Wade Rathke: Chief Organizer Blog » Organizers Forum

Celebrating Barbara Bowen

Mariehurt — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 16:56:49 +0000

Barbara smiling in Melbourne next to the head of the Australian Labor Federation

New Orleans There is no way that anything I can write would do complete justice to the life and work of Barbara Bowen, my friend and comrade for over 40 years, but luckily I don’t really need to because her life and work was about justice and she lived it exactly that way from beginning to end.

My path first crossed Barbara’s in mid-October of 1969. I used to hear her tell the story of being sent from Boston where she was working with Massachusetts Welfare Rights Organization to Springfield, where I was working, to see if she could help out in some way during a large action demanding winter clothing for adults that was hitting its climax on the same day as the Vietnam Moratorium. The short story is that we didn’t win and all hell broke loose, but Barbara used to tell the story of breaking clear of the riot and finding a telephone booth in the middle of the chaos to put a collect call into Boston for whatever reinforcements might be available to get me and others out of jail and do whatever it might take.

In 1970 when I moved to Boston as head organizer, I lived on Rutland Square in the South End one or two units above Barbara and my other old friend and comrade over all of these years, Mark Splain, who she married around the same time. Over the many decades our paths would always be interwoven and crisscross continually.

After I left to move to Arkansas and found ACORN, she and Mark and others ended up in Chelsea founding Massachusetts Fair Share, a landmark organization in the 1970’s. When she and Mark left Fair Share, they worked in various capacities with ACORN. We all worked on jobs campaigns. We founded the United Labor Unions together, with Mark and Barbara in Boston, me and Danny Cantor, Kirk Adams, and Cecile Richards in New Orleans, Keith Kelleher in Detroit and then Chicago, and Mike Gallagher a little bit of everywhere along with many others. Barbara did stints with SEIU and the AFL-CIO. Around 2000, I convinced her to join me at the Organizers’ Forum where she worked for a decade as its coordinator until she retired at the end of 2008, as she told me then, “…because she could.”

Barbara in Moscow assembling the troops before we head to the next stop in Red Square

The other day talking to Mark about a list of email addresses, I asked him if he wanted me to edit the list and make up a shorter one, and he replied that it didn’t matter, “Barbara doesn’t have an enemy in the world.” That phrase stuck with me. It was precisely correct. People loved Barbara. She was a sweetheart. Leading delegations around the world with the Organizers’ Forum she was always willing to go the last inch of the last mile to make sure it worked, that people were taken care of, and that it all came together.

But, if that conjures up an image of a laid back, California girl who was in the first avant garde women’s class at Pitzer College outside of Los Angeles, and a “helping hand” VISTA volunteer, all of which she also was, you didn’t know Barbara Bowen or at least you didn’t know enough about Barbara Bowen. The Barbara Bowen I knew and worked with all of these years was a stickler for details with a thousand questions, both large and small. My first day on the job as her boss in Boston in 1970, she asked me to look at a flyer she had made for a meeting, something she had probably done a couple of hundred times at the point. I remember telling her she should probably be showing me how to make the flyer, rather than the other way around!

But whether it was details on the menu in Kolkata or the rooming arrangements in Jakarta, she always included me and wanted input. If she had a question you heard about it, and she forced the plans to be crystal clear so there was alignment of my big picture, “it’ll all work out world,” and her details, planning, and preparation. It was easy to appreciate why on all the houses that Mark and Barbara built in Boston, Washington, and then finally in Stinson Beach how Mark might be architect and master builder, but Barbara would be permits, general contractor, bookkeeper, and finish painter and punch list person. On the three international dialogues I have done since Barbara’s retirement in Thailand, Vietnam, and Egypt, I’ve always warned people in the first orientation that they were going to miss experiencing the trip that they would have had if Barbara had been with us….

My point is not that she was just a details person or a meticulous note taker, planner, and so forth, because that was not the core of the woman. At the heart of the woman was character and courage. Once she was convinced of the plan, had it clear, and committed to it, she was fearless and unstoppable. Once she was in, she was all the way in.

In the late 1970’s and early1980’s, US Air had something called “Liberty Fares.” For $700 for 14 days a passenger could fly anywhere throughout the US Air system from Boston or Providence to New Orleans or Phoenix or Memphis or whatever. It often meant circling back to the Pittsburgh or the Philly hub. Obviously USAir meant the ticket to work with one flyer, but as a fledgling union and community organization, we were “up in the air” and could keep various folks flying from place to place endlessly during that period just by passing them off to our fellow travelers in the hubs or wherever the connections aligned. You can imagine the stories, but the best and boldest often featured Barbara. In the post-9/11 world this is unimaginable, but Barbara would talk her way onto one flight after another with nothing but moxie despite the fact that the ticket seemed to be in a man’s name and often with little or no ID. She had the ticket, and for her it was a ticket to ride, and if she had a problem with one flight, she would walk away and jump another one.

