s marginalizing himself, just as his predecessors did back in the early 1960s.”

To remind amnesiacs still walking among us, this was a response to Beck’s chagrin about all things Egypt and Tunisia and how unsettled he was that street protests for democracy, change, jobs, and housing were bringing down dictators. Beck had warned that it would be “Katie bar the door” (my words) if you link all of the socialists (and he listed Bill Ayers of course, a Code Pinker, and “Wade Rathke, that ACORN guy) as all hooked up in the street protests and hanging with the Muslim Brotherhood or words to that affect.

For Kristol to stand in defense then is truly remarkable. For him to nail Beck for fabricating “connections between the caliphate-promoters and the American left” is extraordinary and for him to label him as reminiscent of “Robert Welch and the John Birch Society” is a signpost on the right, just as I and other progressives have increasingly pointed out these signs of neo-McCarthyism over the last years. When the thieves fall out, there’s real hope for the innocent living in the neighborhood, and that’s where our prayers have to lie now.

But, it’s nothing to count on. Some may be bored by Beck (how could you not?) but with 2 million TV viewers and countless other Beck-book-buyers and radio zealots, he has a hardcore fan base which guarantees him a platform for many years to come, Fox or no Fox. He’s not going away until he’s driven even deeper underground. That’s also the lesson learned from the John Birch Society which still has a heartbeat out there in America.

Community Organizing is a Revolutionary Tool

dine — Sun, 27 Feb 2011 23:28:13 +0000

New Orleans I retweeted something last week where someone had said, “Glenn Beck takes the left more seriously than anyone else,” or words to that affect, simply because it was true. For all of his buffoonery and conspiracy theories, Beck is on to something: he knows community organizing is serious business, and he knows that it threatens the status quo. Liberals make the mistake of simply seeing community organizing as nice, harmless civic participation, which is also true, but only part of the story, which is why in the assault on ACORN they often drew the line inaccurately at form, rather than recognizing that the substance of the attack was deeply targeted at substance, and as it turned out the very right of a mass-based, socially responsive, politically active membership organization of low-and-moderate income families to even exist. It wasn’t then and isn’t now a question of the name, but the very game itself.

All of this is becoming crystal clear as change continues to come in the Middle East. When reporters began interviewing the small cadre of younger activists who seemed to serve as the catalytic organizers of the early protests and marches that ended up toppling the Mubarak regime in Egypt they were unequivocal in explaining that the sea change in their development of a significant mass base of support was when they finally abandoned middle and upper income neighborhoods with their call for democracy and participation and instead went directly to the poor and working areas and called to people flatly about their need for jobs, higher wages, and better housing. In other words when they turned from being sloganeering activists to fundamental organizers, and in fact community organizers, talking to people about their real issues and helping them link the connections to the lack of responsiveness of the government, then they saw success.

The superficial intellectual left critique of community organizing for decades has been the inability of community organizations to move past stop signs, drainage, and loose dogs to “more fundamental” societal and political issues in their analysis. To say that such a criticism is elitist is equally one-dimensional. To answer simply that one builds a base with such issues is also less than satisfying and does nothing to silence such criticism if there is no further explication of what the base might do or essentially “power for what.” Frankly, too often community organizing has stuttered and stalled past the “stop signs” so to speak. The Alinsky formulation of “organizing the organized” and aversion to direct politics has continued to confuse many organizations and their organizers in the United States for decades. ACORN’s very difference and distinctiveness in strategy and battlegrounds made it target, and the lack of consensus on these very issues isolated the organization, fatally as it turned out.

No such qualms about the effectiveness of such issues in developing strategy and tactics can be seen in the Middle East or elsewhere. A fascinating piece, “Revolution U” on the work of some of the old Optor organizers from Serbia written by Tina Rosenberg in Foreign Affairs, was forwarded to me by a friend, and gave a fascinating report on her witnessing conversations between Srdja Popovic, one of the founders of Belgrade-based CANVAS (Center for Applied Non-Violent Action and Strategies) along with Slobodan Djinovic, with activists among the Burmese trying to organize against this repressive regime. The conversation was one I have witnessed and been a participant in perhaps a 1000 times, as the group discussed possible issues useful for organizing and began focusing on discontent around garbage collection and the strategies and tactics useful in moving people around the issue. From our organizing with ACORN International in slums around the world, we know that garbage is the developing world’s “stop sign” issue as a failsafe common concern that is virtually universal.

