September 2008

  • North to Alaska—Where Organizers Roam

    Very enlightening : I came across an article today on the Minnesota Independent, an online news source, titled Palin’s Maligning Aside, Alaska’s Rife with Community Organizers. Among other tidbits, we learn from reporter Chris Steller that Palin’s state government is…

  • Community Organizing: More than 15 Minutes of Fame

    For months, I’ve been leading kind of a single-minded existence, writing a book about the little known and little understood field of community organizing through the lens of ACORN, the largest grass-roots organizing group in the country. Imagine my amazement when I looked up from my computer screen about two weeks ago and noticed that community organizing had taken center stage in the presidential campaign contratemps. Although I could hardly believe my eyes and ears, there were the Republicans’ featured speakers at their national convention, lacing into community organizing as a fringy, freaky, suspect, navel-gazing, Sixties-inspired form of self-indulgent radicalism. Or, as Mike Huckabee insinuated, the brainchild of “European ideas.” The GOP has unleashed such a barrage of bogus claims since the convention that you could be forgiven for feeling like the orchestrated series of smears against community organizing in St. Paul has been bypassed by talk of wolves, pit bulls, barracudas, and lipstick on pigs. But I’m here to tell you why it’s imperative that we keep the phony attacks against organizers in the public debate. McCain’s supporters ridiculed Obama’s community organizing work. Remember that Sarah Palin, Rudy Giuliani, and George Pataki claim to represent real Americans and to paint Barack Obama as an elitist who held a bogus job called community organizer. In making that equation, they showed ignorance and contempt for the kinds of actions that bind our democracy together and for the everyday people the Republicans claim to represent. In fact, as Alice Chasan and Peter Dreier have argued in recent Rooflines posts, the Republican strategy of smearing community organizing has backfired, unleashing an unprecedented run of sustained media interest in the role of community organizing in American life and a torrent of impassioned essays by organizers and their supporters explaining what the work has meant to them and their communities. more

  • Did the GOP Attack on Community Organizing Backfire?

    In a column on September 14, titled “Community Organizing Changed Fishery,” John Corrigan, the fishing writer for the Concord Monitor, explained that “anybody who has caught a fish at Sewalls Falls over the last two decades has witnessed the value…

  • Service Forum: McCain’s Moment of Truthiness

    Just finished watching ServiceNation’s presidential forum on national service, and I’m here to give credit where it’s due: Judy Woodruff asked John McCain to explain his running-mate’s disparaging taunts about community organizers vs. those — specifically small-town mayors — with…

  • Is It Just a Foreclosure Holiday?

    Following the United States Treasury Department’s move this week to take control of mortgage investors Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, a handful of U.S. senators Thursday showed support for a moratorium on foreclosures for loans within the two companies’ portfolios.…

  • Making Lemonade

    Here’s a great example of the law of unintended consequences: The McCain campaign’s sour, distortive targeting of community organizing in an attempt to marginalize Barack Obama as “un-American” — or as New York Gov. David Paterson and others have suggested,…

  • What Do You Make of the Fannie/Freddie Takeover?

    The markets responded well on Monday following Sunday’s announcement of Treasury’s takeover of mortgage investors Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, signaling some optimism about the long-troubled agencies. But then Tuesday the Dow quickly lost most of those gains amid resurgent…