Anyone who underestimated Barbara or her toughness did so at their peril! Like I said, you had to be careful with Barbara. If you asked her to go through a wall on an action, once she was clear where the wall stood, how it worked, and that it was important, then that wall was going down, one way or another. Barbara had your back, front, and sideways! I hate to think about the number of times she went on unemployment to do the work, including once with the Organizers’ Forum. I can’t even imagine the times she maxed out credit cards or whatever. I loved that woman. There was no quit or whine to her. Ever!

It took me forever to realize that almost all of our international dialogues were too close to her daughter’s birthday and often had her doing crazy things to get home in time or in at least one case, missing the event entirely. She was an elected member of the school board in her community for years, but it took me almost that long to hear her mention it and talk about it. She was never going to put herself ahead of the program, even when it was just the two of us figuring it out.

I’m glad on the back end, especially now, that she and some of the women in Kolkata moved to a better hotel after our wild experience at the Great Eastern (now torn down!) and that she took an extra day to go to Agra when in Delhi and a couple more to see the Iguazu Falls at the border of Brazil and Argentina. For all of the times I may have taken her for granted for 30 years as a friend and colleague, I was glad that in the 10 years with the Organizers’ Forum for the most part I could feel like, I did right by her. People loved her and could appreciate her contribution at every level. She saw the world in India, Indonesia, Brazil, Turkey, Russia, South Africa, and Australia, and like all of us it made us better organizers and better people. We all became clearer about the larger community where we live and work. We had great experiences together. She was fun, and she had some fun.

Thank goodness!

In Sydney I had noticed her walking uncharacteristically slowly up a stairway near the harbor. I asked her about it then, and she just said she was being careful. The next year when she called me to say she was having some health issues, she reminded me of that conversation and how even then is seemed there were starting to be coordination problems.

Luckily she and Mark got to do some traveling in Europe and Hawaii. They visited with friends. She got to her college reunion. When I saw her last fall she was still fawning over Tera’s children and delighted over Manuel’s pending wedding.

She was a great organizer. She was a wonderful woman. She was friend, mother, wife, comrade, and sister. She had a great life, just not enough of it.

My life is better for having known her and all she did with and for me in large and small ways over 40 years. Like so many others, I will carry the flame forward for her into the future and spend the rest of my life time and work time paying back her loyalty, faith, and trust.

Over recent years Barbara and I learned together how to say and understand “hello,” “thank you,” “democracy,” “union,” “justice,” and “freedom” in many of the world’s languages. Her life and legacy has meaning in all of those words and every time they are spoken in the struggle of people everywhere. And, anywhere those words are spoken, sung, or shouted, the heart and soul of Barbara Bowen will still stand strong.

Barbara admiring the fresco in the cathedral in St. Petersburg

Thanks to Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s Revolution May Succeed

dine — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 18:52:34 +0000

New Orleans Once again Tahrir Square in Cairo stands for dream of freedom, rather than the disappointment of struggle. Tens of thousands have held the square for days against scores that have died and thousands injured by the military. Finally, the demands have been clear and consistent and directed at the brazen power play in recent months by the military (known as SCAF, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces), which has categorically proven that this is yet another institution in Egypt that cannot be trusted by the military.

Having been in Cairo several months ago with the delegation from the Organizers’ Forum (www.organizersforum.org), it was impossible not to feel while we were there and in the weeks that followed the profound disappointment of so many of the activists and the increasing likelihood that the revolution’s aims might be lost even though changes would be felt for the future. The message to the military when we were there was inchoate and spoke more to the divisiveness of the protesters in the emerging politics, than to folks with their “eyes on the grape,” as we used to say.

The push that finally began days ago in Cairo, as doubts continued to increase that the military was angling for a permanent role in running the country and being dilatory in the discussions of any real transfer of power to parliamentary and democratic rule, was led by the much maligned Muslim Brotherhood. Organizational discipline once again trumped social networking and political jockeying for power. The Brotherhood poured tens of thousands into the square and their commitment and discipline was deep enough to withstand the military attack and hold Tahrir Square, bringing tens of other thousands to fill the space in escalating protest and resistance.

