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".
Pearl River Cape Cod in Massachusetts has a reputation as a tourist and second-home area. “Going to the Cape” is what people talk about in the summer months in Massachusetts, so a lot of the economy is seasonal. Seasonal for tourists means service work for the towns, even if the luster of the Kennedy …
San Francisco The Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) has been the most persistent, long-lasting, and arguably the most successful rank-and-file union reform movement over the last more than forty years. Their effort was begun, as Ken Paff, the former director, and permanent union activist, reminded me of Wade’s World in the fight …
Brooklyn I’m talking to Ernie Dumas, a former editorial writer for the Arkansas Gazette, at a coffeehouse in Little Rock’s Heights neighborhood. A woman overhears us, disappears, and comes back and gives each of us a book of interviews she had done with ten African-American women in the Delta towns of Gould and Marvell, Arkansas. …