  • McCain’s Service Problems

    Am I the only one who’s eager to see the outcome when John McCain appears at the same forum with Barack Obama on 9/11 to discuss “their views on service and civic engagement in post-9/11 America”? Yes, it’s the same John McCain whose nominating convention in St. Paul featured one speaker after another in an orchestrated series of snide, slanderous attacks on Barack Obama’s work as a community organizer in Chicago. Dubbed a “Presidential Candidates Forum,” the gathering at Columbia University is sponsored by ServiceNation, a nonprofit group that describes its mission as follows: ServiceNation is a campaign for a new America. An America where citizens unite and take responsibility for the nation’s future. An America that restores the great tradition of citizen service, and honors the profound sacrifices made by so many Americans who have passed before, from the small band of Founders to the millions who have fought for equality and justice at home, and defended our freedom abroad. ServiceNation is about an America that is ruggedly idealistic, compassionate, and above all committed to the idea of shared sacrifice in pursuit of America’s boldest promise: liberty and justice for all. I certainly hope that the moderators — PBS senior correspondent and political editor Judy Woodruff and Time magazine managing editor Richard Stengel — press McCain on his campaign’s assault on community organizing and how it jibes with the convention’s theme of “service.” It also behooves ServiceNation’s Leadership Council — an impressively bipartisan, interfaith group, ranging from well-known progressives to religious and political conservatives — to ask one of its members, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, why he took part as a featured speaker at the GOP convention in that evening of smears against Obama’s record of working at the grass-roots level to serve his fellow Americans. Observing the convention, “Daily Show” host Jon Stewart quipped that the sea of signs Republicans waved reading “service” referred to their desire for some from the wait staff at the Xcel Energy Center. Maybe Huckabee’s confused about the mission of the organization on whose board he, umm, serves. more

  • Border Patrol

    The U.S. Census Bureau recently released Income, Earnings, and Poverty Data from the 2007 American Community Survey, and with it announced a new class of America’s poorest big cities: Toledo, Memphis, Newark, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Miami, Cleveland, and…

  • GOP: Organize This!

    I kind of knew it before, but watching John McCain’s speech as I write, it’s easy to see how the GOP VP pick Sarah Palin’s speech on Wednesday was planned to be the shock-paddle portion of the McCain campaign. But holy smokes. Despite the “USA” chants, the senator’s pitch seems a predictable snooze. But not Gov. Palin’s. Hers got the crowd — dutifully positioned front and center at the Xcel Center by party handlers — all buzzed and rowdy. She got the best lines — I guess. Overall, from what I can tell, the GOP-ers evidently want us all to believe that community organizing really means sitting around in the Inner City and hanging out. Or something. Former Gov. George Pataki: “[Barack Obama] was a community organizer. What in God’s name is a community organizer? I don’t even know if that’s a job.” Rudy Giuliani: “On the other hand, you have a resume from a gifted man with an Ivy League education. He worked as a community organizer. What? [Laughter]…I said, OK, OK, maybe this is the first problem on the resume.” Ha ha: Rudy Giuliani talking about resumes. He who has turned 9/11-based “security consulting” into his own cottage — er — mansion industry. more

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    Katrina Documentary Gets Distribution in Wake of Gustav

    Fortunately, Hurricane Gustav did not turn out to be another Katrina. But as major storms go, it appears mild only by comparison. After Gustav, hundreds of thousands were without power; evacuated citizens struggled to get by in shelters; the sewers…

  • What Palin Could Have Said…

    The pushback from around the country is bracing. No sooner did NHI president John Atlas post on Rooflines, setting the record straight on community organizing, we started to hear from incensed readers from around the country. It looks like the…

  • Organizing a Counterattack

    As John Atlas has pointed out, the GOP strategy on Wednesday night was to have vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani try to discredit the purpose, effect, and overall worth of community organizing…

  • GOP Credo: Less Government, No Community Organizing?

    Ronald Reagan famously said the government is the problem, not the solution, and touted the importance of our civil society. Now we hear the party of Reagan touting government experience over that of community organizers — the people who strengthen…

  • Alinsky’s Organizing Writ Large

    I came across a letter to the editor of the Boston Globe written by L. David Alinsky, son of community-organizing pioneer Saul Alinsky. It’s worth reading what the son has to say about his father’s disciple, Barack Obama: All the…

  • NIMBYism in the Big City

    I am accustomed to think of NIMBY (“Not in my backyard”) as referring to suburban homeowners who want to keep out affordable housing, bars and cafes, public transit and anything else that smacks of urban life and might interfere with…

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    Alaska’s Pebble Mine Vote the Same Old Catch-22: Jobs or Environment

    Much attention has been on Alaska politics lately thanks to John McCain’s choice of Gov. Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate, not to mention Sen. Ted Stevens’ resounding victory in the Republican primary despite his indictment on corruption…

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