It is now the military that is forced to blink and retreat. With the announcement that the civilian puppet cabinet as offered to resign the military reads the writing on the wall: they either compromise or stand the chance of being institutionally crippled in the future. Heads will roll! One protester quoted in the Times pointed out the final realization of the irony that the military was thanked last January for not shooting the protesters as being the same as “thanking your wife for not sleeping with other men.” Correctly, one should have the right of a citizen to not expect your nation’s military to shoot you. The military seems to have forgotten this as well in these strange times.

David Kirkpatrick of the Times, who has been an excellent source on some much of this, paints the Brotherhood as “reeling from the swift collapse of the military’s authority” in fear of there being a delay in the elections. This is a tactical hiccup in the face of a potential victory. There seems little doubt that the Muslim Brotherhood has not been immeasurably strengthened in recent days. In fact it seems clear if the revolution in fact is finally won that the protesters of all stripes will owe a huge debt of gratitude and grudging respect.

We found a consensus that in elections the Muslim Brotherhood would be big winners, but a realpolitick assessment that they were too smart not to understand the lessons of the revolution and the lack of interest of the Egyptian people in suddenly living in a rigid theocracy. The Brotherhood is now incurring huge debts for saving the revolution, but hopefully they will not make the mistake the military made in January of ignoring how important the revolution is to all of the Egyptian people.

Egypt’s Grassroots Revolution: Legan Sha3beya

dine — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 12:13:41 +0000

Cairo The Organizers’ Forum meetings have been outstanding. On our third day we begin meeting with emerging political leaders who are building parties (Egypt Arab Union Party) and standing as candidates for Egypt’s new president (Amr Moussa, former head of Arab League and Foreign Minister) as well as labor leaders and organizers who played a crucial role in the overthrow of the government, though less celebrated in the glare of the media. Quieter meetings, especially with women activists and organizers, have developed a significant undercurrent theme at the grassroots level that may hold the real key to on going institutional capacity and democratic participation though, and the movement to consolidate and connect “neighborhood councils” or the Legan Sha3beya movement, seems to be the most interesting and important of these developments.

When we first met Aswatna Masriya, who had come to our attention originally because of a Facebook page standing up for Women in the push for democracy, it was hard to miss the stories of the fundamental changes she described in her upper middle class area of Zemalek, when the women provided the leadership in organizing intricate neighborhood security systems in January as public safety disappeared and rumors were everywhere at flash point. List were made, young men were recruited, and women perched on balconies taking “block watch” duty until 2 and 3 AM in the night. Intricate inventories of fire arms were recorded, surprising many residents to discover how militarized the neighbors were. There was a recognition that everyone, everywhere including the home guard way distant from Tahrir Square had a role to play in making the revolution live and transforming expectations with their own direct participation.

This theme was picked up by Marwa Boushra Al-Sawi, now working with Oxfam-NOVIB, but an activist in various campaigns around the need for civilian rather than military trials and the need to reform the Family Law dealing with custody, divorce, and other issues. Importantly she felt the neighborhood councils that had survived over the 6 months since the revolution were perhaps the most significant hope for the future. This Legan Sha3beya movement from her reports has linked a number of neighborhood councils together in Cairo and nationally and the groups that have thrived have increased their range of issues and campaigns more broadly than simple security, and are doing so successfully. In a classic move they are pushing the government around garbage pickup and threatening to take the garbage to the government if collection does not improve. Certainly a familiar tactic to many community organizers. A broader “know your rights” campaign is now being plannned.

Some of this is reminiscent of the self-organization at the community level in Buenos Aires of the barrios asembleas – neighborhood assemblies – that grew up throughout the city during the “crises” and in response to the need to maintain public services, create jobs, and provide stability. The energy was amazing in the immediate wake of the Crises. Many of these asembleas have not survived, but they spoke to similar energies and interests.

Importantly, Legan Sha3beya seems to be mainly concentrated in the poorer areas though linked to some of the activity in more middle income neighborhoods. The development of more political parties in the coming election campaign may also make these councils fundamental, if they remain what is united, even as 30 to 120 parties compete for power.

Teachers and Health Care Workers Strike, Welcome to Cairo!

dine — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 23:06:45 +0000

Military moves in

Cairo The first day is a “shakeout” day for the Organizers’ Forum and with an outstanding delegation of over 20 people from diverse and outstanding organizations in the USA and Canada, just moving about from place to place was a project in the crowds and chaos of Cairo. After an excellent orientation offered by individual

Cairo residents and activists in the January 25th and 28th activities, and particularly in the post-revolution campaigns to really create change from these movements and build the organizational capacity to sustain it all, we almost felt like we had been there ourselves.

