chieforganizer

New Orleans One day I write that receiving food stamps is the “new normal,” as we say in New Orleans, and the next day there’s a front page story in the Sunday Times by Jason DeParle and Robert Gebeloff with a headline that includes the words: “stigma fades.” Wow! Am I ahead of the curve or what?

Living in the world’s richest country, it is now normal for children to need assistance at some point during their childhood. This is a right of passage in America.

New Orleans The Wall Street Journal published a chart in Monday’s paper based on information from First American Home Core Logic, a real estate information service in Santa Ana, California in Orange County which was the heartland of the sub-prime industry. The chart indicated that between 1 in 4 and 1 in 5 (22.6%) home mortgage holders are “underwater” on their homes with negative equity. In simple terms these 10.7 Million homeowners now owe more money on their home than the home is currently worth.

Memphis The lecture was the 2nd in a series commemorating the 100th anniversary of city planning in America, so 40 years in hundreds of city streets and Citizen Wealth and its themes were perfectly suited to the interests of students and civilians at the University of Memphis. I had warned my hosts that some of the excitement that came with me was unpredictable, but there was no reason to expect that there would be problems. Sunday night had been special and there were few clouds on the horizon other than some snarky comments on the Commercial Appeal site that carried an announcement that I was speaking.

New Orleans More than 20 years ago every month or so I would drive from New Orleans across the River and down to Bayou Lafourche until I got to Galliano, then I would pull into a lot paved with oyster shells. In a small nondescript building there hardly noticeable among the working shrimp boats tied up along the pretty bayou, I would work with an association of shrimpers and fishers hardly making a living on the water and trying to organize. I did it partially as a favor for a good guy who worked with the Houma-Thibodaux Catholic diocese who had helped these folks get a Catholic Campaign for Human Development grant to see if they could get something going. I saw it as a form of giving back and a rich learning experience about the hard work, trials and tribulations of making a living on the rich fishery of the south Louisiana.

Easthampton, MA I didn’t like paying for the privilege but the chance to hear Congressman and House Financial Services Committee Chair Barney Frank pontificate to the faithful at the annual dinner of several small town committees in the Democratic Party heartland of Western Massachusetts was too good to miss. I also wrongly thought that this might be a small affair of 30-50 folks giving me a chance to actually pull the Congressman’s lapels and ask him to account for some of his actions recently where he has flip flopped on the Community Reinvestment Act and on how to deal with ACORN.

Bill Gunn, the leader of the Western Massachusetts 912project.org and Tea Party protestors at my presentations at Springfield College and UMass at Amherst, had written me an email and invited (challenged?) me to be interviewed by him and some of his friends at the local cable access station for Comcast in the Palmer and Wilbraham areas not far east of Springfield. I had told him that “sure,” if we can schedule it, I would be glad to create a dialogue between us. Billy had also been the primary disrupter who had jumped up as I had walked to the lectern, so although we had never been formally introduced, we certainly knew a little about each other. Regardless, I found myself at 4 PM navigating the directions to the studio in this faded old railroad depot town not far off the Mass Pike.

Williamstown I did two short hitches at Williams College before going over the fence for good a long, long time ago, so it was with mixed feelings that I returned to talk to a couple of groups of smart students and their dynamic faculty members. I’m not sure what I think about it quite, but it was educational for me in some surprising ways, so here’s some notes:

Once I showed up at Gordon Hall at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Professor Dan Clawson and others shared with me a message they had printed from the internet of the 9/12 projects strategy for disrupting my talk on “Workers and the Poor: Lessons for Organizing in the Age of Obama and Globalization.” Supposedly they were going to wait until 15 minutes into my remarks before disrupting. They wanted to make sure that they had different people inside than were at Springfield College so that they weren’t recognized. Faculty and staff scurried around to make sure they were ready for whatever might happen. An undercover campus cop was in the audience and ready if there were problems.

There is a lot of talk about reforming credit card fees and rates, but a lot of this seems just that: talk. The House Financial Services Committee chaired by Barney Frank has talked about capping rates, but also seems powerless in the wake of many companies (including my own Union Privilege Card offered by HSBC to the best of my knowledge!) raising the fees now ahead of any bill passage. That’s clearly wrong.