Category: Rathke: Chief Organizer Report
Election security means standardization
by Wade Rathke November 24, 2020 New Orleans Here’s a full disclosure first. I read everything that passes in front of me that is written by tech wizard and take-no-prisoner-analyst, Zeynep Tufekci, a professor at the…
Rogues gallery of corporate liars
by Wade Rathke Saturday, November 21, 2020 Pearl River We should all know the name, Thomas Midgley? He was a chemist for General Motors almost one-hundred years ago, when General Motors and Rockefeller’s Standard Oil…
The Bolivian election mystery
by Wade Rathke Friday, November 20, 2020 New Orleans In the United States now we wait and watch while President Trump stoops to historically new lows in trying to subvert the vote of the people…
Hipsters of the world unite
by Wade Rathke Thursday, November 19, 2020 New Orleans Hipsters are absolutely not taking over the world, but it’s hard not to find them almost all over the world. MoveHub, an international shipping company got…
Clock ticking on Trump expiration date
by Wade Rathke Wednesday, November 18, 2020 New Orleans The Trump meltdown is going from the dangerous to the ridiculous to the absurd now, and then back again to the dangerous. Everyone knows Trump has…
Essential workers and pay equity
by Wade Rathke Monday, November 16, 2020 New Orleans In a moment of youthful recklessness more than fifty years ago, I allowed myself to get into one of those dangerous political conversations with the father…
The fat man is singing
by Wade Rathke November 15, 2020 Pearl River The Monday Night Football expression that “it’s not over until the fat lady sings,” has thankfully been retired given the lack of appreciation for opera in our…
Moving forward on US healthcare
by Wade Rathke Sunday, November 15, 2020 New Orleans Breaking away from a meeting with our new tenant organizers at a table in front of Publix grocery store in the Buckhead neighborhood of Atlanta, I had…
Georgia, ground zero for the Senate
by Wade Rathke November 13, 2020 Atlanta It took five hours and half a tank of gas for me and two organizers for the ACORN Tenants Union in Atlanta to visit more than a dozen apartment…
Oh, no, now O’Keefe goes postal
by Wade Rathke November 11, 2020 Atlanta Attorney General Barr, Senator Lindsay Graham and other Republican hardline Trump apologists made quite a bit of a story told by a postal worker in Pennsylvania that he…
People move on, politicians stuck in place
by Wade Rathke November 10, 2020 Columbus It’s hard to call Ohio a battleground state once you look out the window and see Columbus in the rearview mirror. Trump-Pence signs dominate the roadways and car bumpers….
Georgia on my mind
by Wade Rathke November 9, 2020 Washington, DC In politics there is always tomorrow, not necessarily for the same candidate or party, but the people will be served after a fashion, and the positions will be…
A battle has been won, but the war is still raging
by Wade Rathke November 8, 2020 New Orleans Joe Biden is president. Donald Trump has lost. Some believe a four-year nightmare has ended. Perhaps, but Trump will not go quietly into the night. Maybe he…
James O’Keefe, Spy Boy
by Wade Rathke October 29, 2020 New Orleans Back when we used to have Mardi Gras in New Orleans, which looking forward to 2021, seems an iffy proposition, one of the treats for early risers…
Hooks Institute for Social Change Looks at Memphis as a Tale of Two Nations: Rich & Poor
Memphis The Benjamin Hooks Institute for Social Change was established in 1996 by the University of Memphis and the late Benjamin Hooks, former president of the NAACP, originally from the city. The Hooks Institute has…
Rathke: Pulling CRA’s teeth when it needs to bite harder
New Orleans Dine’ Butler and I had just finished our presentation about the impact of predatory land installment contracts and hedge funds in the Memphis real estate market at the Hooks Institute event at the University…
Productive incoherence and thinking differently about change
by Wade Rathke October 24, 2020 Pearl River A book entitled, The Sex Obsession: Perversity and Possibility in American Politics, arrives in the mail with the word SEX in capital red letters along with obsession…
Puerto Rican earthquakes
Ponce We hadn’t been to Puerto Rico over the last fifteen years. Tickets were too pricey to Mexico and Columbia, so why not see how they have come through the recovery from Hurricane Maria, touch base…
Rathke: Plundering Black Wealth with Predatory Land Installment Contracts
Columbus An analyst for the Federal Reserve Bank in St. Louis on a panel with us at the Benjamin Hooks Institute at the University of Memphis listened to our remarks about the devastating impact of hedge…
Surprising UK election outcome – people want to organize
Fort Lauderdale The voters came out from under the rocks and jumped over the hedgerows to vote for the Conservatives behind weird and wacky Boris Johnson in the recent snap election in Britain. Labour took a…
Rathke: Protest by the powerless…congressmen
“The cap is off of that bottle! We’re now in the land of “no limits,” even in the halls of Congress. Everybody is ready to throw it up against the wall!”
Rathke: Lessons from the South for 2020
New Orleans It may be too early to make a definitive list of lessons learned from the off-year elections in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Kentucky, but the one thing that seems crystal clear is that the…
Rathke: Leaving Honduras the hard way
San Pedro Sula We had weathered another difficult annual general meeting of Honduras ACORN midway between Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula. It was a difficult three-hour session as the leadership tried to navigate the legal requirements…
Rathke: Are single use plastics getting a bad rap?
New York City Once the breeze picks up between the canyons formed by New York City skyscrapers, the most common local bird that seems to be floating in the sky when you see something flutter…