Listening to Ahmed Rehab of CAIR in Chicago talk about the meeting at the mosque and the excitement of pouring out into the streets with the crowd shouting “Down the Mubarak!” and seeing the crowds build in waves from around the city as the protesters took the Square through his eyes, we felt like we were there. Equally moving was hearing our visiting sisters speak to us of how change worked block by block as women moved to organized the security for the communities, stood on their balconies in Zamalek, made the maps and assigned the men, all the way down to pulling on helmets and poles to fight hand to hand themselves. We were hearing how change happens in the mess of real life, where some have to take the first uncertain and scary steps and others have to make sure the change leaches down to the deepest points in every community and finding the personal power to prevail. This is what happens in th

e mess of movements. Every word from our new friends cried to the sky for change.

Later in mid-afternoon we moved to the streets across for one of the ministry buildings only a few blocks from Tahrir Square. Several unions including the teachers and the health care workers had begun strikes and were rallying in central Cairo to build support and increase the pressure. At first the scene was so calm, I couldn’t believe this was really a union rally, but after pushing into Square and finding nothing, we were back between the police line and the encroaching military. This was a post-revolution strike. There was no fear in the air even as as a small delegation of the military moved to clear the area before the curfew. The players now knew their lines and moved within the new script. There was drama, but it was mostly drama, rather than the knife point of pressure and reaction. No strike would be won or lost on this street as we watched the health care union demand more money.

Morning or afternoon it was hard not to hear the repetition of disappointment. There was pride at the surprise and power of the change, but there was disappointment on the pace and product of change. There was optimism but it was now tempered by the difficulty of digging out the established folks who were dug in for power. The problem of having lost one overarching target and now holding the coalition

together as parties and politicians elbowed forward to the November election day, was depressing, difficult, and depressing.

There is no sugar in our coffee in Cairo. It’s strong and bitter. But it is also exhilarating and promises an amazing week before us as we try to get our arms around the revolution and the work to be done.

Cairo Excitement and Challenges for Organizers’ Forum

dine — Sat, 24 Sep 2011 14:10:46 +0000

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!

Keeping Up to Date on Slavery, Yes, Slavery!

dine — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 15:03:32 +0000

New Orleans Yes, I know many of you believe that slavery ended almost 150 years ago in an American-centric view of the world, but it’s a big world, and shockingly simple to exploit people by having them work for free, which is what slavery is all about. The US State Department estimates there are 27, 000,000, yes 27 Million!, people who fit this definition of slavery.

An organization called Slavery Footprint has come up with a methodology (and $20000 in funding from the State Department) to allow you to go to www.slaveryfootprint.org, and take a quick survey to determine how many “slaves are working for you?” Yes, you! It’s worth a good, hard look. Don’t wait for the weekend!

We stumbled on this reality almost a decade ago in the second Organizers’ Forum International Dialogue when we visited India and journeyed by bus several hours outside of Delhi, the national capital, and visited a compound that was schooling and training young adolescent and teenage boys in new skills, all of whom had formally been forced to work in unpaid, slave labor in mining in the area, largely impressed for their labor in exchange for contrived, historic debt to mine owners or labor suppliers, sometimes for generations. We felt not only shocked, but profoundly naïve for not having realized that so much of this kind of forced labor was still enduring in modern times just beyond our daily recognition in the silence of sweat, hidden from eyesight by thousands of miles.

Cases involving women from Eastern Europe shanghaied for years to the west as sex slaves grab headlines in the 21^st Century. Factory workers report child sized handprints on imports from Asian on their assembly lines. Even in the United States wage theft and the kind of exploitation that finds immigrant workers at Hersey plants (see special on-line report at www.socialpolicy.org) and in Canadian agricultural fields, is really only a different distinction by a matter of degrees from such oppressive slavery.

Seems like this is something that we should be able to end completely, and if not, we should stop pretending that we stand for any kind of civilized society.

Support the Save the Khimki Forest Movement

dine — Sat, 09 Apr 2011 05:53:06 +0000

New York

Yevgenia Chirikova while she was speaking to Organizers' Forum delegation in Moscow in 2007.

City In the fall of 2007 a delegation of labor and community organizers with the Organizers’ Forum (www.organizersforum.org) visited with organizers doing similar work in Moscow and St. Petersburg. One of the more moving meetings we had was with a young, passionate and spirited mother, who told the story of moving with her husband to a Moscow suburb that they could afford and finding signs while walking her baby in the nearby woodland forest that a highway was going to be built in this protected, virgin area. Her name was Yevgenia Chirikova and this became her cause as she went door to door in her apartment block and suburb trying to build support, recruited friends and students, and tried to build support in challenging circumstances to reroute the construction of safer alternative routes.

