New Orleans

Looks like some folks are merely trying to cash in on the movement, because I  can guarantee you from my experience with the grass roots tea-people in Memphis and Springfield, they are angry and alienated and looking for a political home, but they are sure not folks who would be willing or able to write a full board check for $549, plus transport and house themselves in Nashville.   Even the dates should have made me suspicious of a Thursday through Saturday affair rather than a weekend only convention. Whoever was organizing this mess wasn’t thinking about the little people in the base who are fueling this outburst with their passion.

Looking under the hood, it seems now that many, if not most, of the real grassroots tea people are in an uproar and pulling out of any connection with what presumably would be their “own” convention.  Part of it is the Super Bowl level ticket price of course.  Part of it also seems some real upset that the queen of the ball, Sarah Palin, is reportedly receiving $100,000 to keynote the affair.  What’s up with that?  This sister is obviously completely out of politics.  I can’t believe that she wouldn’t have been willing to speak to a real Tea Party convention for car fare, and of course in her case, maybe a suit of new clothes or something.  If tea people are not her base, then she doesn’t have a base at all.  This is the problem with populist outrages that don’t have set principles.  There’s no one to shoo away the fast buck artists trying to exploit the movement.  I would bet within days – if not hours – Palin will be saying that she’s donating her fee back to the movement or waiving the $100K or whatever.  She can’t want this to stick on her shoe while she continues to act like she’s one of the regular folks.

The other problem is that this nascent populist movement seems to have been pretty much already hijacked by the Republicans who seem desperate to convert tea people into their storm troopers for coming electoral battles.  The usual 3^rd party debates are happening, but without any integrity.  The Republican strategists and party apologists, including wild eyed elected officials, desperately want the tea people not to figure out how much power they might have in building an independent platform on a state-by-state level (look at the Working Families Party in New York for example).  The Republicans want to convince them that they would be spoilers, but one party’s view of spoilers is another party’s view of power brokers.

All this anger has to go somewhere, but it’s pretty clear that this fascinating and important phenomena is now splintering and as a fledgling movement is most likely to die in the pains of birth.

This anger will go somewhere.  If the right can only see dollar signs from this passion, maybe the left can finally start thinking about where this anger finds common ground on issues of jobs, trade, banks, Wall Street,and more.  At the grassroots there’s a fertile field worth walking carefully and plowing well.

Memphis

Many themes returned again and again, but one of the themes that echoed so loudly that it was impossible not to hear was the way that developers were literally having their way with the City of Memphis and Shelby County.  A more than $100 million dollar giveaway of public dollars for one developer of the Memphis Fairgrounds was averted with no community benefits agreement asked or offered for the nearby communities.  Planners in the afternoon told me story after story of developers benefiting from 15 year tax incremental financing (TIF) districts in the by-and-by hopes of community benefits without any efforts to assure community benefits on the front end.  It was enough to make my head spin.

These were great leaders, well trained and experienced with a good grip on the issues and the nuances of Memphis, who needed a process to finally make a decision to re-engage resources and participation for this generation of organizations and activists to curb the excesses and try to wrest the city away from the developers and their public lackeys and back to the people.

The last point made by a well respected minister at dinner caught my ear.  A developer named Harold Buehler was being given 140 lots in a lower income, inner city area of Memphis, despite owing over $2 million in taxes for his previous developments.  People were outraged.  There was a roar of response about the “fix” being in with the County Commissioners.  It all seemed so wild and bizarre, I knew I would have to look under the hood to try and figure it out.

I found a squib by Jackson Baker in something called the “political beat” in the Memphis Flyer. Despite Baker’s bias in favor of Buehler and his contempt for Commissioner Henri Brooks, and anyone who opposes this project, his piece does confirm the facts behind the minister’s disgust and my new friends’ revulsion at this action:

Memphis Mayor Pro Tem Myron Lowery spoke before the commission on the premise that it would be folly not to develop the vacant lots Buehler sought title over (140 out of some 3,000 in the inner city, including many that were the result of arson and neglect). Antonio Burks, the former Memphis Tigers basketball star who was recently wounded by gunfire, showed up on crutches to extol Buehler for having provided Burks’ mother a rental home for the past decade.

Even a Klondike resident who had been featured in The Commercial Appeal as opposing Buehler rental property on style points was shown in a Buehler-produced video extolling the builder for having arrived at new designs. (Both the video and several posterboard displays of previous Buehler properties were stage-managed by Upton.)

