New Orleans I will talk about this a lot more, and I’ve been talking about this a lot before, but the article in Sunday’s Times-Picayune is a flashing neon sign that I’m going “all in” on a number of bets that recognize that we have to change the paradigm of resources to organizing domestically and internationally in order to improve the results of organizing, particularly in creating independent, democratic, and self-sufficient organizations.

Community activist will practice what he preaches at New Orleans coffeehouse

Published: Sunday, August 28, 2011, 7:15 AM

By John Pope, The Times-Picayune

As Wade Rathke, the New Orleans-born community organizer who founded ACORN, prepared to turn 63 this month, he was at a crossroads. The U.S. branch of the activist organization he turned into a powerhouse and a punching bag for the political right was dead, a victim of internal and external strife.

‘Had this been a regular coffee shop, I probably would have just kept on walking,’ Wade Rathke says of his decision to buy Fair Grinds coffeehouse.

Although Rathke has kept busy traveling to the 12 countries that are partners in ACORN International, he wanted something that would let him do some organizing in New Orleans.

So he bought a coffee shop.

It isn’t just any coffee shop. It is the Fair Grinds Coffeehouse, a two-story Ponce de Leon Street establishment whose name is a play on the name of the nearby racetrack.

Though coffee shops have become synonymous with bourgeois excess, the Fair Grinds is in some ways a natural place for a veteran rabble-rouser to land. The ground-floor interior, where flecks of paint peel off the dark-green beaded-pine walls, looks like one of the last outposts of the 1960s, with fliers touting yoga, concerts and meditation groups.

There are, however, some modern touches: Casually clad customers commune with laptops and smartphones, and the walls and front window display advertisements for vegan cuisine and gourmet cupcakes.

But, Rathke said, what drew him to buy the business from Robert Thompson and his wife, Elizabeth Herod, wasn’t just the opportunity to sell coffee and pastries, although he envisions the shop as an ideal market for fair-trade coffee made by a co-op of Honduran women with whom he works.

“The attraction here is the space we’re in right now,” Rathke said.

Rathke, who will take over in mid-October, was sitting with Thompson in a big, empty room upstairs, a space that has been used for years by art groups, meditation groups and boards of nonprofit organizations.

“You name it, and it probably met here at some time or another,” Rathke said. “Had this been a regular coffee shop, I probably would have just kept on walking, but the chance of combining what I know about building a community from 40 years of being a community organizer and the role that this coffee house has in this community was just too good to pass up.

“I’m excited about the fact that there are 300 or more people who come in here every day, and we’ll have a chance to talk to them. God knows what we’ll say. God knows what we’ll hear. I’m very much looking forward to the dialogue that a cup of coffee can help make happen.”

Rathke, who paid about $500,000 for the building, is no stranger to the coffee culture. A graduate of Benjamin Franklin High School, he got a job as a shipping clerk at Luzianne Coffee Co. after dropping out of Williams College, where he had organized draft resisters and welfare recipients.

At Luzianne, Rathke was introduced to coffee and chicory in the company cafeteria, and he frequently was given a 1-pound bag at the end of a week’s work.

“I liked coffee after that,” he said.

At Fair Grinds, Rathke said one of his priorities will be to educate people about fair-trade coffee, a category of coffee that may cost more because, Rathke said, its producers are getting paid adequately.

“People should get the reward of their labor,” he said. “The organizing I do, which is the broadest way I express my commitment to people and the justice they deserve as part of their lives, will also be meted out here at this coffeehouse.”

The Rathke regime will carry on a tradition that Thompson and Herod established when they opened the business in 2002.

“If we’re absorbing a penny or more in the cost per cup, so be it,” Thompson said. “We feel better about the cup of coffee we’re drinking.”

The two men’s apparel espoused the coffeehouse’s laid-back vibe. Thompson wore a Fair Grinds T-shirt, shorts and Crocs. Rathke wore a light blue shirt, jeans and sandals, and he carried a tote bulging with copies of his two books on community organizing.

His latest book, “The Battle for the Ninth Ward,” will debut Monday, the sixth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, with a party at 6 p.m. at Light City Church, 6117 St. Claude Ave.

Rathke also is the editor in chief and publisher of Social Policy, a quarterly magazine.

