New Orleans

The accelerated pace has been driven by a rare organizing opportunity that David brought forward in our first Skype conversation.  He had identified a handle that he wondered if it might be helpful in building ACORN in Italy.  The handle was more than helpful, it was one of those rare, classic organizing tools that with hard work and wide range can springboard mass organization.

Here’s what’s happening.  There’s a problem in Rome and undoubtedly all of Italy (and perhaps elsewhere in Europe for all I know) around collecting taxes from landlords.  The parliament passed a very interesting piece of legislation.  They created a procedure first that allowed landlords to “come clean” that they had been renting without reporting the income or registering the leases (which is required by Italian law).  They had to do so by June 6^th of this year.  Failing to do so, if tenants could establish that they had been renting from a property owner through a series of steps with several agencies and a sizeable bureaucracy then their rent would be reduced to between 10 and 20% of what it was (there is a complex reckoning on the formula assessing value, penalty, and reward) and then guaranteed at those rates for the standard lease term, which in Italy is four years with a four year option extension (4×4).  Thus far from articles that David has shared with me, and I have dutifully ground through Google translate, several tenants with lawyers have navigated the rules and are now enjoying leases along these lines, establishing the precedent in stone.

Estimates indicate that no less than 70,000 tenants in Rome could be living in unregistered apartments and on the upside the numbers are huge.  Multiply that by all of Italy, and bam!  Were ACORN Italy to be able to create a campaign that effectively broke through the bureaucracy to create a streamlined entitlement millions would be collected by the state from scofflaw landlords, millions of euros would be effectively transferred in savings and increased spending power by tenants, and a confluence of interests would combine to create dramatic change.

The Italian law has created the appropriate carrot and stick.  Essentially they have created an incentive for tenants to assist the state in income tax collection, but unfortunately they did so in a quite half-step that was more threatening than real and then buried it in a multi-layered complex bureaucracy.  Now we have the opportunity to try and organize a powerful organization and campaign that can hit it squarely, shake it hard, and make it produce huge benefits for tenants that will alter the balance of power for families in the future in Rome and throughout the country.

Rome I should have suspected that being without internet and simply depending on my Blackberry while in Sicily was still a dangerous thing to do, and sure enough as I was being driven to the Catania airport I got a message from a reporter for the Washington Times named Amanda Carpenter asking about ACORN International’s new name:  Community Organizations International.  Her specific question seemed to be that someone had reported that ACORN in the USA was changing its name, so what did I know.

My response was simple:  “Acorn International is a totally separate corporation from Acorn.  We are changing our name especially in the U.S. NOT to be confused with Acorn!!  I know of no plans whatsoever for acorn to change its name but you would have to ask them.  I’m in Sicily training organizers and working with groups here.  I have no clue what may have been reported but I would bet it is as off base as most of what I read.  Thanks for asking directly!” Short and simple, I thought.

In Rome today waiting for my plane to Vancouver, I was able to catch up on email, news, and the Google alerts for “acorn international.” Whoa, baby!  What a wild ride that was!

This guy, Glenn Beck (who is he?), seems to have been on this like “white on rice,” arguing that he had predicted something, though he seems to have been 100% off base.  There was some bunch from Fox News that had a whole panel discussion on our little name adjustment.  They seemed to conclude that ACORN should not be allowed to change its name, so it’s a good thing that this was never in the works to my knowledge.  A spokesperson for ACORN muddled the issue even more by not saying simply that they had no plans to change their name period, and just made up some stuff to whitewash the story.  Of course that statement seems to have been after this brouhaha had already passed, so it didn’t matter really how off the mark it might have been.  In short people had taken a something from a notice about Acorn International’s global action on just remittances, and perverted it to their own stories on both sides.  Oh, and some guy accused me of fomenting revolution or socialism or something around the world now.  One guy on a blog asked how I could change the name of ACORN when I had resigned more than a year ago, but he was drowned out in the din of hooey calls.