Buehler opponents got up to speak, too, including one man who said,” We need to do a background check on this criminal.”

Besides Brooks, overt opposition on the commission itself was limited to another longtime critic of the builder, Mike Ritz, who succeeded in adding an amendment to Commissioner Steve Mulroy’s enabling resolution, one that required full repayment of Buehler’s delinquent taxes. Another Ritz amendment, which would have mandated approval of Buehler designs by community development organizations in all affected areas, was rejected.

In any case, Wednesday’s apparently definitive vote notwithstanding, Brooks announced that she intended to soldier on. “I’ve just begun to fight,” she said — though how and with what allies and to what end remained to be seen.

From this piece it looks like a “Hail Mary” pass forcing Buehler to pay up before he cashes in on these lots may have landed safely in the end zone, so I’ll have to check on that, but regardless of the pros and cons here, there’s no doubt that the community is increasingly clear that Memphis cannot continue to be developer heaven and community hell.  One dinner guest who lives near the development in Memphis caught my ear making the point that the area had housing, but “needed jobs!”  There were other comments that could not be missed about the need for people to have a “voice” again and the lack of equity and citizen centered priorities in Memphis.

It was great to be a fly on the wall and an excuse for some great people to get together who could make a difference in Memphis by deciding once again that “enough is enough,” and taking the next steps to make something happen again in this great city.

Washington

A friend who worked with me 30 years ago sent me a note of concern suggesting it might be time for stepping back, rather than stepping forward.  He was worried about me, and I appreciated that, but found myself explaining why it is precisely the time to step forward.  First, it’s been a while since I worked for ACORN, and, secondly, the situation is such that the chance of collateral damage is now zero.  There’s no election in the offing where this could be a distraction, and the host of locusts that have swarmed on the organizations couldn’t be much worse for me shooing some of them off.

I also think in a very, very small way, I can already sense a small turnaround.

Last night at Busboys and Poets talking about Citizen Wealth I actually had the folks from biggovernment.com (the ACORN sting people) compliment my manners (making my mother proud!), and a gentlemen from the National Review applaud my “courage” for being out in the public and taking his and other questions.  I know I’m grabbing at thin straws here, but at least it’s something.

Newsweek magazine flinched a quote of mine they found in the Washington Post as one of their “quotes of the week” in the front of the magazine, where in reaction to the Congressional dog pile defunding of ACORN, I responded that “it was balderdash with a side of poppycock.”  Truer words have hardly ever been spoken.  Good to have them out there!

On a Baton Rouge NPR call today with Jim Engster of the 5 calls only 1 was whack and 4 were dead-on positive about the need for ACORN and its future.  An article from my hometown paper, The Times-Picayune, after starting out snidely was actually to the point, and reasonably objective as these things go.

The Google alerts are down and perhaps people are taking a breath and finally looking at what is really going on.

I may be deluding myself, but I feel like I’m even getting traction on my argument that we have to all stand up and stand together to oppose McCarthyism.  That is what is really at stake here, not ACORN, me, or whatever.  Unfortunately, I can’t say that without also being willing to also go 15 rounds with what seems to be all comers.  It’s not pretty and it’s not fun, but being able to take a punch has a value still it seems just as I learned 40 years ago.

Maybe soon people will in fact really hear what I’m saying – along with the voices of so many others.  And, maybe soon, the progressive forces will finally unite together rather than continuing to stand apart and scoff and at best say to themselves, “there but for the grace of God go I as well.”

If we don’t jump out there, we won’t find out.

New Orleans

Ehrenreich begins with a stark indictment as she equates the failure of the government’s safety net NOW with the Bush failure in Katrina.

“So far, despite some temporary expansions of food stamps and unemployment benefits by the Obama administration, the recession has done for the government safety net pretty much what Hurricane Katrina did for the Federal Emergency Management Agency: it’s demonstrated that you can be clinging to your roof with the water rising, and no one may come to helicopter you out.”

Take the case of Kristen and Joe Parente, Delaware residents

She nails the fact that the system is designed to frustrate applicants who desperately need the help and essentially criminalize the process.

“Meanwhile they were finding out why some recipients have taken to calling the assistance program “Torture and Abuse of Needy Families.” From the start, the experience has been “humiliating,” Kristen said. The caseworkers “treat you like a bum — they act like every dollar you get is coming out of their own paychecks.”