I was so impressed with her that upon returning to New Orleans I enlisted the help of a Russian speaking co-worker, Denis Petrov, and his wife to reach back out to Yevgenia and see if there was any way we could help or support her work. Time, language, and imagination all probably stood in the way, so in spite of the initial enthusiasm of her response, nothing really developed, until yesterday, when I got an email from Yaroslav Nikitenko, a physics student who has joined this effort whole heartedly, and was writing to update me on the situation and ask for any help possible since the effort to save the Khimki Forest has reached a critical juncture.

The twin towers of power in Russian politics have been Valdimir Putin, who as President was a promoter of this project and continues to support it as Prime Minister, and the current President Dmitri Medvedev. In the fall of 2010 activists seemed to have won some reprieve when Medvedev halted the steps to construction for review, but at the end of the year, the project D greenlighted against despite substantial opposition in the community and throughout Moscow to the project. There are lots of other issues that are endemic to current Russian politics that muscle their way into this fight including massive corruption that seems hardwired to any highway construction in the country and raises the costs as much as 50 times comparable jobs building in the USA and elsewhere, and brutality and corruption which have seen journalists beaten and in one case crippled, visits by “child protection” to Evegenia’s home to question her fitness as a mother and insinuate that there were reports of child abuse, and countless stories of rallies and demonstrations rousted and stopped.

Bottom line is that the Save the Khimki Forest Movement, Evegenia, Yaroslave, and the crew, Muscovites, and just maybe the ability of the Russian people to have a voice and organize, need our help. Luckily, they are only asking for us to sign a petition at this point, which seems almost too lame but is the least we could do, so how about a hand by clicking below and sending them some help!

http://www.change.org/petitions/save-khimki-forest-stand-with-russias-human-rights-and-environmental-activists

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!

Craig, Zach, and Ed’s Unique View of Vietnam

dine — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 21:12:20 +0000

Bangkok I hate the Bangkok international airport. It’s an overpriced mall with planes in the parking lot. A cup of coffee can cost $3 to $4 bucks USD, and I’m stuck here for 8 hours on the cheap route from Hanoi to Delhi, so making the best of it. Leaving a new country after an Organizers’ Forum trip it has become something of a tradition for me to list out the random notes about what made the country unique and special to answer the question my dad, Ed Rathke, used to ask me when I would see him after one of these trips and he would start the conversation by asking what I thought “he would most want to know” about the country. My dad passed away a little me than two years ago, but his question never leaves me in the notes I scribble on these journeys. Craig Robbins in Philadelphia and Zach Polett in Little Rock used to tell me that these were their favorite blogs, so to keep it light rather than tinged with the maudlin and morbid, we’ll answer my dad’s question by making it a “popular demand” blog from Craig and Zach.

