Voting, The Least You Can Do To Change The World. The Very Least.

The day after Howie Hawkins lost his bid to become the 4th District representative on the city’s Common Council, his 15th unsuccessful run for political office, he got arrested at a direct action protest in favor of a single-payer health insurance system.

All I can say is, “Welcome home to direct action protest, brother!”

During the past month I have been involved in helping to organize a large national protest against the American Banker’s Association, while simultaneously volunteering for the Stephanie Miner campaign for Mayor of Syracuse. My contributions to each function were relatively small, but each gave me a glimpse at how activists and politicians view the social change biz. I realize that I belong with the activists.

Since I’ve become an organizer I’ve shied away from involvement in political campaigns–mainly because my free time is limited what with the odd hours and evening meetings that organizing requires. As much as I wanted (and needed) Barack Obama to win last November, my contributions to that campaign were limited to a lawn sign, signing up for the website and casting my vote.

I got involved with the Miner campaign for selfish reasons–I know her and I know that she understands the housing, crime and development issues that I confront in my work life as an organizer. If Stephanie won this election, my job would perhaps become easier–Syracuse would have a mayor that is on our side. So I signed up as a volunteer–nothing fancy, making phone calls every week and being a phone bank captain on election day. But, I was on board.

I’m very happy that Stephanie won and I am hopeful that our city will embark on a new and more intelligent course–systematically dealing with the issues I care about. But I am under no illusions. Change doesn’t come at the ballot box, it comes from the pressure put on the politicians by everyday citizens. That’s why I organize. It might be easier to get a meeting now and the new folks at City Hall will undoubtedly be brighter and more responsive. But it doesn’t guarantee change.

In a Republic, we elect politicians we think will do what we want them to do. But there is no contract and most politicians face a fractured electorate with conflicting viewpoints. If I want something accomplished, I stand a much greater chance of seeing it happen by organizing people to fight for it, rather than hoping that the politician I voted for (and maybe even volunteered for) agrees with me.

This Is A True Statement, Not A Joke.

This is a true statement, not a joke.

I don’t usually read the right-wing cartoon Mallard Fillmore, but the community organizer reference caught my eye. The humor intended by the cartoonist is what he sees as a distinction made by liberals that is an equivalence in the minds of conservatives.

To my mind, there is no equivalence in the efforts of talk radio to rouse their rabble of an audience and a community organizer’s traditional efforts to agitate, educate, and organize because the talk radio crowd only does one part of the trilogy, agitate.

Talk radio DJ’s foment the whack jobs and the result is senior citizens receiving Medicare complaining about about the government takeover of their health care and people carrying signs of Obama made to look like Hitler. (Obviously ignorant of Lennonist philosophy–”if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao/You ain’t gonna make it with anyone, anyhow.”)

Organizers educate folks about why the problem exists and where the power lies to make the change that’s needed. So, yes, community organizers mobilize concerned citizens and talk radio mobilizes angry mobs.

But then, that suits each groups ultimate purpose. Organizers are trying to create a powerful organization, led by grassroots people, arguing on their own behalf to enact positive change. Talk radio just wants to get people to bloviate and tune in to their show so they can sell more advertisements.

It is interesting to see that the difference between this summer and last summer when the GOP convention tried to demonize community organizing, is now the right wants to organize too! But it’s also nice to see that the right-wing still doesn’t have a clue about organizing and how to go about doing it themselves.

Community Organizing Is Now Hip! God Help Us.

Last Sunday, community organizing was the subject of a New York Times article in the . . . wait for it, Fashion & Style section.

This is the section described by Jack Shafer of Slate thusly:

If the New York Times’ Sunday Styles were a hairdo, it would be a wig. If it were on the menu, it would be a meringue. If it were a retail outlet, it would be Spencer’s Gifts. As a mélange of fashion notes, celebrity reporting, personal essays, and piffle, Sunday Styles resembles the old-fashioned supermarket tabloids in that it knows that it’s a stinking pile of entertaining trash and makes no apologies for it.

So, organizing is right up there with man dates, trucker hats and other important trends.

For a better take on why young people are looking at organizing careers, check out Peter Dreier’s blog post at Talking Points Memo. Dreier is a professor at Occidental College and teaches a course on organizing, as well as being the director of the Urban & Environmental Policy program at the college.