Nationally, according to Kaaryn Gustafson, an associate professor at the University of Connecticut Law School, “applying for welfare is a lot like being booked by the police.” There may be a mug shot, fingerprinting and long interrogations as to one’s children’s paternity. The ostensible goal is to prevent welfare fraud, but the psychological impact is to turn poverty itself into a kind of crime.”

Hitting the point harder farther along in the piece, she writes:

“It’s no secret that the temporary assistance program was designed to repel potential applicants, and at this it has been stunningly successful. The theory is that government assistance encourages a debilitating “culture of poverty,” marked by laziness, promiscuity and addiction, and curable only by a swift cessation of benefits. In the years immediately after welfare “reform,” about one and a half million people disappeared from the welfare rolls — often because they’d been “sanctioned” for, say, failing to show up for an appointment with a caseworker. Stories of an erratic and punitive bureaucracy get around, so the recession of 2001 produced no uptick in enrollment, nor, until very recently, did the current recession. As Mark Greenberg, a welfare expert at the Georgetown School of Law, put it, the program has been “strikingly unresponsive” to rising need.”

The story on food stamps is a little better, but the criminalization continues:

“People far more readily turn to food stamps, which have seen a 19 percent surge in enrollment since the recession began. But even these can carry a presumption of guilt or criminal intent. Four states — Arizona, California, New York and Texas — require that applicants undergo fingerprinting. Furthermore, under a national program called Operation Talon, food stamp offices share applicants’ personal data with law enforcement agencies, making it hazardous for anyone who might have an outstanding warrant — for failing to show up for a court hearing on an unpaid debt, for example — to apply.”

I loved the fact that Barbara adds a personal note in underscoring not only the experience that many of us, as organizers, have found all our lives in dealing with low income communities around issues like dues, but also the evidence that recent national polling has shown about the greater generosity of poorer families than those that are more wealth.

“I’ve never encountered the kind of “culture of poverty” imagined by the framers of welfare reform, but there is a tradition among the American working class of mutual aid, no questions asked. My father, a former miner, advised me as a child that if I ever needed money to “go to a poor man.” He liked to tell the story of my great-grandfather, John Howes, who worked in the mines long enough to accumulate a small sum with which to purchase a plot of farmland. But as he was driving out of Butte, Mont., in a horse-drawn wagon, he picked up an Indian woman and her child, and their hard-luck story moved him to give her all his money, turn his horse around and go back to the darkness and danger of the mines.”

And of course she underscores her own experience with yet more devastating research from scholars:

“In her classic study of an African-American community in the late ’60s, the anthropologist Carol Stack found rich networks of reciprocal giving and support, and when I worked at low-wage jobs in the 1990s, I was amazed by the generosity of my co-workers, who offered me food, help with my work and even once a place to stay. Such informal networks — and random acts of kindness — put the official welfare state, with its relentless suspicions and grudging outlays, to shame.

BUT there are limits to the generosity of relatives and friends. Tensions can arise, as they did between Kristen and her mother, which is what led the Parentes to move to their current apartment in Wilmington. Sandra Smith, a sociologist at the University of California at Berkeley, finds that poverty itself can deplete entire social networks, leaving no one to turn to. While the affluent suffer from “compassion fatigue,” the poor simply run out of resources.”

And, finally in a tour de force that caught me totally by surprise, but which I have to admit I also completely loved, she had mentioned that the family, the Parentes, were obliged to do community service in exchange for their meager TANF benefits.  It turned out that she was assigned to work for ACORN in Delaware.

“In the meantime, Kristen has discovered a radically different approach to dealing with poverty. The community agency she volunteered at is Acorn (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), the grass-roots organization of low-income people that achieved national notoriety during the 2008 presidential campaign when Republicans attacked it for voter registration fraud (committed by temporary Acorn canvassers and quickly corrected by staff members). Kristen made such a good impression that she was offered a paid job in May, and now, with only a small supplement from the government, she works full time for Acorn, organizing protests against Walgreens for deciding to stop filling Medicaid prescriptions in Delaware, and, in late June, helping turn out thousands of people for a march on Washington to demand universal health insurance.”

The story had an inspiring ending there, as Barbara intended, but being realistic, Ehrenreich also pointed out at the column’s conclusion that despite having found work as an organizer through the crucible of this experience, the family was now fighting eviction with not enough money to find a new place.