CANVAS has had these kinds of basic trainings in what can only be called community organizing techniques applied to political action in fifty different countries around the world. Not all of them have ended in revolution. This is not a cookbook session after all. Nonetheless the seeds have been planted and the inevitability of change is present as long as the end is clear and the work is done.

Community organizing is dangerous stuff in the hands of people who want to participate fully as citizens and create democratic change. Anyone who opposes the will of such people expressed with determination and dedication, should be worried, whether Glenn Beck, Republican Congressmen, or dictators wherever they may live and rule.

More Wildness: Media Matters and the Daily Show

dine — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 15:32:16 +0000

New Orleans Being on the road is a little like having a “delay switch” on information and the mess and mayhem of life and business. I used to joke years ago about one way to hide information from me was to send it through an attachment! And, so it is with my buddy, Glenn Beck, and his efforts to organize my fan club.

Thanks to Media Matters, which is really an excellent organization doing the hard and thankless job of trying to dial down some of the wildness out there and throw some facts at the fire, I was able to actually read what Beck was slinging out there. Below I’ll share for your own head nodding and reading pleasure:

Beck Strains To Tie ACORN To Egyptian Unrest. During the February 1 edition of his show, Beck stated:

BECK: It’s interesting to note a few other leftists who seem somewhat involved in what is happening in Egypt. Believe it or not, Wade Rathke – Wade Rathke, the ACORN guy, and Drummond Pike of the Tides Foundation are both on the board of the Organizers Forum.

This is a forum that was planned to host their fall 2011 international dialogue in Egypt, where they will meet with labor and community organizers and other activists in Cairo.

I’m sure that they’re just there for social justice. That’s it. What a coincidence. Wade Rathke even put on his Web site — or this is actually not Wade’s Web site. This is the coalition’s — the forum’s Web site.

It says: “Exciting changes and developments are currently taking place in Egypt with elections coming soon to determine leadership transitions in what has been an autocratic regime now challenged by the Muslim Brotherhood and succession and democracy issues.”

Coincidence just doesn’t seem to stop. Why would Rathke and Pike plan a big get together in Egypt? Maybe the flights to Cairo are cheaper than the flights to Vegas. I don’t know.

Maybe they’ve always wanted to see the pyramids. Or maybe they’re sowing the seeds of unrest, because global revolution is what they’re looking for. [Fox News, Glenn Beck, 2/1/11]

What can I say, but wow! And, my heart goes out to the Media Matters staff who actually watch all of this garbage and then mildly comment that it is a “strain.”

Jon Stewart and The Daily Show seem to have been on the job here just like Media Matters. At the end of his show the other day, he seems to have repeated the piece for the obvious humor involved in the “moment of zen” feature, where Wade Rathke , “the ACORN guy” gets to be a revolutionary moving the Islamic beat from the streets and across the globe.

Check this out:

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-february-2-2011/moment-of-zen—glenn-beck-warns-of-the-world-imploding

It’s an honor to be mentioned on The Daily Show, but what a way to get a laugh!

Sorry, Glenn, the Organizers’ Forum Dialogues are Only for Organizers!

dine — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 12:37:44 +0000

Vietnamese Organizers exchanging with the Organizers' Forum of 2010

New York City After a long day of meetings in the big city, I got back to my priceline special in Chinatown on the Bowery to find a curious email from a conservative blogger asking me about the date of posting for the Organizers’ Forum announcements on the home page www.organizersforum.org. I wasn’t sure what was going on, but once there I found nothing special other than the usual background on the Forum and the notice of the 2011 dialogue to be held in Cairo at the end of September. Turned out from my correspondent that Glenn Beck was fixated on something or other about the Organizers’ Forum and particularly the trip to Cairo.

I didn’t see the show, but I’m betting Glenn was hoping he could join the delegation of community and labor organizers from the USA and Canada traveling over to Egypt to meet our counterparts there, especially in light of all of the excitements triggered by the mass movements on the streets these days. Unfortunately, one of the duties of being the chair of the Forum is that sometimes I have to deliver the bad news, and in this case I’m going to have to disappoint Brother Beck and tell him that despite the fact that I bet he’s a bundle of laughs on a trip, this is really an experience exclusively for organizers, so there’s no room in the end.

Furthermore, not surprisingly, this is a hot ticket already!