Learning To Take A Punch

Well, I didn’t see this one coming. I wrote up a position paper on a current topic under debate in Albany that will have an impact on our neighborhoods. Not a huge deal, my organization planned to release the statement to the media and ship it off to our representatives in the Senate and Assembly, and then call it a day.

My organization has worked on this issue in a related way for several years, so I figure this will not be too controversial. I spend about two hours of my time doing a little internet research and drafting the one page statement. All policy statements such as this need to be approved by our Board of Directors. I give it to our director in time for last night’s meeting, expecting to do a little work on the approved edition this morning.

It was voted down, apparently overwhelmingly. I’m stunned. The position of the Board on this issue is wrong, and it’s going to come back to bite our neighborhood in the ass.

That’s grassroots democracy for you. A messy thing. But that’s what I signed on for–to empower people to make their own decisions. Even if they are what I believe to be wrong. Very wrong.

Hard to get happy after this one.

“Community Organizers Are The New Oilmen.”

Great article in the Washington Post recently about the effect that Barack Obama’s election has had on community organizers. That “hope” that Obama kept talking about seems more realistic now, especially for organizers toiling in the trenches.

All I know is that the annual convention for the organizing network that my neighborhood organization belongs to is coming up at the end of March. For years, we have been trying to get Congress to modernize the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA): strengthening the rules guaranteeing lending equity in low-income neighborhoods and extending new regulations over the “shadow” banking industry of sub-prime lenders that has remained beyond the reach of CRA. We made no progress.

Now, in discussions with House and Senate staffers working on banking issues prior to the convention, we aren’t being asked to justify the need for stronger regulations and more expansive equity rules, we’re being asked for the language we want in the bills and the names of neighborhood folks that can testify at hearings on their behalf.

As the Washington Post states:

There’s never been a better time to do what they do: Be an obscure, idealistic, possibly burned-out toiler in a broken neighborhood or a starving country hollow, those American battlegrounds where faith is fragile and clear-cut victories are rare.

And to quote another noted philosopher, Dee Snider of Twisted Sister:

I WANNA ROCK!!!

Hope Dies Last. Thanks, Studs.

Studs Terkel died at the age of 96 on Friday. Studs was an author, actor, disc jockey, radio talk show host and general raconteur–the toast of Chicago for decades.

But he was also a man of the left, unapologetic and proud to stand up for those less fortunate. The best anecdote I’ve read in the reams of tributes coming in was from Garry Wills, a friend and fellow author who claimed that Studs was envious of his wife Ida, an anti-war activist and social worker, because her F.B.I. file was thicker than his!

Studs was perhaps best known for popularizing and expanding the practice of oral history–a form he often called guerilla journalism. His interviews with scores of people on subjects such as race relations, World War 2, the Great Depression and the nature of work were notable for one main reason–he wasn’t limiting his interviews to a small coterie of “experts.” His conversations included the housewives, soldiers, iron workers, bartenders, the homeless–the people who live history rather than interpret history.

I am most thankful to Studs Terkel for his 2003 oral history “Hope Dies Last.” It is a collection of conversations with activists–organizers, social workers, union folks, seminarians, politicians: those people who fight the good fight to help others. It is a business that I’ve been involved in for close to fifteen years. It is a business that is frustrating, confusing and heartbreaking, in equal measure to the times it is inspiring, ennobling and satisfying. Studs’ conversations show us the good with the bad and acknowledges the importance of the work, despite the long odds:

Activists have always battled the odds. But it’s not a matter of Sisyphus rolling that stone up the hill. It’s not Beckett’s blind Pozzo staggering on. It’s more like a legion of Davids, with all sorts of slingshots. It’s not one slingshot that will do it. Nor will it happen at once. It’s a long haul. It’s step by step. As Mahalia Jackson sang out “We’re on our way”–not to Cannon Land perhaps, but to the world as a better place than it has been before.

If You’re Not Building Power, It’s Not Organizing

I happened across an interesting post on the Skaneateles Talk site entitled “Community Organizing, Making A Difference.” The post was a nicely written story about how some energetic kids’ attempts to clean up a couple streets in the community fed others to think about expanding the effort. Great idea, positive message–but it’s not community organizing.

