Wade Rathke is the founder of ACORN International where he was chief organizer for 39 years. He is also founder and chief organizer of the Service Employees International Union Local 100, and publisher and editor of Social Policy, a quarterly magazine for scholars and activists, and the author of Citizen Wealth: Winning the Campaign to Save Working Familiesand The Battle for the Ninth Ward: ACORN, Rebuilding New Orleans, and the Lessons of Disaster. At his blog Chief Organizer, he writes: Obama is wrong about social movements and activists:
President Obama is on his farewell tour. Speaking to a young, university audience in London while trying to drum up some support for Britain to stay in the European Union, he offered what has to be seen as totally gratuitous advice to them – and of course all of the rest of us – about what he sees as the proper, underline “proper,” role for social movements and activists. And, not surprisingly, he is totally wrong, but here was what he had to offer:
“The value of social movements and activism is to get you at the table, get you in the room, and then to start trying to figure out how is this problem going to be solved. You then have a responsibility to prepare an agenda that is achievable, that can institutionalize the changes you seek, and to engage the other side, and occasionally to take half a loaf that will advance the gains that you seek, understanding that there’s going to be more work to do, but this is what is achievable at this moment.”
In TheNew York Times story about his remarks, they predictably added that something that they felt, equally gratuitously, would help give an extra dose of credibility or street cred to the President of the United States, arguably—and temporarily—one of the powerful people in the world. They offered that,
Mr. Obama began his career as a community organizer working on local initiatives in poor neighborhoods in Chicago. Sometimes, he said, solving a problem means accepting a series of partial solutions.
Now, certainly if you are a big whoop, or the biggest whoop of them all you, want the rowdies out there to get the message that if you lean down from your perch and deign to listen to them for a hot minute, they are supposed to understand that they are supposed to behave, thank you, and then go and shut the heck up. But, as Obama surely must really know, regardless of the claptrap he’s selling right now, the role of social movements, and many activists, is exactly the opposite. The role of social movements in fact is to speak “truth to power,” not to make the deals and settle for the incremental changes, but to chant, “more, more, more,” keep the heat on that continues to create the pressure and push to create the space for the deal-makers to do their thing to get closer and closer to the mark, and not stop until the job is done.
Obama knows from his time in Chicago that an organization has to accept “half a loaf” frequently to deliver to its members. Good organizations get more, and weaker organizations get less, but it’s a social movement’s job to continue to raise the banner for truth, justice, and the whole loaf. There’s a different between seeking power and putting on the pressure.
The Alinsky tradition, that Obama shared, was always uncomfortable with social movements because they were too easily appeased by applause, rather than being thankful that social movements enlarged the space to allow organizations to win even greater victories. Sadly, but once again not surprisingly, Obama knew this seven years ago when he challenged activists to push him – and the country – if they wanted more change, but now that he’s more worried about his past legacy, than his future accomplishments, he sitting too comfortably on the throne.
It’s worth respecting his position, but for the sake of all of us working for change, when it comes to social movements, we need to adamantly decline to follow his advice.
The anti-war movement made two key points in the lead-up to GW II: 1) the Bush Administration was overstating the case against Saddam, and 2) by doing so, it was putting our troops and civilians in harm's way.
Iraq fought back harder than many expected, but luckily for everyone its regulars laid down arms before a truly bloody confrontation in Baghdad. Still, we suffered 600 dead and wounded, and thousands of Iraqi soldiers and innocent civilians lost their lives in the war. Thus, #2 came to pass. Thousands died.
So it's important to see whether their lives were given in vain, or whether their ultimate sacrifice was indeed in pursuit of our national security.
So it's with genuine horror that it's clear that we naysayers were right. Administration officials are now admitting they overstated the thread of Iraqi WMDs, and invaded Iraq simply to "make a point." […]
So Powell told the world that Iraq had thousands of tons of chemical weapons. The administration now admits that they won't find that much, and may not find any at all. And it's not a lie???? It's a "matter of emphasis"?
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: Gearing up for tomorrow’s primaries. CT looks tightest. Will guns make the difference? Tamir Rice settlement. Former Sen. Harris Wofford to wed. Escalation against ISIS. Just your average in-church shooting. The endorsement game gets tricky: PA & MD-SEN.
'Lemonade' is the artist's second visual album, and has led to an interesting response
'Lemonade' is the artist's second visual album, and has led to an interesting response
About two-months-ago, many police unions around this country became so enraged about what they perceived to be an indignity on the character of law enforcement they announced multi-city boycotts in order to show their displeasure. Was it in disbelief to a pattern of certain officers arguably overstepping their authority, and killing unarmed men and women with little to no repercussions? No. Was it in disgust towards officials of authority, who’ve been slow to react in protecting both civilians and police officers from having to go through traumatic incidents, and whose aftereffects have caused widespread unrest and distrust? No.