On Sunday as all hell seemed to be breaking loose my colleague, Judy Duncan with ACORN Canada forwarded me a tweet that was wondering if I was in touch with the street organizers in Cairo. I wish! I said the same on one email inquiry. On the other side I got one email from an organizer in Chicago who was recruiting 4 or 5 organizers to go and a text from another who was already committed to attending from Maryland who was widely excited about what we might learn in the wake of these massive social changes.

Contrary to Beck’s fertile and creative imagination, the Organizers’ Forum is a great experience for organizers because we are able to learn from our counterparts in other countries what is the same and what is different in their organizing experiences. We try to wrap our arms around a different culture and a unique set of organizing obstacles and challenges. Greg Galluzzo of the Gameliel Foundation was speaking to me the other day and was telling me that the report from their participant in the Vietnam dialogue in 2010 was so moving that it not only almost brought tears to other organizers eyes because it was such a transforming experience for him, but they already had a list of people signing up for Cairo.

Beck should be worried about the Organizers’ Forum. This is a capacity building experience that is now self-sufficient thanks to the level that organizers, their networks, and their unions value it so dearly. Achieving even this modest level of sustainable capacity building should be a frightening and disturbing thing to the Becks of the world.

But organizers need something of our own, and this is it! From what I read there are hundreds of meetings for right wing pundits and radio/tv personalities, so hopefully this disappointment will build character for Beck over the long arc of his future. For organizers, get your names in early for this one!

Power and Paradox of Cloward & Piven “Breaking the Bank” Strategy

dine — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 15:08:31 +0000

Toronto Fran Piven is a brilliant scholar and political theorist, still vitally engaged

Glenn Beck crazy about Fran Piven

at the cutting edges of her work while still affiliated with CUNY’s Graduate Center, and someone I count as colleague and friend over our 40 years. We spoke months ago. She called for advice about how to handle the sudden interest in her work by Glenn Beck and sneak artist video bloggers who had tricked their way into her home pretending to be students engaged in the same pursuit of truth and justice.

My advice: water off a duck’s back – ignore it. The old Huey Long axiom, as quoted by the great LSU historian, T. Harry Williams: “there is no adequate defense for a public attack.” In essence let it go.

Fine advice that was! It now develops some of the whacks have been threatening enough to require Professor Piven to report them to the FBI, which knowing Fran, she would not have done lightly. My rule of thumb for the Beck crowd had been “delete” and “ignore.” God knows where to draw the line these days.

The irony of all of this is that we are dealing with the power of an article that Fran wrote with her partner Dick Cloward in The Nation in the 1960’s which argued famously for a so-called “break the bank” strategy to achieve what I now call “maximum eligible participation” and in this case that mean the very basic achievement of the full benefits in the welfare system of the time that eligible families were entitled to receive. “Breaking the bank” was a rhetorical flourish essentially arguing within both a kinder liberalism of that time, hard as it may be to believe now, and a more palpable fear, particularly of race and riots in the urban core, that government policy makers would inevitably be forced to attempt to calm and co-opt the poor and therefore raise the grossly inadequate benefits to something more humane. Is that radical? Hardly! It was a fine piece of strategic thinking coupled with the kind of phrasing that attempted to force policy change and organizers into action. Fran should be proud of the power of that piece, no matter how mangled and misunderstood by Glenn Beck and his followers.

The irony obviously is that at the time Fran and Dick were both fierce and patient advocates of such a strategy in the face of their disappointment that in fact the leadership and organizers of the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) under Dr. George Wiley though sympathetic to the aims and paying lip service to the advice would neither adopt nor implement the strategy. This led to long, fascinating, and bitter debates. As a young organizer with NWRO being a part of these late night discussions at places like Bucky’s Town, Maryland and elsewhere was exciting and dramatic as organizers picked sides and struggled with the issues and devastating arguments that Fran would make or the passionate positions that Dick would take. In the end of the day they were critical of both NWRO and organizers in general in many of their subsequent works for having been “distracted” into building organization, rather than following the arc of movement and protest to the maximum levels of pressure for change.

