Notes from the Left Coast

Drummond Pike’s Blog

Organizing and advocacy for social justice causes is hard. We all know that, and those of us who work to support such things often tire of the uphill battles. Even when we are winning, it feels so fragile. But then, every once in a while, you run across a story about how people dealt with something that just amazes you. Here’s one.

I just returned from Australia where I was with a delegation from the Organizer’s Forum, a project of Tides Center. Barbara Bowen has been working with this project for years. They get together groups of organizers – labor and community – and have 2 dialogs each year, one overseas. So this time around, our motley crew from Gamaliel Foundation, ACORN (US & Canada), British Columbia Government Employees Union, SEIU, Amalgamated Transit Union, and a Chicago group called Albany Park Neighborhood Council spend a full week in Sydney and Melbourne meeting with labour (Aussie spelling!) and community groups. Early on, we met with two women – Amanda Tattersall with Unions New South Wales and Verity Burgmann, Chair of Politics, Melbourne University – who briefed us on the history and general state of social movements in Australia in a somewhat dizzying, and brilliant, barrage on our jetlagged brains. It was in this process that we first learned about the remarkable Jack Mundey.

Born in the hot northern stretches of Australia, Mundey arrived in Sydney in the early 50’s, having left school at the age of 19. He soon became a metal worker and then a “builders’ labourer” working on the large scale construction projects in the fast growing city. He also became an ardent unionist. By 1968, this bright energetic unionist had led efforts to get the union involved in both workplace and broader social issues, including the war. Though still a young man, he was elected Secretary (leader) of the New South Wales Builder’s Labourers Federation, the major construction union based in Sydney, the largest city in Australia. By all reports, he broke the mold for union leaders, quite readily taking on issues from gay rights to feminism.

Before Earth Day 1970 put environmental issues on the public agenda in the US, Jack Mundey had developed the idea that labor unions should consider all the aspects of projects on which they worked, that, in the case of the BLF, they should consider whether buildings they were constructing would benefit the entire community and were otherwise environmentally friendly. It was a truly radical idea, and an opportunity to test it arose in 1971.

An area called Kelly’s Bush where the Parramatta River met Sydney Harbour had remained undeveloped open space between a middle class neighborhood (Hunter’s Hill) and an industrial area that had been abandoned for the suburbs in the mid-sixties. While under company control, the community had permission to access the shoreline and they had built a cricket pitch and community center. A developer, A.V. Jennings, purchased the land and proposed a massive development causing an outcry in the community. The local council rejected several designs and proposals and was under massive pressure. This led to about half of the site being purchased as a park by the State government, but increasingly scaled down plans kept appearing. Finally, with the high-rises gone, replaced by 2 dozen townhouses, public pressure ceased. All, that is, but for thirteen women who formed Friends of Kelly’s Bush. To them, all the open space should be public park.

They were active in every respect, approaching everyone from Prince Phillip, the Governor-General, the Premier, and any member of parliament they could access. Finally, they approached this young, very different, labor leader whose members would actually build the project. In classic sixties fashion, they called a community meeting to understand the depth and breadth of sentiment and learned just how strongly the neighbors still felt, even though their advocacy efforts were flagging. What happened next changed the skyline of Sydney forever, and deeply affected the evolution of civil society in Australia. Jack Mundey declared the first Green Ban. No Builders’ Labourers Federation member would work on the project because the union decided the project shouldn’t be built. Period.

The builder, of course, would have none of it. They’d bring in non-union labor and get those 25 townhouses built, union or no union. Fences went up and preparations continued, but then a funny thing happened. The BLF members working on all the other A.V. Jennings projects threatened to strike if Kelly’s Bush was plowed under for townhouses. It didn’t really take Jennings all that long to do the math, and they caved in. Finally, in 1977, the incoming Premier of NSW named Neville Wran proposed purchasing the rest of the site and declaring it a ‘State Recreation Area’ which serves the entire community to this day.

Green Bans continue to be a rarely used tool in the pocket of labor to this day. Dozens were declared in the early 70’s, though the brilliant Mundey was expelled from his union by the national leadership, to great celebration among developers and others. And many even now credit Mundey and his BLF rank and file for having preserved hundreds of historic buildings and a number of neighborhoods including the Rocks, where the city was first settled by the British displacing the many Aboriginal people whose home it had been for centuries.

