WADE RATHKE is the founder of ACORN, Chief Organizer at ACORN International, and Author of "Nuts & Bolts", "Citizen Wealth", "Global Grassroots", and "The Battle for the 9th Ward".
New Orleans ACORN in the United Kingdom is one of our fastest growing affiliates, so I keep up with some of the obstacles we face in organizing. One of them is the radical steps the government is taking to curtail all manner of protests, as well as free speech. I started looking into …
Pearl River In 1984, ACORN organized what we called “Reagan Ranches” all over the country, recalling the famous Hoovervilles, to protest Reagan economic policies impacting our membership. In a similar “ranch”, organized along the trickle of a river in Dallas during the Republican national convention, we slept and marched under a banner that proclaimed, …
Marble Falls Supposedly, there’s more bad news, at least for those of us dedicated to making change. It seems Harvard researchers, according to the news headlines, have studied the question deeply and have now found that “protests are failing at record rates.” The Times reports that the “odds of success [of mass protests] …