So now paradoxically, Beck is essentially blaming Fran Piven for a strategy that was brilliantly articulated, yet left her sometimes seemingly bitter because it was a strategy that was effectively discarded. Fran has written that in fact NWRO and its organizers were less useful in increasing welfare rolls than the waves of VISTA volunteers assigned to Community Action Programs around the country who signed up many eligible families for welfare not for any political or policy reasons, but simply because it was what they thought they were supposed to do in the War on Poverty. There is a clear record of this in Fran’s lectures, remarks, and writings for decades, such that many of us as organizers have often chafed at the arguments and been equally passionate in the rebuttal that we were not simply chasing members and dues rather than creating change and power, as she and Dick sometimes seems to argue. Being interviewed by a conservative writer for a piece published last year, he was astounded to find that Cloward and Piven were not the St. James version of the Bible that guided us in the work at that time.

All of this would require Beck and the right wing zealots to actually read more of Cloward and Piven than an article in The Nation. It is probably easier to ask for civility as many are doing now in the wake of these threats to Fran Piven than to actually ask people to read her work and face reality both then and now.

Of course conservatives should be very careful what they are asking by once again raising Fran’s ideas and advocacy to the forefront of discussion in these times. This time around it might be different. Organizers might take a hard look and debate anew some of these old arguments and find there are some blueprints worth adopting and finally putting into practice.

Calls to Assassinate Assange of Wikileaks Out of Line

dine — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 15:07:20 +0000

Houston In San Francisco I had spent a lot of time talking to Tides people about “hate speech” as purveyed by Glenn Beck and supported by Fox News, Rupert Murdoch, and the corporate sponsors which led to an attempted attack on their offices thwarted by good police intervention. The attacks on Wikileaks founder and spokesperson, Julian Assange, are so direct and so violent that they go way past even that low water mark for civic discourse and these attacks are facilitated by the Washington Post and their distributors, like my hometown paper, The Times-Picayune, and anyone else carrying the Post columnist Charles Krauthammer. Vigilantes are on the loose, and this is just plain wrong!

There are widely divergent views on the appropriateness of Wikileaks document dumps whether from the Iraq or Afghanistan war zones or most recently from U.S. State Department cables. This is undoubtedly an appropriate debate, where I might be sympathetic but others apoplectic about these releases. Assange is also not everyone’s cup of tea either or necessarily someone you would want to introduce to your daughter. If lawyer think laws have been broken, then that’s why we have courts and a judicial system, though the more it is just talk, then more I believe they don’t own any cattle.

But, hey, when Tom Flanagan, a former adviser to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, says on CBC, “I think Assange should be assassinated, actually,” I know that is out line and simply dead wrong. What is the CBC’s responsibility and the Associated Press though? They are just reporting, but at another level, they are broadcasting hate speech at its worse and most violent without any warning or moderation. What’s the story? One is free speech but the other isn’t? Hardly! Both are free speech and both are dangerous and involve consequences and accountability.

I also am not fooled by the call for violence and hate speech of Charles Krauthammer in his Post column’s conclusion:

“Want to prevent this from happening again? Let the world see a man who can’t sleep in the same bed on consecutive nights, who fears the long arm of American justice. I’m not advocating that we bring out of retirement the KGB proxy who, on a London street, killed a Bulgarian dissident with a poisoned umbrella tip. But it would be nice if people like Assange were made to worry every time they go out in the rain.”

Who at the Post was on duty as an editor when Krauthammer made deadline? What kind of fools are we being taken for now? The fact that Krauthammer says he is not “advocating” assassination, but then both exhaustingly describes it and recommends violence sufficiently intimidating that Assange should fear for his live “every time” he goes out, is clearly an implicit call for assassination as well. What line is the Post trying to draw with Krauthammer? If someone finds Assange and beats the bejesus out of him and he dies later, what is there moral compass here? They just meant to “scare him?” They were just “trying to teach him a lesson?” They “didn’t mean for him to die.” Bull-dink! When you issue the cry for violence and threaten people personally you have crossed the line of commentary and entered into the world of thuggery and no one should pretend anything different.

Even the call for “American justice” seems to be the call for “rough justice” typical of the vigilante’s hanging rope of frontier “justice” without a trial, judge or sheriff or the lynchings that still disgrace the history of the South.

This has to stop. It is wrong as it can be and part of a dangerous movement of ad hominem attacks in this sad McCarthyist time polarizing all differences, criminalizing all politics, and now only days away it seems from dripping blood from the powerful pens of the press and far, global reaches of broadcasted speech.

Soros Stepping up to Murdoch and Fox News

jstuart — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 14:51:16 +0000

ACORN Canada members Preeti and Pascal with Wade.