The plane fares might be pricey, but once you are there Vietnam is way cheap. Tell me the last time you could get a decent beer for a buck at a restaurant? We bought beer at the Circle K next to the hotel in Ho Chi Minh City for about 70 cents. I bought the popular Hanoi beer obviously in Hanoi on the street for 14 dong or about 75 cents in the tourist district. In the hood I bet it’s 50 cents or less a beer. It’s not the 99 cent six-pack special I remember for Jax beer over at the Times-Saver on Paris Avenue 40 years ago, but it’s damn close. A special note for Rick Hall in Nairobi: a Jameson’s on Ngo Huyen was about $1.25, book your ticket now.
If I could get the internet now ($8.50 for 60 minutes!) I would check but Vietnam is screaming to be a priority country project for the Bloomberg Foundation given their emphasis on reducing deaths from smoking and traffic. People smoke everywhere and all the time, including in restaurants obviously. There were 10000 traffic deaths last year according to some of the folks we met with. Traffic is pretty wild, more scooters in Ho Chi Minh City and more cars in Hanoi. Like India lives are saved largely by the fact that the traffic snarls up preventing folks from reach top speeds, though it is much faster moving in Vietnam than any Indian city. The government decreed that motorcycle riders had to have helmets, and most complied with $2 plastic helmets similar to what a baseball player wears. Better than nothing, but….
There was a small item in the Hanoi Daily News today (the English language paper) advertising for the government the need for 80,000 workers through the rest of the year, including part-time for the seasonal push. It was a news story, but it would be one helluva want ad in anybody’s paper!
My other favorite item several days before was a long piece in the business section about the toothpick trade wars with China. Toothpicks are on every table at every meal. For years it seems the bamboo sticks were a Vietnamese specialty, but cheaper Chinese bamboo toothpicks in a variety of styles had flooded the market and were pushing Vietnamese toothpick purveyors out of business. Serious stuff.
Here was a another Vietnamese puzzle: real estate values were sky high in both Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City! Small, new places of around 800 to 1000 square feet (though everything was meters) were running around $300000 USD. With a $65/month minimum wage, cheap prices everywhere with low wages, how could afford those numbers and where was the demand coming from? China? Foreigners? No, foreigners are not allowed to own property though there are 60-year leases and supposedly some ways around this, but still, who was buying the property that every source acknowledged was rising rapidly in value? Some of our interpretors intimated that these were Party favorites and special business folks, but we never felt like we had a grip on this one. A similar contradiction existed about hotel lodging rates which were extremely reasonable even though to buy a hotel property would be ridiculously expensive. What kind of real estate bubble is this unsustainable?
All school children learn English now in primary school. We met some excellent English speakers who had no experience outside of the Vietnamese school system, yet all of them spoke with a British accent. Why? Our impression was that just as work was a 6-day affair, so was school Chaco and I tried to go see the Hanoi Botanical Gardens (closed for the 1000 year anniversary celebration and acting as a military bivouac) and saw a huge school across the street in full session and fury at 2:00 PM on a Saturday.
It’s impressive the number of women wearing short shorts. I had never thought about this until reading something recently that detailed the exercise regimen of the woman start of HBO’s “True Blood” complaining about the short shorts the waitress at Merlotte’s wore. In Vietnam it often seemed there were simply no fat people. The population was not gaunt like one would find in Korogocho or Dharavi, but small, wiry, and healthy despite the beer and cigarettes.
Ice is the deal. Beer is served with ice cubes. Coffee is served three ways, but the most popular is with ice cubes and condensed milk. You figure? The coffee though is very strong and almost chocolate-y in Ho Chi Minh City and there it was made with an aluminum contraption that was offered an ingenuous way to make a stout cup of personalized brew. (Yes, I bought 4 of these in various sizes to bring home!)
We heard a lot of talk about the “envelope” system which most seemed to relate to us in an unconcerned fashion as ubiquitous, but somehow livable because the sums tended to be fairly trivial. It seemed commonplace that when interfacing with the government or other state managed businesses and bureaucracies that there was such an exchange. Pay for government workers rarely made it past $100 per month, and the expectations were not harsh, but ever present. We had our own experience with this system in amounts that were less trivial, but manageable as part of the price of doing business with the government.
Facebook is blocked from normal IP addresses, though surprisingly from some hotels it can be accessed if you got through a number of security codes (I finally got on late in my stay but failed the first security test on photo recognition because I didn’t spot the side of Sean O’Brien’s face until too late!). Access to Google was blocked at the Moca Cafe, one our favorite hangouts in Hanoi.
The 1000 year celebration of the founding of the city of Tranh Long (Rising Dragon) or Hanoi was the real deal. Coming back from Ha Long Bay on Sunday evening with Ignacio Carrillo, the last of my Organizer Forum delegation to head home with a plane to catch at 1130 PM, we were off loaded on the wrong side of the Lake in the center of the old quarter and right in the middle of the big celebration with people and scooters packed everywhere. We had to struggle upstream against the crowd flow and it was like one of those wild chase movies where the cars are careening against traffic. I’ve only been in such a scrum of humanity a couple of times like the one at the Durga Puja festival time in Kolkata with the Organizers’ Forum a couple of years ago and another time at the Puerto Rican Day Parade along Central Park with my family during the AFL-CIO convention when Sweeney was elected. These are not things that I forget! But, the crowd was mellow, and young! With population increases more than tripling in the last 35 years since the end of the war, half of the country is below 20.
The older people are only let out on the streets of Hanoi for exercises at dawn on the Lake. Even at 5AM this morning, there were hundreds and normally there are thousands doing tai chi, dancing, and walking.
The streets are blocked then because the trick quickly taught and learned for crossing the streets in the scooter traffic is to bull over without stopping while slightly waving your hand at the scooters and cars that you are coming through. They are supposed to respond to the bluff by not killing you, and largely this worked while we were there, but god knows how.
My daughter once took a class in “industrial tourism” at Hampshire and loaned me her text book, which had a profound impact on me. Cu Chi Tunnel and the tours to beautiful Ha Long Bay, both world UNESCO heritage sites, were classic examples of industrial tourism with a smile and a hustle, but nonetheless good value. On Ha Long for $14 (admittedly Ignacio found us a good deal!) we got a $2 ticket to the boat and the caves and a great lunch with 50 cent beer on a 6 hour drive during a 13 hour day. The tunnel was a half-day $10 trip with a snack. It was well organized and in both cases there was no way that any of us individually could have duplicated the experience for a fraction of that price.
Tipping is not expected and often simply written into the service charges everywhere, which says something good about a “socialist market economy.” The cab driver to the airport this morning refused even a nominal tip. Ignacio was calculating that it would be cheaper to bring his whole family over to Vietnam for the holidays even given the pricey plane tickets than to fly more cheaply to Mexico for example and pay the higher “inclusive” costs of hotels, food, and transportation. He has an excellent point once you do the math. Both cities where great and huge (both in the 8 million range) but of the two, Hanoi is the older, more interesting, more authentic, less modern, and more attractive.
In the street at dawn every morning in Hanoi I would watch women washing clams. They were delicious. So was the fresh fruit, including dragon fruit, which we all loved in China. Passion fruit ice cream turns out to be one of the great treats of our time.
The bread survives as a vestige of the French period and every morning there are fresh baguettes for sale everywhere.
We never encountered any anti-Americanism though we were often asked where we were from and America was always warmly greeted. Someone said this had to do with the dominant cultural impact of Buddhism and a more forgiving tradition. That may be the case although the fact that we are in a whole different generation that the war generation I suspect has much to do with this as well.
I could go on, but my dad would be interested in the fact that we saw a lot of places where they buried people above ground, like they do in New Orleans, so I’ll end there.

