New Orleans    You just have to love the irony of the government bashing, back-to-the-basics, tri-corner hat wearing Tea-people now lining up at the whining wall to weep about the fact that the Internal Revenue Service is not bending over backwards to give them tax exemptions by joining the pretend party that somehow their [...]]]>

Tea Party

New Orleans    You just have to love the irony of the government bashing, back-to-the-basics, tri-corner hat wearing Tea-people now lining up at the whining wall to weep about the fact that the Internal Revenue Service is not bending over backwards to give them tax exemptions by joining the pretend party that somehow their purposes are in any way “charitable.”  Even in the tedious and trying world of IRS regulations, charity is still not defined as kicking around women, immigrants, and just about everyone other than your buddies at the VFW bar.

Seems a sweet sixteen of the groups banned together and hired a rightwing shyster who normally works on trying to break down the barriers between church and state to pretend he was a tax expert and yell at the IRS to give them tax breaks for their miserly contributions to their hater groups.  Some of the sweet-16 are the old Glenn Beck (remember him?) 9/12 groups which I got to know well in 2009 in Springfield and Memphis when they picketed events where I spoke.

The IRS didn’t comment but issued a statement in response to inquiries by the Times:

To be tax-exempt as a social welfare organization described in Internal Revenue Code (IRC) section 501( c) 4, an organization must be primarily engaged in the promotion of social welfare.  The promotion of social welfare does not include any unrelated business activities or intervention in political campaigns on behalf of or in opposition to any candidate for public office.

Heck that might even include your main activity of showing up and heckling Congressional representatives when they hold “town hall” meetings in their districts to get constituent input?

Don’t get me wrong; go wild, Tea-people!  Just don’t ask for special tax breaks for doing it.    And, don’t cry about it, just cuz you’re cheap!

New Orleans   Andrew Breitbart’s career speaks loudly to the ongoing American phenomena of the winking carnie barker, P. T. Barnum huckster who always had something to sell and could find the suckers that would buy it.  Breitbart’s passionate mission to destroy “progressive institutions” was clearly stated and there were plenty of rubes in [...]]]>

Andrew Breitbart

New Orleans   Andrew Breitbart’s career speaks loudly to the ongoing American phenomena of the winking carnie barker, P. T. Barnum huckster who always had something to sell and could find the suckers that would buy it.  Breitbart’s passionate mission to destroy “progressive institutions” was clearly stated and there were plenty of rubes in cities large and small ready to fall for whatever tricks he had up his sleeve.  Truth or fiction hardly mattered as long as it drove traffic to his websites, dollars to his pockets, and stirred up a mess, which then drove more traffic.  That was his business and that was all he really cared about.  For him the rest was no regrets and road kill.  He built nothing, since hate, lies, and innuendo were the tools he wielded and they were only useful in trying to destroy.

I’m sorry he’s dead, but the plain truth is that he was already beaten.  The voices he attempted to silence were no longer as loud, but they still were raised for justice, including mine and many others.  Breitbart’s moment coincided with the Tea Party and fell as fast as they ebbed.  He watched and railed while strange things, like the Occupy movement filled up space, and his base became narrower and narrower as his allegations became wilder and more farfetched around the litany of his personal enemies list.   I was proud to have been high on his list, though I bore the buffoon no rancor.  I understood his game, and he played his part well.

His credibility was shot, and even a huckster needs a thin reed of fact to grasp in order to hustle the sale.  His obituary on the Associated Press (AP) wire minced no words in writing of the spurious editing behind the ACORN videos he promoted.  The New York Times was more circumspect because they are still smarting from having swallowed his bait hook-line-and-sinker as leaders of the sucker brigade and the media outfits he abhorred.  His attack on Shirley Sherrod and unconscionable editing of her remarks to the NAACP were harder for any fair minded person of any persuasion to stomach, and was the final coup ending his claim to any credibility.

When obits are reduced to saying that you cared about your family and were loyal to your spouse (“according to friends”), oh, and maybe you didn’t hate gay people, there can’t be any doubt that liberalism is still alive and well and searching for something nice to say.   Amen!

I’m sure he didn’t beat his dog either, and neither will I beat on him now that he’s down.  An early and untimely death is never a cause for any joy for anyone.  There is nothing to celebrate there, and I won’t.