It’s this sort of personal and political subtext in her music which has made the Beyoncé’s sixth and latest album release turn some heads, and dominate entertainment headlines over the weekend. The premiere of the visual album Lemonadeon HBO, and all 12 tracks for download, has been met with accolades for being a work that touches on both the big picture and deeply intimate struggles. The visual part of Lemonade, with seven credited directors, is a mishmash of interweaving styles, which mixes surreal imagery in a very Southern Gothic way. But lyrically, the album touches on the adversities faced by women, especially black women, and references slavery, growing up in the South, riots, Fox News, and police brutality among other things. And yet, this also a work which wants to say something about what it means to be a mother, to be a wife, and to be wronged. All of this has also engendered some of the same ire from the same usual suspectsand in some of the stupidest ways possible.
We now check in with America's worst governor, Maine's Gov. Paul LePage, as he continues an insult comedy tour that nobody asked for.
Paul LePage, America’s second-favorite racist, has a lot of things to say about foreign workers, and few of them are good.
According to the Associated Press, the Maine Governor said Saturday that Indian workers are the “hardest” and “the worst ones” to understand. Perhaps realizing that his nightmare words were reverberating off the walls of the room, LePage quickly qualified, saying that Indians are “lovely people but you’ve got to have an interpreter.”
He is governor of a state, I might add. And it's still a step up from his rants about black drug dealers flocking to Maine to impregnate the state's fine white women.
Mark my words, he's trying for a Donald Trump VP slot. He's got the rhetoric down, but I don't think Trump will be picking anyone who doesn't have his name on the side of a plane or a skyscraper.
MSNBC is holding back-to-back town hall events for the Democratic candidates on the eve of Tuesday's critical primaries with both candidates appearing from Philadelphia.
Chris Hayes and Bernie Sanders take the first hour, beginning at 8 PM EST. At 9 PM EST, Rachel Maddow moderates the second, hour-long town hall with Hillary Clinton. Watch on MSNBC and talk about it here.
MSNBC is holding another one of those back-to-back town hall, not-a-debate events for the Democratic candidates on the eve of Tuesday's critical primaries. Both candidates are appearing from Philadelphia.
Chris Hayes and Bernie Sanders take the first hour, beginning at 8 PM EST. At 9 PM EST, Rachel Maddow moderates the second, hour-long town hall with Hillary Clinton. Watch on MSNBC and talk about it here.
The forced marches of the "Trail of Tears" began with the Choctaw in 1830 and ended with the Cherokee in 1838. Andrew Jackson's wars on American Indians enhanced his personal fortune as he and his pals gathered up tens of thousands of acres they sold to others or turned into cotton plantations tended by slaves.
The forced marches of the "Trail of Tears" began with the Choctaw in 1830 and ended with the Cherokee in 1838. Andrew Jackson's wars on American Indians enhanced his personal fortune as he and his pals gathered up tens of thousands of acres they sold to others or turned into cotton plantations tended by slaves.
One would think we could celebrate the recognition that Harriet Tubman will be given on future $20 bills without demeaning former president Andrew Jackson as a “monster,” as a recent Huffington Post headline did. And summarizing his legendary tenure as being “known primarily for a brutal genocidal campaign against native Americans,” as reported in The Post, offers an indication of how far political correctness has invaded our educational system and skewed our national consciousness. [...]
As president, Jackson ordered the removal of Indian tribes east of the Mississippi to lands west of the river. This approach, supported by a string of presidents, including Jefferson and John Quincy Adams, was a disaster, resulting in the Trail of Tears where thousands died. But was its motivation genocidal? Robert Remini, Jackson’s most prominent biographer, wrote that his intent was to end the increasingly bloody Indian Wars and to protect the Indians from certain annihilation at the hands of an ever-expanding frontier population. Indeed, it would be difficult to call someone genocidal when years before, after one bloody fight, he brought an orphaned Native American baby from the battlefield to his home in Tennessee and raised him as his son.
Webb is certainly right about Jackson’s threats against South Carolina that may well have delayed the Civil War. And he was the nation’s first populist president whose tenure was an affront to the Eastern elite that had hitherto held the presidency before he won that office. His veto of the renewal of the charter of the Second National Bank was a very good thing. And he was certainly a capable military leader. Webb could have left it at that, making a case that Jackson’s good acts outweigh the bad. While that case is disputable, and one I don’t agree with, it’s not unreasonable.
U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley suggested on Friday that the FBI might leak reports of its investigation into presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server as secretary of state.
Grassley, Iowa’s senior senator and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said an anonymous and unauthorized release of FBI investigative materials could result if officials at the agency believed prosecution of Clinton was stymied for political reasons.
Grassley, who is definitely one of those kids who would so grab the marshmallow, can’t stand the idea that people might 1) conduct a competent review or 2) follow the law. Information wants to be free! Especially when that information is incomplete, out of context, and thoroughly partisan. Grassley sure can be in a hurry—so long as it’s not about approving a Supreme Court nominee.
Hmm. Suborning perjury is a crime. What about encouraging the FBI to violate confidentiality? Doesn’t matter. Here’s a secret Grassley really doesn’t want leaked: His seat is up for re-election this year and Patty Judge is a really good candidate to replace the Senate’s leaker-in-chief.
