chieforganizer

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.

Any “protest” that has too many names is bound to be questionable, and that seems the case with some of the efforts to direct consumer consumption along political paths. Among the assortment I saw recently in a piece by Anand Giridharadas in the Times: “boycotting,” ethical consumerism, moral economics, latte activism, critical consumption, and “charitainment.” [My daughter, Dine’, uses a great term along a parallel path when she talks about people signing Facebook petitions for various causes: slacktivism, i.e. slacker activism. Happy birthday to her today!]

New Orleans It’s a small sample, but the Virginia bellwether and the deeply blue state New Jersey went hard Republican and in Jersey tossed a Democratic governor looking for a second shot. Across the river, New York City voters surprised the chattering political classes by almost moving Mayor Bloomberg to his next career as a philanthropist and out of his current posting as a semi-politician. A couple of thoughts crossed my mind.

Washington Being around the DC area gave me an opportunity to ply friends and associates for information on what might be happening to some other critical efforts for reform now that health care is at center stage. The votes still don’t seem there for labor law reform and there’s no push to have it jump over health care in the queue of course.

It was a lot of fun to be the guest speaker at the annual Labor Lawyers reception to support Philadelphia Jobs with Justice. It was a good, there were people, old friends and comrades came out of nowhere, and once we got to the problems of “majority unionism” as discussed in Citizen Wealth, and the questions were excellent and interesting.