But, Breitbart had already lost where it counted, and where he wanted to be counted, in the larger political and public life of the country.

Adios and vaya con dios!

By Michael Volpe

10:56 PM 11/24/2011

In an exclusive interview with The Daily Caller, Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) founder and Service Employees International Union organizer Wade Rathke acknowledged that the [...]]]> ** Below is an article taken from The Daily Caller, a right wing news site & blog of an exclusive “interview” with Wade **

By Michael Volpe

10:56 PM 11/24/2011

In an exclusive interview with The Daily Caller, Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) founder and Service Employees International Union organizer Wade Rathke acknowledged that the tea party movement has been more effective than Occupy Wall Street in influencing American politics.

Rathke was unequivocal about the Occupy movement, telling TheDC that “in no way has it had the political impact that the tea party movement has.” Yet because Occupy organizing is “still in its embryonic stages” while tea partiers have been organizing for more than two years, he cautions that “comparing the tea party movement to OWS is apples and oranges.”

While watching ACORN implode in the United States, Rathke has thrived in his new role as community organizer to the world by remaking ACORN International, known as Community Organization International in the U.S., into a worldwide community organization with near-global reach and power. And former ACORN board members say Rathke’s remarkable global turnaround is proof that most observers completely missed ACORN’s bigger picture and its broader goals.

Rathke generally had positive things to say about both the tea party and Occupy movements. “They are substantially mobilizing individuals around a set of principles,” he added. “It’s fascinating that they’re both appealing to many of the same people.”

That’s a point on which Matthew Vadum, a conservative investigative reporter whose book-length deconstruction of ACORN hit stores in May, disagrees. His book, Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers, opens with the provocative question, “How many dead Republicans does it take to satisfy the bloodlust of ACORN founder Wade Rathke?” referring to his contention that Rathke’s “progressive comrades-in arms” planned “to kill delegates and police” at the 2008 Republican National Convention in Minnesota, before a turncoat helped law-enforcement dismantle the plot.*

Vadum sees a world of difference between right-wing tea partiers and left-wing occupiers. “The only point upon which both agree is their hate of bailouts,” he told TheDC. “But that’s it. Zuccotti Park is a small park … The tea party attracted thousands and tens of thousands to their rallies; OWS attracts tens and maybe hundreds. When the tea party rally was over, the tea party left. OWS refuses to leave.”

Rathke said scenes of tea party activists shouting down politicians at town hall events reflected poorly on their movement. But he also acknowledged that scenes of public defecation, drug use, fighting and other violence also left an indelible impression.

“You never let anger get in the way of your tactical position. Anger is a tactic. When you don’t control the anger, you don’t control the tactic … Out of control anger leads to some of the things you mentioned.”

Rathke offered this piece of advice to occupiers and tea partiers alike: “Make sure that the issues you represent are laid out clearly to the public.”

That’s advice the Occupy powers-that-be may want to take to heart. A Gallup poll released Tuesday morning showed that 56 percent of Americans are generally indifferent to OWS protesters and their activities.

T.V. Reed, a Washington State University professor and author of a book on the culture of progressive social movements, told USA Today that Americans find it difficult to understand the Occupy movement since it lacks a cadre of leaders who can consistently articulate their objectives.

Rathke said he was closely following the Occupy movement, and is sympathetic to many of its ideals, but dismissed the idea that he had a hand in making it go.

“Some people think I’m organizing the OWS movement,” he told The DC, “but we know better than that.”

While Rathke hasn’t been tied directly to the occupiers, his former organization has. A Fox News investigation in October found that New York Communities for Change, basically New York’s ACORN contingent operating under a new name, hired around 100 ACORN workers from other cities and paid some as much as $100 per day to attend and support Occupy Wall Street protests.

New York Communities for Change is run by John and Steve Kest, brothers who served as two of Rathke’s chief ACORN deputies. Rathke says he has nothing to do with any ACORN campaigns or day-to-day operations now.

Name changes in the ACORN universe are common now, since its brand is now so toxic. Rathke himself conveniently changed ACORN International — domestically, at least — to Community Organizations International.

ACORN isn’t nearly as well known internationally, and certainly not in the countries where Rathke is gaining a foothold. It’s not very likely the average poor person living in a Nairobi slum has any idea that ACORN has been implicated in criminal activity in the United States.