Even though Rathke will be the Fair Grinds’ owner, he won’t be a regular fixture at the counter. He’s still busy, traveling to countries where he is ACORN International’s chief organizer.

In the United States, ACORN, which had been one of the country’s biggest community-organizing groups, disbanded last year after allegations of criminal conduct — an investigation found none — and the revelation in 2008 that Rathke’s brother, Dale, who also worked there, had embezzled nearly $1 million from ACORN and some affiliated organizations in 1999 and 2000.

The matter was kept quiet for years. Dale Rathke was ousted on June 2, 2008, shortly after the news became public, and Wade Rathke stepped down as ACORN’s chief organizer the same day.

Dale Rathke, who lives in New Orleans, had paid the money back before 2008, his brother said.

“He had his problems,” Wade Rathke said. “Obviously, it was very unfortunate. He made a big mistake; he paid back the money. That is a legal response. We could have thrown him in front of the bus, but we wouldn’t have gotten the money back.

“We weighed between getting restitution and having retribution, and restitution seemed like the wise course, and that’s the one we chose. The majority of ACORN’s members and leaders were OK with that.”

Even though there is no longer an ACORN structure in the United States, Rathke has plans for the coffeehouse as a nexus of activism.

“We’ll run it as a social-venture operation,” he said. “The work will directly support change, both out of the gross revenue and whatever the net profit is. Those monies will be expended to try to make sure that people in developing countries like where we get the coffee are able to come together, organize collectively, improve their livelihoods, build power. That’s where the resources will go.

“These things all integrate together, and I think the Fair Grinds Coffeehouse is a natural place to put more of these pieces together.”

Oh, and sure I was born in Wyoming but these are minor details.  The point here is to watch where we are going with all of this in the future.

            Primarily Indian metalworkers paid brokers up to $20,000 USD, which is literally a king’s ransom in rupees, to undertake the work.  They expected and put up with the terrible living conditions common in a labor camp in the shipyard, especially in the post-Katrina.  What they also expected was that promises of a green card which would allow them to continue working in the USA would also be delivered, since that was so clearly the line that recruited them to the shipyards.   Unfortunately, as any reader would know, that line was a total line.

            As the 500 workers agitated about their conditions, circumstances, and the injustice of it all, supported by assistance from the Workers’ Center and national advocacy by NDLON, the National Day Labor Organizing Network, and its leaders, Pablo Alvarado and Chris Newman, the boss according to the court papers and an article by Julia Preston in The New York Times, saw the Indians as “whiners” and wanted to target and remove the ringleaders.  Where did the boss go for advice in this area?  Well, right to agents of ICE, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement outfit so notorious throughout the land.  

The advice was a classic labor busting technique more reminiscent of the old organizer tales of the Wobblies tarred and feathered and ridden out on the rails than anything else.  The agent according to the boss said, “Don’t give them any advance notice.  Take them all out of the line on the way to work; get their personal belongings; get them in a van, and get their tickets, and get them to the airport, and send them back to India.”

It didn’t work out so well in this one situation since folks like the Workers’ Center were all over this bad boy, but I have to wonder how many thousands of times this advice would have yielded exactly the expected result?  This situation may see some justice through the courts, but this is rare. 

The notion that we can build a “guest worker” program on the backs of desperate immigrant workers, almost classically exploitative labor contractors and recruiters, and still make a big deal out of the Statue of Liberty and any core values of the United States as a nation of immigrants, is the cruelest irony underlying all of this.

New Orleans

• The city’s population has now reached 76%+ of the pre-storm number putting us over 350,000 and rising.  Observers were shocked, since they had predicted a falloff after the 3^rd year bump.
• Similarly a report today on a “windshield” survey of housing stock indicated that there had either been full rehabilitation or substantial work done on more than 75% of the damaged houses.
• Driving by the old St. Bernard housing project in the city, structures are finally framed, roofed, and skinned, and work seems to finally be moving apace.

Make no mistake though.  This is four years on since the storm.  This is not recovery.  This is long term convalescence.  This is not acute care, this is only a notch better than hospice treatment where the doctors are surprised the heartbeat and willpower to live are still so strong.

New Orleans will make it, but after four years is it too much to ask that our governments finally take this all seriously and pull together and really give us a hand?