I may never be back, but if, as Drummond Pike said, “someone sends me a ticket,” I’ll be there in a minute. Vietnam was an amazing country and for a change we caught it before the transition to its future is completed, when everything is moving and exciting, and still unsettled and puzzling. This is a country worth watching.

NGO’s in Vietnam

jstuart — Sun, 03 Oct 2010 15:27:28 +0000

Hanoi From the outset I’ll be clear that we met some fine non-profits or NGOs (non-governmental organizations) in Vietnam during our visit there. RENEW and the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial led by Chuch Searcy virtually brought tears to some of the Organizers’ Forum delegation as he told of the challenges of clearing ordinance and the injuries everywhere. We met dedicated young people with Habitat International in Hanoi and the NGO Resource Center in Hanoi and LIN in Ho Chi Minh City trying to pull big and small pieces together. We met people with projects among children and in an array of planning and disaster preparation areas. We met operations set up as NGOs to support workers living in dormitories who had migrated into the Special Economic Zones and the new industries. When we met with PACCOM, the governmental liaison to NGOs, they could not have been more clear how much they support “the sector.”

Nonetheless, the picture for NGOs is not a pretty one in many respects, and at the least it is crystal clear that there is virtually no such thing as “free and independent” activity in this sector. Furthermore, it is also clear that much of the government’s enthusiasm for NGOs is its desperate quest for donor dollars and continued need to shed subsidized service segments.

There seem to be a menu of laws and regulations affecting NGOs, many of which change constantly from what we learned at the NGO Resource Center, but no matter what is happening with the laws, it is clear that for any foreign NGO to operate they have to have a license from the government. They would also need another license for each project they would undertake. Yet a thrid license would be required from the government in order to locate a staff or headquarters operation in country. The government is pretty much a silent or overt partner in much of this as well down to the level of naming a co-manager, though a silent one, at the NGO Resource Center. The government would select where Habitat worked and provide the land. Projects would be approved and then canceled for reasons unknown as governmental interests or priorities shifted.

Many of the locally based NGO’s and many of the local staff for all of the NGOs were former government bureaucrats in similar fields. This was a track from lower to higher pay. People couldn’t have been more frank about it. For the government it also meant that they were dealing with proven commodities and folks who knew how things were supposed to work and wouldn’t shake the boat. All the NGOs we met were clear that they were not advocates and could not be advocates.

We didn’t hear about crackdowns, as we had in Russia. The Vietnamese had short circuited the process from the beginning, rather than intervening on the back end. We did hear about a problem in 2008 when a piece of property previously owned by the Catholic Church in Hanoi was being given to a favored entrepreneur, and there were protests of several hundred people, police, and injuries when the Church supporters demanded the property back. The new modifications to the associations and NGO laws are going to now have a special section restricting churches to only operate in narrower margins around their faith and members, and expressly not be allowed to be advocates. It was clear to Ignacio Carillo from Gameliel that there would be no “faith-based” community organizing here.