The national BLF union leaders who drove Mundey and his allies out of the union were eventually convicted of corruption involving developers, though the case was later over-turned. But once sent packing, Mundey and friends never returned to power, and the Green Ban movement faltered. This was a remarkable period when labor groups forged the ability to use their considerable power for larger, non-workplace issues. Had they had a longer period in which to consolidate this ‘new way’ about thinking, organizing, and acting, it is quite possible – even probable – that labor would have developed differently in Australia in ensuing years. And, if successful there, who knows what effect it may have had internationally. Many in the US labor movement are struggling to reach out to community-based organizations to support their work. Blue Green dialogs and alliances are springing up ever since the Battle in Seattle. Apollo Alliance – an explicit green infrastructure strategy backed by both labor and the environmental community – is gaining traction and political recognition, so maybe there is hope that the lessons of the Green Ban movement can once again inform the movement for social justice.

The critical element, it seems to me, was the willingness of labor to take risks of its own rather than simply asking for support of others. In the now decades long period of shrinking union “density,” or percent of the workforce covered by collective bargaining, this may seem daunting to labor organizers. It’s hard enough to recruit members as it is. On the other hand, this could also be the key to a revitalized labor movement and a very different public profile or narrative. Unions seen as not just out for their own collective benefit, but rather committed to the welfare of the broader community, could play a very different role. Sydney’s BLF refused to work on projects they deemed against the broader interests of the community. Let’s try to imagine what that could look like here.

Note: thanks to Wikipedia’s article on Green Bans, and several papers by Verity Burgmann from the University of Melbourne: “Labour and the new social movements: the Australian story” and “a perspective on Sydney’s green ban campaign, 1970?74,” Burgmann, V. Power and Protest 1993.

Traveling outside the country, as I am, it is surprising how difficult it is to escape the imploding financial markets. The entire globe appears gripped in this drama, man-made and preventable, and the solutions being bandied about have yet to gain real traction or acceptance. I just glanced at a blog from the ever-sharp-eyed Paul Krugman who basically asks, “where’s the beef?” or, in other words, the boat as currently designed won’t float. He’s a good critic, who rarely pulls a punch, so I’ll go with that conclusion.

But what should candidates and public figures be talking about? Clearly, neither of the major party leaders seems willing to peel back the onion. Instead, McCain wants to blame someone, and Obama retires to the high ground of “this must not become a partisan issue.” While I agree with the latter to some extent, both fail the critical test: neither is willing to talk about why this happened.

There is a streak in the amazing American tradition of entrepreneurism that is both ugly and despicable. It is that element for whom greed trumps all other considerations. Think of the sub-prime crisis and how it started. The basic building blocks were mortgages pushed by what ACORN labelled “predatory lenders.” These unconscionable souls designed lending packages that they knew the customers could not repay, and then pushed them like heroin on unsuspecting, often low income and unsophisticated buyers hungry to join the “ownership society” their president talked so much about. The lenders could give a hoot about whether they borrowers could repay, especially after rates adjusted upward and teaser rate periods expired, because they had already sold the mortgage into “the system.” The system then theoretically spread the risk through all sorts of fancy deals that the Wall Street mavens convinced themselves had great value.

We all know what happened when it unraveled, but let’s remember the building blocks when we think about the solution. There were thousands of wing-tip shoed hustlers out there who took advantage of innocent people who will now suffer the most. Obama and McCain should begin talking about this in the terms that really matter. It was immoral. It was unchristian. It was despicable. It was driven by people who wanted to make a buck more than anything. They ought to be treated like drug-pushers. But street pushers are fed by conspiracies of people who create the product, and just because we call them investment houses and they technically didn’t break laws, they were as immoral as the loan pushers.

In the thirties when the banks failed because greedy bankers tried to ride the 20’s boom by taking depostors’ money and speculating with it, and got caught, bankers became the scourge of the time and were literally run out of towns they ruined. For the captains of Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and the like, that sounds like a far better idea than letting them softly land with taxpayer funded golden parachutes.