Rather than retreating quietly into the world of left-wing philanthropy and union organizing that forms the rest of his professional identity — the Tides Foundation and SEIU’s New Orleans local, both of which he founded — he has quietly built a growing worldwide community organization. Its potential seems nearly limitless.

ACORN International already has a presence in twelve countries across five continents. Rathke is just as likely to be tooling around his native New Orleans as camped out in the slums of Nairobi, roaming the streets of Mumbai, or making the rounds in Dominican villages.

Rathke’s resurgence, say multiple critics, is proof American conservatives won the domestic ACORN battle but lost the global war.

“We tried valiantly to tell people three years ago,” former ACORN board member Marcel Reid told The DC about Rathke. “People should have focused on his organizing efforts inside and outside the U.S.” Instead, says Reid, most observers limited themselves to dissecting a host of voter-fraud allegations.

“People let him get away,” Reid said, “and now that man has taken over the world.”

In the fall of 2008, Reid and seven other ACORN directors became whistleblowers against corruption by obtaining a court order forcing their organization to open its financial books to its board members. The rest of the board pushed back with delays and postponements, and eventually removed all eight from their positions.

They formed a counter-insurgency of sorts, the “ACORN 8,” to caution politicians, labor organizers, and members of the media that ACORN’s size, the scope of its activities, its chameleon-like nature, and its almost certain involvement in criminal activity made working with the organization a risky proposition.

That caution extends to ACORN’s global expansion.

“We see all of this as extension of what ACORN and Wade Rathke always intended,” ACORN 8 spokesman Michael McCray told TheDC.

Rathke retained control of ACORN International, at the time just a rag tag bunch of disparate organizing groups sprinkled throughout the world. But three years later, with Rathke’s organizing focus directed toward his global federation, that group’s growth is no less than astonishing.

Rathke is no longer focused on organizing low-income urban Americans and registering them to vote. Instead, he’s pressuring foreign governments to better fund education in Africa’s slums, pressing for microfinance reforms in the Third World, and organizing Indians to respond when big retailers set up shop in neighborhoods accustomed to conducting commerce with street merchants.

He’s deeply involved in international remittance, the process by which expatriates send money back to their home countries. Community Organizations International operates in many countries with weak banking laws, crooked governments, and little oversight. This, say his critics, is a recipe for graft and corruption.

“Of course we should worry about that,” said Reid. She was part of the original three-person investigative committee that unearthed what she called widespread commingling of funds among now-famous ACORN affiliates like Project Vote and ACORN Housing Corporation. It’s those financial crimes that she says Rathke and those around him are likely to repeat.

With its global reach and in-your-face tactics, the Occupy movement has grown largely by using the same tactics that made Rathke successful, Reid told The DC. Comparing the ACORN founder to Saul Alinsky and his “Rules for Radicals” tactics, she added that “the tea party practiced Alinskyism of organizing while OWS is practicing Wadeism.”

Both McCray and Reid said they participated in campaigns where hundreds of volunteers camped out front of the homes of corporate CEOs who were unwilling to play ball with ACORN. Hundreds of ACORN activists, they recalled, were sent to home addresses to intimidate ACORN targets.

During their time with ACORN, they said, the community-organizing giant redefined and perfected many of Alinsky’s tactics — with a far more aggressive edge.

ACORN’s downfall coincided roughly with Rathke’s reinvention, and it began with guerilla tactics of a different sort, practiced by conservative filmmaker James O’Keefe. His series of 2009 videos showing ACORN employees and volunteers attempting to facilitate prostitution and human-smuggling proposals from walk-in members of urban communities — in fact, O’Keefe himself and his cohort Hannah Giles. Shortly thereafter, Congress froze ACORN’s federal funding. The IRS and the U.S. Census Bureau later terminated their ACORN contracts.

McCray, who was booted from ACORN’s board months earlier, tipped his hat to the young agitator. “There’s no better practicer of Alinsky tactics than James O’Keefe,” he told The DC.