The impact even among great operations with large and extensive projects and government support is chilling, as all of them seem to move constantly on the “yellow caution flag” in dealing with the authorities, knowing that a wrong step puts them out of business. Atlantic Philanthropies is perhaps the biggest single operator in-country with more than $25 million in annual grants. It’s political impact and weight are huge! At the Vietnam Women’s Union we were asked pointed questions about our relationship because they had just received a first grant from AP and were trying to expand the relationship. PACCOM, the NGO coordinator mentioned in our meeting that they had recently moved to the location where we were at the invitation of Atlantic Philanthropies who owned the modern Friendship House building, and they were delighted at the upgrade in their space and footprint. Yet, when first reaching out to arrange for this visit as helpful and friendly as AP was, its directors were clear they did not want to risk their relationships with the government by offering a formal invitation, and when they tried to off load the risk on one of their favored grantees, who also balked, they pulled the strings to have PACCOM itself provide the invitation. There’s no doubt we benefited from what the government saw as a good relationship between us and our delegation and Atlantic Philanthropies, but there is also no doubt that despite the huge and outsized contributions AP is making in Vietnam and the deep footprint their programs have here, they are walking on tiptoes around the government as well.

An NGO sector that eschews advocacy and self-censors its work and expression defines chilling speech and action. Certainly their work is all important and the people benefit, but many of our delegation were left unsettled as we tried to imagine how any of these NGO’s could be truly effective except as simple service providers.

Mike Eso from BCGEU asked often whether this privatization of services from the government to the private and NGO sector had political and ideological consequences. Routinely the question was avoided or bypassed or simply not understood. This was all government reallocating and cost shifting in the most blunt and pragmatic terms for immediate needs with little thought about the impact on policy or politics for the future. The government is in a position to operate within that rationale to deliver to its base, and the reduction of poverty in Vietnam from 75% to 12% over the last 20 years is an economic miracle frequently cited to change the subject or settle the question. These long term compromises for the NGO sector may be harder over time, especially when even the biggest dogs are cowering in the corner unwilling or afraid to bark even when they hear things in the dark.

Associations in Vietnam

dine — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 14:07:57 +0000

Hanoi The Organizers’ Forum delegation kept hearing about the distinctions between unions, the government, the party, non-profits or NGO’s, and associations, all of which became clearer in our first meeting in Hanoi with the Vietnam Women’s Union, one of the principal associations in the country. With 20000 staff at different levels and branches at every level, the VWU defined what the theorists used to postulate as the role of a “mass based organization” and its role in maintaining accountability, mobilization, and participation in a communist regime, though in Vietnam all of this is with a decidedly different twist.

The VWU is a membership based operation with dues about 25 cents per month and with over 10,000,000 members eligible to all women over 18 years old. They exist as a specially chartered institution, much like the Red Cross and Neighborworks have special charters from Congress in the US. They are guaranteed a meeting with the Prime Minister or the deputy Prime Minister every other year to push for their big “ask” in legislation. Their job is to advocate and review and sign off on everything involving women.

They also lose some. We hear about the difficult fight they have had with the National Assembly to equalize the retirement age between men and women, so that women can achieve more equity in elite and senior positions in ministries, the Assembly, and workplace. This one surprised some of us, since when first hearing about the earlier retirement age, I had thought, good deal. The VWU put another spin on it entirely. They had gotten the proposition through all of the levels but failed to get a majority from the Assembly.

The VN Chamber of Commerce and Industry is another pea in this pod whose role is to advance and advocate for business. Many of our delegation kept referring to them as the Chamber. They have a membership of a couple of hundred thousand businesses. Mike Eso from BCGEU and the head of the Victoria (BC) Labour Council pushed the representative hard on the need to index wages to inflation and have businesses accept the equity, and the silky smooth C&I guy ended up finally, as so many of us have heard so many times, telling Mike that this was an area where we needed to admit that we could not agree.

Surprisingly both of these associations in the new market-based economy of Vietnam were hustling for support. Commerce and Industry was trying to develop a bureau to expand CSR (corporate social responsibility) to soften the image and fund its programs. The VWU engaged us extensively about donors, especially Atlantic Philanthropies based in the US, which had just given them their first grant as a lead agency to put in a $3.6 M program of emergency preparation in four provinces over four years.

It’s all different and clearly these outfits have to work out their own paths with the government and the party, but it was also clear that “it’s a process” with real struggle and argument, winners and losers, and now a lockstep operation. We didn’t get a clear look through the window, but we could still see how fingers were getting smashed as the associations aggressively advocated for their members.