Citizen wealth?  Hardly!  This should be a national disgrace, but now a hard year into the recession already, and this is story is still a rarity despite the lives ruined, the hopes dashed, and the personal tragedies piling up all around us.

SN is a beautiful movie that dramatically portrays the immigrant trail from Honduras in Central America riding the rails through Mexico to the Texas border crossing at Reynosa.  A deported father is making his way back to his new family in New Jersey and takes the young woman who is now his daughter on the trip.  A gang originally Salvadoran is the other piece of this story since they prey on the traveling immigrants adding an additional level of fear and violence to the constant battle for survival of these economic refugees heading for estades unidos.

Gomorrah leeches out every last bit of romanticism that any may have had about the work of the “mafia” in Italy.  This movie is brutish and almost stark and colorless in the drab and defeating way it portrays life in the huge apartment blocks dominated by poverty, unemployment, crime, and drugs and therefore ruled in its own way by these criminal clans with only the slightest sense of any code.

In both movies it seems almost inescapable to conclude that life for the poor and powerless in these very different countries in Europe and Central America has virtually no value to anyone.  The movies though very different in outlook (there’s actually a “happy” ending of sorts in SN?) also make it hard to conclude that there is much hope that anything anytime or anyway soon is going to be any different.  Both movies are like a staggering punch in the face.

I felt I had to go see Gomorrah since we had agreed to help Professor Ken Reardon and organizers in Sicily with their organizing problem there in any even larger housing development that the mafia has squatted in order to see if there’s an organizational “answer” to the dilemma for the poor and working families caught in this crossfire between government, mob, and the desperate need for housing.  The whole movie was an ice cold shower of reality that forces the plans our plans for anything in Sicily to have to toughen up so that they are more than platitudes and bromides without meaning.

SN is lighter in some ways though the dread of death and violence lies under every scene.  For every light moment in which Mexicans in the countryside toss oranges up to the top of the train to the immigrants, there is the continual danger of the train and toll it takes, as well as the fact that all of these travelers are easily victimized, robbed, raped, and killed without names or numbers as they seek a better, more hopeful life.  One movie may be saying that this is no way to deal with criminals and that no one is really dealing with criminals, while the other says that but also says that the lack of immigration policy is a scourge on all of the countries of the Americas, including the United States.

It is amazing how clueless many still are.  The well meaning New Orleans audience at Canal Place applauded Sin Nombre and its young director with polite enthusiasm.

One well meaning question struck me more than others as staking out the inestimable distance of the gap between these well intentioned viewers and the reality of migrants and the poor around the world.  A woman respectfully asked Fukunaga whether his crew had “planted” all of the garbage strewn everywhere along the train tracks at every place the immigrants huddled to hobo along the route.  He laughed as he answered, that “no,” all of the garbage was part of what was normal in this experience and never part of the task list.

Indeed!  Had the director been making another movie the camera would have easily fallen on the cartoneros or reciclidades who would have been staying in Mexico City or any of these train stops along the way and making a living from this ever growing trash heap.

The question revealed how far the world of even New Orleans, hardly on anyone’s list of the worlds’ cleanest cities from the everyday reality of poverty and peril in the rest of the world.  With Fukunaga we can agree that trash is the least of the problems here, almost past notice and beyond comment.

The papers were full of reports of possible compromises looking for a way to secure a vote here or there. Some of it was patently absurd. Workers just can’t seem to catch a break!

Good example: Chamber of Commerce. One story, I think by the Times’ Greenhouse said the Chamber was demanding 45 days between filing and an election – heck, the average now is less than than I think! These folks are obviously just obfuscating.

There is talk about “quick” elections in the 21 day or 3 week range, which would be about half the average now. Anything might be better than what we have, but one world of hurt can be administered to workers in 3 weeks by these lawyer and consultant goons, so it’s unclear whether that will solve the problem or any real problem at all?

Senator Diane Feinstein from California seemed to be shopping a compromise that would forego elections if a majority of workers mailed in their signed cards to the NLRB for cross checking. Frankly, that’s a hard one for me to follow. A business might want to challenge the demand for recognition if it is presented to the labor board, but would not if it were mailed to the labor board? Would the future rely on constant litigation trying to prove whether a worker personally went to the mailbox or had a friend or their local union representative go to the mailbox for them? Huh?

Why all of the grabbing at straws? This is broken. Fix it!