Vancouver At Douglas College in New Westminster, hard by Vancouver, more than 30 ACORN Canada members and friends, gathered to watch the Dharavi documentary, WASTE, on ACORN International’s organizing of waste pickers, and to dig deep in their pockets to support our organizing in Latin America, Africa, and Indian mega-slums. It was a special honor to be introduced by Pascal Apuwa, one of our British Columbia leaders, who it turned out was from Korogocho where ACORN Kenya is organizing and in fact knew some of our organizers and friends with COPA-Kenya from his own time there as a community organizer. It seemed we had our own kind of “globalism” of organizing working here!

The support helps us move forward on ACORN International’s campaigns around the Commonwealth Games impact in Delhi and the larger Remittance Justice Campaign we are preparing to launch in December to another level. Pascal confirmed that he pays $17 CN on a transfer of $100 CN to his family in Korogocho, plus they pay more to pick the money up in Nairobi as well.

Just as people were stepping up to help people all over the world, it was a pleasure to finally drag my whipped butt back to crash and see that billionaire George Soros strapped up with a million dollar donation to Media Matters to match some of the millions that Rupurt Murdoch and Fox have been pushing towards hate speech, Glenn Beck, and the Republicans. This was no pussy foot thing where he sent an anonymous note over to someone with a check. This was an “in-your-face, sonuvabitch” contribution directly aimed at supporting the accountability campaign directed at Fox advertisers who are supporting the madness – and violence – being advocated by Beck and the rest of their talking heads.

We won’t win this fight as some kind of “battle of the billionaires” between Murdoch and Soros (and no, my right wing buddies, I’ve never met Soros or raised a dime from him!), but leveling the playing field as this campaign gets ready to take some major steps forward is a good thing.

But just as we’re trying to link members in Canada and members in Korogocho and Dharavi to create power and a stronger fight, because that’s our strength, I wish Soros would really step up and contribute not just money but something from his strength. Given Soros legendary skills with currency and financial markets, I would love for him to spend a couple of days looking at the numbers behind the New Corporation and the Murdoch empire and seeing what it would take to give that tree a really hard shake.

That would hurt Murdoch where he sits on his wallet. A million dollar contribution provides good symbolism and real resources, but looking at how to hit Fox, Murdoch, and the New Corporation hard and heavy would be a global contribution to people and politics throughout the world.

Holding Fox News Accountable – Stop the Ads Now!

jstuart — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 15:42:18 +0000

New Orleans It’s amazing how we become inured to the ridiculous, even when it is abusive and preposterous. That’s my cut on Glenn Beck and his ranting, especially when he evokes me as anti-christ and revolutionary. Over the last couple of years, whenever I would mention the absurdity of it all, too often it would end up on Beck’s show on another whiteboard of whackiness, so I followed Huey Long’s old dictum that there is no real defense for a public attack and let it all run off of me like water off a duck’s back.

When I flew into San Francisco a couple of months I got there just as a crazy was in the news having been arrested in a fire fight with the cops as he was headed to do damage to the Tides Foundation, ACLU and others. He’s now conceded he was revved up by Beck and the Fox News fanatics. I didn’t enjoy seeing my name in those articles either, but what can you do, move under a rock? Nada, me! Not because I’m such a cowboy anymore (I swear!), but the work has to be done, and it’s the risk we’ve always lived with….

Well, my friend, Drummond Pike, Tides Founder and CEO, has had enough of this shit and though generally much, much more mellow than me, has reared back and lofted spit right in the eye of not Beck, the puppet, but Rupert Murdoch, the grand master of Fox, the Wall Street Journal, and more. Drummond wrote an excellent letter that’s getting good reviews asking Fox to stop the hate speech before someone else is hurt or killed, and going one better and demanding that Fox advertisers back away from this insanity before it’s too late. Working with Media Matters and others who are veterans of the Beck advertisers’ wars, he’s clear that the collective underpinning of Fox advertising is subsidizing the Beck harangues, because advertisers have abandoned him like a toxic spill.

Drummond is giving them 30 days to back off. Or else!

Enough is enough. Drummond is right, and I’m wrong. We probably shouldn’t ignore this craziness, but instead should push back until we hurt Beck and Murdoch where it hurts them: in the pocket book.

Take it from me, Brother Glenn, that’s revolutionary capitalism!

Update: You can read Drummond Pike’s letter to Fox News’ advertisers here: http://blog.tides.org/2010/10/15/dear-fox-advertiser/