*An earlier version of this report incorrectly cited Matthew Vadum as having contended that “ACORN leaders” sought to “kill delegates and police” at the 2008 Republican National Convention. “[ACORN founder Wade] Rathke had nothing to do with the bomb plot. He did, however, express disgust that a fellow community organizer had foiled the plot by alerting the FBI,” notes Mr. Vadum in a blog post citing the mistake. We regret the error.
Original article at: http://dailycaller.com/2011/11/24/left-wing-organizing-kingpin-tea-partiers-out-organized-occupy-wall-street/#ixzz1fE31lHE3

When Obama was working at the neighborhood level

New Orleans According to a fascinating article by Damien Cave in the New York Times the families that have hunkered down and stayed in the Ciudad Juarez warzone in Mexico directly across the Rio from El Paso in Texas are frequently headed by generations of women [...]]]>

When Obama was working at the neighborhood level

New Orleans According to a fascinating article by Damien Cave in the New York Times the families that have hunkered down and stayed in the Ciudad Juarez warzone in Mexico directly across the Rio from El Paso in Texas are frequently headed by generations of women and their children, welded to jobs and livelihood, they are now called familia anclada – a family anchored to the city.  Despite losing more than 200,000 people or 20% of its population to a Katrina- like tsunami of crime, such families have seemingly stabilized Juarez at over 800,000 as part of the linked metropolitan complex we so often ignore with El Paso which has a population of around 650,000, the 21^st largest city in the United States.  This is all fairly amazing in many ways and speaks of the tremendous resilience of families in the face of adversity often ignored.

In the celebration of the “power of weak links” which undergirds the fascination and impact of social networking tools like Facebook and Twitter to link people who kinda, sorta, maybe know or want to know each other and create somewhat of a personal “affinity” group, something like the familia anclada should once again remind us of the stronger values found in the power of strong links and deep engagements between people.  Maria del Socorro Velaquez Vargas, a sociologist quoted in the same article speaks plainly saying, “People don’t have faith in government.  They have faith in their neighbors.” In some ways that’s a pretty fair definition for the root strength of community organizing methodology and practice over the last 50 odd years.

In the celebration of the new and the justifiable excitement over the prospects of new tools found in technology, communication, and activism, something like the daily swelling numbers in Tahrir Square in Cairo should be a stark reminder of the power of people, the force of action on the street, the passion that defines youth, and the anger that triggers liberation.  The combustion of these elements is not some electric flash from a computer screen or a beep from a mobile phone but the connections made in the streets of Egypt, in the neighborhoods in Juarez, and in communities big and small where organizing is going on every day around the world.

It is probably important to remember that this has always been so.  I might even argue that this very strength of community engagement is perhaps what has been the most radical and unique of all American political contributions.  We certainly did not invent representative government or democracy, but we did seem to have modeled how to build the power at the grassroots level, whether we are talking about the Populists or the Tea Party people.  Community organizers were somewhere between smart, shrewd, or dumb lucky enough to understand that the community and constituency level is where change has to be constructed in order to win and be sustainable.

Using house meetings, organizing committees, and the constant connections of the community all came to mind thinking about the most exciting part of T. H. Breen’s writing on the role of “committees” in building deep engagement of the base in his recent book, American Insurgents, American Patriots. He painstakingly details the way “faith in neighbors” replaced “faith in government” in 1774 and 1775 even before the outbreak of full on armed struggle against the British.  The organization of hundreds, if not thousands, of locally based committees of safety and whatever operating in plain sight to force the most direct accountability at the community level welding ties between “Americans” more deeply and isolating sympathizers with the Crown essentially outside of the community norms, uprooted the British at ground level rendering their attempt to govern a dead letter even before troops were massing across the land.  These very local committees dealing with local people and local issues were the practicing crucible of real government based on the Articles of Correspondence way before there was a Declaration of Independence or thoughts of a Constitution.  Those flowery documents were constructed on what was built by arguably the most successful community organizing we have ever seen in this country.

Hannah Arendt, the conservative political philosopher, argued that the single most important contribution of the American Revolution was found in the decades following independence in the construction of the “ward” as the basic unit of government.  For modern Americans the notion of the ward and ward government as revolutionary must seem like heresy and certainly there could be some conservative headaches trying to assemble rationalizations here, but Arendt’s point that constructing government on the most basic building block that allows maximum participation by people in the most connected and engaged community at the most local level possible through wards is in fact very radical, and therefore, American in the truest sense.