Ever since the brouhaha over community organizing erupted in the Presidential campaign, (see SRITS coverage of the skirmish here, here, here, here, and here.) some people have been throwing around the term “community organizing” in a very loose way.

For some people, community organizing was every can drive, cub scout jamboree, PTA bake sale and Earth Day clean-up in a community. The warm, fuzzy feelings engendered by this linking of civic do-goodism and community organizing wasn’t explicitly called out, because it was such a good way to trash the GOP and score some political brownie points.

Let’s be clear, community organizing happens when citizens come together in an organization whose collective power will enable them to negotiate with politicians, bureaucrats and corporations to remedy perceived injustices. Creating collective power is important because it is the only response available to low income citizens as an antidote to the power wielded by those with wealth and social status.

If the story cited in Skaneateles Talk was community organizing, the children would have organized a protest against the village Mayor and DPW for inadequate trash pick up, requested a meeting to discuss the issue and then gotten a public commitment for increased trash pick up and a special crew to deal with litter. Sometimes it’s easier to go pick the trash up yourselves, but that begs the question of why the area is always so trashy (and often why the neighborhood the Mayor lives in is not trashy.)

Obama, Organizing and Getting Out The Vote

This is where we will most clearly see the influence of Obama’s community organizing background on his campaign. Obama has invested time, effort and money in creating a volunteer structure to do two things: register people to vote and then get them to the polls. Registration has been a whopping success with numbers that far outweigh Republican efforts–especially in key battleground states.

The Obama machine now moves into “get out the vote” drive. And make no mistake, this is a machine, but not your father’s GOTV machine. This is not a “flood the zone with orange hat college kids” type of door knocking. The canvass is staffed with local folks, managed by more local volunteers with advanced organizing training, overseen by regional organizers with specific goals for contacts. The whole operation is abetted by state of the art technology that allows the campaign to target specific voters, rapidly disseminate information and run a concurrent phone outreach program.

Two recent articles in the media have touched on this part of the campaign. The Washington Post looks at the nuts and bolts, while Zack Exley (one of the founders of MoveOn.org) in a piece on The Huffington Post entitled “The New Organizers” looks more in depth at how organizing principles animate both the operation and the participants–a force of volunteers that will power progressive movements for years to come:

Then, at the end of our meeting, my neighborhood team leader, Jennifer Robinson, totally unprompted, told me: “I’m a different person than I was six weeks ago.” I asked her to elaborate later. She said, “Now, I’m really asking: how can I be most effective in my community? I’ve realized that these things I’ve been doing as a volunteer organizer—well, I’m really good at them, I have a passion for this. I want to continue to find ways to actively make this place, my community, a better place. There’s so much more than a regular job in this—and once you’ve had this, it’s hard to go back to a regular job. I’m asking now: Can I look for permanent work as an organizer in service of my community? And that’s a question I had not asked myself before the campaign. It never occurred to me that I could even ask that question.”

Social Work v. Organizing

text of a poster I recently saw on the office wall of a union organizer:

If you give me a fish
you have fed me for a day

If you teach me to fish
then you have fed me until the river is contaminated
or the shoreline seized for development

But if you teach me to organize
then whatever the challenge
I can join together with my peers
and we will fashion our own solution

I’m A Thug!

The right-wing response to the community organizer backlash against the Republicans is in full swing. One such effort really made my day.

This is how Investors Business Daily (IBD) characterized National People’s Action, a national organizing network that counts SUN as a dues-paying member:

“National People’s Action, or NPA, a particularly thuggish group of Alinskyite agitators who sing the following ditty when picketing the homes of business and government leaders: “Who’s on your hit list, NPA? Who’s on your hit list of today? Take no prisoner, take no names. Kick ‘em in the ass when they play their games.”

N.P.A. is also the group that is responsible for the creation and passage of the Community Reinvestment Act, federal legislation requiring banks covered by FDIC loan insurance to make loans in neighborhoods from which they receive deposits.

What really made my day was how Investors Business Daily tried to discredit organizers and organizations of N.P.A’s ilk:

Some community organizers are well-meaning and harmless. But not the ones Obama threw in with. They intimidate and agitate for more government home loans, more government job programs, a ban on police profiling, more benefits for illegal aliens, felon voting rights, minimum wage hikes, “environmental justice” and so on.

Again, thank you for making my day IBD–spin doctors for the running dog capitalist oligarchs!