The Missouri Legislature, or at least the Republican contingent of it, loathes Planned Parenthood. It is because Planned Parenthood still allows women to receive abortions, no matter how many conservative Republican lawmakers demand they not do that regardless of what the nation's Supreme Court has said on the matter. So toward the end of making certain everyone in their state knows just how much they loathe Planned Parenthood, the Republican-led state legislature has decided to spend a bucketload of taxpayer money on what at this point is a mere party fetish.
The Legislature rejected more than $8.3 million in federal Medicaid funding the state was slated to receive for family planning, sexually transmitted disease testing and pelvic exams at county health departments, other clinics and Planned Parenthood. They replaced it with money from Missouri's general revenues, leaving the total unchanged at $10.8 million, and stipulated that none of it could go to organizations that provide abortions, as Planned Parenthood does.
Mind you, that federal Medicaid money that the state was getting was already prevented by law from being used for elective abortion services, but state Republicans are upset that the federal government will not allow them to summarily ban Planned Parenthood from providing Medicaid services regardless. So the lawmakers are now saying they simply won't take that federal Medicaid money at all. They'll take that money from state coffers instead, allowing them to block Planned Parenthood from providing any services to patients. Those 7,000 or so patients will have to find other providers, it's likely that at least some of them won't be able to find clinics offering similar services nearby, and the state will pick up the $8.3 million tab for the pleasure of causing that damage.
The budget may be boring, but that's how policy is established or broken.
The budget may be boring, but that's how policy is established or broken.
Start discussing, in detail, the budgets of public entities if you need a shortcut to glazing over people’s brains. That’s true whether it’s a municipality or the federal government being talked about, which is a drag because spending is what makes policy. A policy without an adequate budget for implementation and enforcement might as well be no policy at all. Indeed, budget is policy.
Yogin Kothari, Washington representative of the Center for Science and Democracy, points out on the blog of the Union of Concerned Scientists that there’s another matter needing attention in the too-much-ignored budgeting process—the buckets of inappropriate ideological riders members of Congress seek to attach to each year’s budget bill. This is done because these riders would never survive if they were introduced as stand-alone bills:
The reason they don’t want you to know about these poison pill policies is because often, these riders are special interests’ backdoor attempt to weaken science-based public protections for their own gain. And like clockwork, they continue to appear, and lawmakers continue to hope that no one will notice.
Last year, Kothari continues, some 200 groups got together to make phone calls, tweet, and otherwise seek to ensure that lawmakers knew people opposed these ideological riders. As a consequence of this grassroots effort, riders that weren’t approved would have kept the Occupational Safety and Health Administration from establishing a rule on worker exposure to silica dust; that would have constrained federal scientists from studying the impact of hydraulic fracturing; and that would have kept experts from advising the Environmental Protection Agency.
With the early talks around the 2017 fiscal year budget now underway, it’s necessary to remain vigilant and continue the previous efforts because these science-bashing riders won’t go away unless they are exposed and objected to. Here's a sampling of possible riders that are coming up.
It's hard to overstate just how devastating the latest round of Latino Decisions’ new national polling promises to be for the Republican Party this November. It’s not just about what we already knew—that Latino voters despise GOP frontrunner Donald Trump:
87% of Latino voters have either a “very” or “somewhat” unfavorable opinion of Donald Trump (79% “very unfavorable”), as compared to just 9% of who view him as “very” or “somewhat” favorable – meaning that his net favorability is underwater by 78 percentage points.
It’s that those hostile views run far beyond Trump, partly because 41 percent of Latino voters say immigration/deportation is the most important issue to them. By contrast, only 21 percent prioritized jobs and the economy, while 16 percent picked education reform, and just 8 percent said health care.
What that means is that Latino voters' perceptions of whether GOP candidates will end President Obama's deferred deportation programs (i.e. DAPA and DACA) are casting a dark cloud over the entire Republican field. Fully 74 percent say the GOP presidential candidates’ commitment to ending DAPA makes them less likely to vote Republican come November; and nearly as many, 73 percent, say the same of the GOP presidential candidates' wish to end DACA.
In 2014, Tamir Rice was gunned down by Cleveland police. He was an unarmed black boy, only 12 years old.
Today it was announced that the city of Cleveland will pay $6 million to Tamir Rice's family. Early last year, Rice's family filed a wrongful death suit in federal court, and the case has now been settled. As part of the settlement, the city "acknowledges no fault in Tamir's death," according to CNN.
The wrongful death lawsuit filed by Rice's family called law enforcement's actions negligent. Unfathomably, the city's response said that Tamir was at fault. And to add insult to deadly injury, former County District Attorney Tim McGinty accused Rice's family of being too focused on money. "They’re very interesting people… let me just leave it at that… and they have their own economic motives,” McGinty said in November 2015.
This is how Tamir Rice died. Officer Timothy Loehmann fired two shots within two seconds of arriving to the scene. Literally two seconds. His car hadn't even stopped moving. Rice was hit once in the chest. No one administered CPR or first aid. Later it was discovered that Loehmann had been deemed "unfit for duty" in his previous law enforcement job.