Community organizations operating at the very level of participation and engagement that governments have mostly abandoned  have created the bonds of steel that allow families to (for example) rebuild after Katrina or remain anchored in Juarez or fuel change all over the world, which proves daily that the excitement over weak links should never let us forget the power of deep engagement and strong ties in creating both change and the possibility of full democratic participation by all people.

Langston Hughes Poem

Orange Beach When looking at the Senate’s Saturday work, it’s important to remember the difference between people who volunteered and those who didn’t.  In DADT we are talking about some protection and relief for brave men and women who volunteered to serve and die for our country.  The defeat of the [...]]]>

Langston Hughes Poem

Orange Beach When looking at the Senate’s Saturday work, it’s important to remember the difference between people who volunteered and those who didn’t.  In DADT we are talking about some protection and relief for brave men and women who volunteered to serve and die for our country.  The defeat of the DREAM Act would have provided some protection and relief for brave men and women who in fact did not volunteer to be in our country, but who were so young that they had no choice as their parents united the families in America.   DADT and DREAM actually had something in common because the involuntary young people could become citizens by volunteering to serve and die in the military.  This is all salt in the wound for these young people.

Some of the DREAM organizers said that they were going to follow some of the “NO” Senators back home to continue pushing for justice.  There was handwringing in the Times about how the Obama Administration would resurrect what has clearly always been a failed immigration reform policy.

Proponents of immigration reform should also need to revisit tactics and strategy, since much of what the DREAM vote was involved the political equivalent of playing politics with a “hail, Mary” pass.  From the minute the majority changed and Obama was elected, there were choices about whether to go “comprehensive” or carve out attractive and politically salable pieces of immigration reform, and passage of the DREAM Act was the lowest hanging fruit on the second strategy.   This is a case where in retrospect going big or going home meant going to a home country on the Obama deportation express if the bets were wrongly placed.

In the fall of 2008, making the big bet seemed right, but as early as spring 2009, the facts were probably already in hand arguing for radical changes in strategy and tactics for immigration reformers.    The cold realities of the situation were lay between slim and none.   When pressure from the base was ruled out as early as the Inauguration by the funders and powers that be, immigration reform was off the table for the first 100 days, when the chances were best with the consequences still years away and the surge of aspiration and power still strong.  Not moving to accelerate local fights in cities and states or target weak Congressmen on immigration in areas where the numbers in the base favored immigration reformers weakened the prospect within the first six months of any real reform.  By the Tea Party Summer of 2009 comprehensive reform for all intents and purposes was DOA, yet even so reformers seemed slow to embrace and advance the real movement and courage of DREAM act students were standing up and putting themselves on the line or to make the repressive excesses in Arizona or the widespread abuse and misuse of 287 (g) immigration police function subcontracting the new Selma’s or Marches to Montgomery.

Now it’s back to the drawing board and once again the strategy, I believe, has to be to go deep at the local level, find opportunities to repurpose reform at the city and state level for progressive reform in the same way that Arizona has manipulated reform for repressive measures, and then target and punish Congressmen, local sheriffs, and even Senators where the opportunities exist to send a message about re-elections, rather than moralities.  Taking down some big bear like Congressman Issa who I would argue is in a very vulnerable district on this issue would create shockwaves in Congress that would be impossible to ignore.

Coming late to the local targeting and base mobilization helped kept a heartbeat alive because of the leverage on Senator Harry Reid in the Nevada election.  We should have done this in scores of elections identified in 2009.  Hopefully we have learned a lesson and are willing to live it in the field.  This is not a DC fight.  This is a door-to-door, community-to-community, state-to-state fight with a DC rearguard in waiting to help when the job is done around the country, and not the opposite.  Lessons taught for sure, so hopefully lessons taken to heart as well.

There shouldn’t be any back slapping among immigration reformers about “how close we came,” because payback is going to be hell as long as the Obama Administration is triangulating this issue with the right and accelerating detentions and deportations, some of which inevitably will hit the best of the DREAM organizers.  Reformers need to stand up and create a sanctuary movement for these organizers now.

Organizing decisions always have consequences and a merciless accounting, even if they do not immediately have accountability.  In this case we may have started on the right foot, but didn’t step quickly enough on the floor when the music changed and the band was willing to play our song.  This isn’t musical chairs though, and everything is going to be harder now, but we need to use the next two years to keep from making the mistakes of the last two years and just hope we have another shot in the opening days of the 2013 session to finally make something happen for millions.