Category: Rathke: Chief Organizer Report
Defanging community organizing, what’s in a job title?
Pearl River There’s something happening to community organizing, and it’s not a good thing. The job is being expropriated and defanged of its critical content and its bottom-up push for peoples’ power by corporate and…
The value of collective experience
New Orleans A couple of random comments have gotten me thinking a bit about the post-coronavirus world. One thing that stuck with me was a young man’s take on hoarding in New York City that was…
Secretary “Lost” at Sea
“Acting” secretary of the Navy is right. He’s acting as if he knows what he’s doing. by Wade Rathke New Orleans I’m way out of my lane when I start chiming in on how the…
Food crisis growing in Honduras cities
A Sunday call with ACORN Honduras organizers brought the harrowing issue of food insecurity home to me with a vengeance. New Orleans Central America doesn’t get the press on the coronavirus pandemic, but it’s as…
From street demos to solidarity work ACORN members are in the community
Pearl River What do mass-based organizations and social movements do when their tactics of mass action, disruption, and street protests are impossible due to stay-at-home orders and social distancing? Do collective actions simply devolve into…
Lessons in Leadership: Captain Courageous vs. President Mr. Me
Pearl River It’s not every day when the United States and any of the world that bothers to look gets such a stark lesson in leadership than what we have seen recently, both in what it…
A pandemic is another terrible time to be poor
Pearl River There’s no good time to be poor in America. Not surprisingly, a pandemic bringing rampant disease and deaths in droves is a spectacularly bad time to be poor. Some are even noticing the poor…
Indian informal workers are starving, some Americans griping
Pearl River I have to tell the truth. It’s hard to read some of these reports from near and far complaining about being required to comply with stay-at-home orders in order to protect their…
Pandemic challenges ad-based business models
New Orleans One of the stark realities undergirding a number of industries that has been vividly exposed during the current coronavirus pandemic is the fragility of advertising-based business models that actually power tech giants and…
Class and culture clashes
New Orleans Ok, let’s be clear, everything about the pandemic sucks, alright? For the most part we don’t hate our homes, but we definitely don’t like being told we have to stay at home. Attach…
Workers virus rights for big companies
Pearl River The stimulus bill overs some expanded rights for workers at companies with under 500 workers. What do you do if your employer has over 500 workers and is refusing to do the right things…
Paying for coronavirus and medical debt
by Wade Rathke Pearl River Ten percent of Americans have absolutely, flat-to-the-bone, no health insurance. Many others have Trump-plan insurance with high deductibles, covering nothing much at all, but maybe catastrophes up to certain lifetime…
Some changes the coronavirus should bring
Pearl River In the Age of Trump and the Time of the Coronavirus, there seems to be constant speculation about what changes in our society, habits, and government might be permanent given our collective experience….
Women in the draft – yes
Pearl River The draft was a central issue in the opposition to the Vietnam War. It touched all young men from eighteen to twenty-six, and the families that loved them. It was a terribly unifying…
Uber CEO wins lie of the week award on gig workers unemployment
New Orleans n the Age of Trump, we biscuit cookers get used to hearing disassembling, tall tales, falsehoods, exaggerations, spin, or, not to mince words, lies, on a daily, sometimes hourly basis. These are…
Tenants are facing eviction across America
New Orleans Recession is here. Layoffs are in the millions. The service industry is hammered. Small businesses are underwater, while the Senate Republicans are only listening to big corporations. Trump is trying to elbow…
Coronavirus is collapsing the gentrifying airbnb model
by Wade Rathke New Orleans Airbnb is in trouble. The Wall Street Journal reports that “bookings last week were down year-on-year around 95% in Asia, 75% in Europe – the company’s biggest market – and…
What is a deprecesscion?
By Wade Rathke Pearl River Brothers and sisters, it’s bad. Furthermore, it’s getting worse! Piled on to that, it will get much, much worse, before there’s even a hint of it getting better. A recession…
A little money won’t cut it in the pandemic crisis
New Orleans On the USA pandemic map, there’s a big fat circle around New Orleans now along with New York, San Francisco, and Boston, some of the oldest cities in the country. Of course, Miami…
Virus exposes gig economy for predatory business model it promoted
By Wade Rathke New Orleans A lot of Silicon Valley are self-isolating in what should be shame as their app-based, platform capitalism, or whatever they wanted to call it, is exposed as little more than…
Time running out for Bernie to make a deal
Little Rock Depending on how you look at it, one of the assets – or liabilities – of being an organizer for over fifty years, is that in the immortal words of the old country…
No place to run, no place to hide
Greenville Talking to ACORN’s head organizer in France from one of the organization’s offices in Lyon was something of an other-worldly experience. He was cancelling a train trip to Paris and had only hours to get…
In the eye of the pandemic storm
New Orleans We all feel like we’re caught in the eye of the pandemic storm, but our collective empathy doesn’t necessarily make us feel safer and more secure. New Orleans’ Mayor LaToya Cantrell, almost as…
Some political issues around health should be settling now
Pearl River Yes, we’re all tired of hearing about covid-19 and our powerlessness to protect ourselves, our federal government’s incompetence, our local government’s uncertainty, and the general chaos. On the other hand, perhaps the virus this…