Here are the brass tacks.  Acorn International is a federation organized with a board from each of its member countries.  ACORN is one non-profit corporation in the USA.  In the USA we are going to do business as Community Organizations International.  Why?  Because it reduces confusion on one hand – why should we want to deal with these whacks and weirdo’s out there, I wonder?  And, on the other hand it allows us to more easily amalgamate other organizations that are already established and have different names.  So in the existing seven countries where we have members and are already chartered, they will clearly keep on keeping on with their name.  In some countries (Sicily for example) where existing organizations have begun talking about affiliating to Acorn International, it is even easier to do so with the name of Community Organizations International, because then no one has to argue about autonomy.  At the point we expand to new areas we will make the decision with local people from place to place.

How hard is any of this to understand?  Seems straightforward to me, but I’m just an organizer of lower income families around and not someone on either side of the fence with an axe to grind.

Catania The four women from Palermo had been peppering me with questions throughout the organizing workshops.  Clearly they were up to something, so it was not surprising when they finally arranged to visit with me for a couple of hours to get advice on their campaign.   At the simplest they were trying to win the designation of public space in the historic district of central Palermo and shut down the square to vehicular traffic permanently to create a cultural and traditional public space.

They had created a committee of about 50 committed activists.  They had a Face Book site with about 500 of their friends and FB “friends.” They had won some initial skirmishes on this issue over the year or so of their fight by getting the City Councilors to move their dozen parking spaces from this area to another not far away.  The Greek Orthodox and one other church had agreed to support them, though other businesses in the area had not been won over.  They had done several public events including a whole series of things in the square one weekend when they had convinced the city to give them a shot.  They admitted that they had become media darlings and got very good press.

They had done a good job with great energy.  They had a huge amount going for them.   Unfortunately they had no real base.  This problem of activists with good ideas, looking for shortcuts in the naïveté that being “right” is enough to win, and not doing the work to create real organization or a wide and deep base, seems epidemic worldwide.

These women had gotten the religion though and were committed to building a base behind their effort.  They were also anything but naïve.  The city officials may not be taking them seriously yet, but with more discussion it became clear that their agenda is deeply political and rooted in an analysis that the city administration is dysfunctional and democratically corrupt.  With a big win in the middle of Palermo under their belt, each one of them could be dangerous, and with an organization someday, they could be powerful.

Catania After an engaging number of hours with a collection of officials from neighboring towns, activists, students, professors, and others discussing the principles of community organization and the “burning issues” they brought to the workshop, I caught a lift with Paolo Guarnaccia

First we saw the “old school” way in which one of the small river towns was simply piping waste into the Simeto, seemingly without a care in the world or any concern for their own health and well being.  Another couple of kilometers away in a non-descript acreage between two low-lying hills no signs marked the proposed site of a landfill that would hold ash from incinerator operations.  Moving along a rougher road another few kilometers brought us to what looked like an abandoned industrial site, which was part of the incinerator operation itself.

Paulo help me piece together the Italian words on the sign.  The project was started and expected to be in full operation by 2006, but here we were in 2009 looking at the skeleton of an operation.  In this long running campaign the incinerator had rushed into operation but then had been stopped by the opposition because the private developer had failed to bother to get the necessary permits to allow the operation.

Converting waste into energy through fire is at the heart of the incinerating process.  The byproduct ash though is highly polluting and requires care and disposal.  Paulo was a trained agronomist specializing in organic farming operations, but he didn’t have to be much of an expert to kick the soil near the fence and find ash deposits from the brief operation of the plant.

The bad news in this campaign is that the incinerator seems set to fire up again in the near future.  Despite the problems and history, the gaping loophole is that the government can declare an emergency in the national safety of the country and on those grounds put aside all other restraints and objections and move full steam head.

The public ambivalence doesn’t help.  Turning the problem of waste from overflowing landfills into energy, sounds like a “win-win” situation, especially when the opposition offers as the alternative the hard work of constant recycling, so this is not an easy battle.  Shrewdly ViveSimeto has turn the tables in this fight by arguing that agri-tourism, the beauty of the river, and the livelihood of the nearby farming communities has to be promoted and that such a vision dies in the pollution of the incinerator.

This fight is far from over.