And you don’t have to be a finance wiz to figure that out.

On the plane to Sydney to meet up with the Organizer’s Forum delegation, I found myself thinking about the current economic “crisis” in contrast to the Great Depression to which it has been compared. Interesting. Yes, the current collapse of the credit markets has required a financial bailout by the federal government second only to that of the 1930’s when, after 7000 banks had failed without any compensation to depositors, Roosevelt and company restored faith in the banking system. Their solution, the FDIC, is being referred to frequently, though current proposals ought more aptly be compared to the S & L bailout under Reagan when those institutions got to unload all their bad debt on a government agency that then did what it could to recover for the taxpayers what value there remained. Such a proposal is at the base of what is currently under discussion by the White House and Congress.

Most striking about the contrast between the 30’s and now is the experience of working people. Then, between 25 and 30% of the workforce was jobless. Soup kitchens were a staple for millions. Tim Egan’s book on the Dust Bowl recounts that people worked a half a day in return for a basic meal – no cash involved. People really suffered for lack of food and shelter. One wonders, of course, just how far that might be away. Could this financial melt-down, courtesy of Wall Street hustlers and sharks, really lead to a depression, a truly broken economic system?

Some clearly believe so. David Brooks, the conservative commentator, suggested on tonight’s PBS Newshour show, that it was quite likely that even with a successful government intervention as is being discussed it is most likely that the next administration will have to deal with an extended recession. Born of the mistrust of the credit markets, he believes we will see an extended contraction, an ongoing caution among those capable of driving growth in the economy.  I wonder how long that could really go on before we begin to see double digit unemployment, before regular folks wind up needing a handout for an extended period.

The interesting political question is, in such circumstances, are we likely to see rising fortunes among organizing efforts among low income people as we did in the 30’s? Will the arbiters of mid-town – those who direct the giving of major philanthropies – take a risk on major support of people’s organizations the way they did during the Civil Rights movement? Since then, with rare exceptions, the risky nature of supporting edgy community organizing has more often than not been avoided. The idea of supporting poor people to build and wield power – arguably a key factor in driving a just response to the current crisis – can be more than a little discomfiting in the Board Room, whether you are Citibank or the Tides Foundation.

The complexities of this current crisis make it likely that the solution will bail out the bad actors and then we will all return to some semi-comfortable equilibrium. But if the powers that be are subjected to the accountability that in some ways only grassroots organizing can produce, we’ve got a much better shot at achieving real reforms, no?

Less that 7 weeks are left before one of the most important elections of our times, and it’s a dead heat. Wow. Usually by this time, there is a clear front-runner and the other candidate is trying to hard to catch up. But however the next number of weeks turns out, the one thing progressives should care most about is turnout. Regardless of the outcome, whoever wins will not prevail in a courtroom (God forbid), but they will preside over a fractured polity. America is as divided as it has ever been on any number of measures – culturally, racially, economically, and any other measure you might choose to employ.

Governing a divided country is not easy, nor has it ever been. If one can at least look back and note that more people voted than at other times – both in absolute numbers and as a proportion of qualified voters – the task will be somewhat easier. If one can also say that votes were counted without controversy, even better.

So what can we do?
This week, we are reaching out to any and all who share this view to support the Tides Voter Action Fund, our election protection initiative that support non-partisan, 501(c)(3) organizations working to increase both turnout and election integrity.  We feel this is important and we hope you will join us.

Tides has always encouraged our donors to support efforts to increase civic participation among low income communities, young people, single women, immigrants, and communities of color. Already in 2008, the Tides Voter Action Fund has granted more than $3.5 million toward these efforts.

If you are interested, please contact me or anyone at Tides and we will direct you on how you can help. There are some fantastic organizations out there which are working tirelessly on these issues.  You can get more specific information about the strategy and the grantees of the Tides Voter Action Fund here at TidesFoundation.org.

I’m a good way into Timothy Egan’s excellent The Worst Hard Time, a history of the Dust Bowl and its survivors, those gritty people who hung on and lived through one of the worst man-made disasters of all time. It truly is an amazing tale. First, how the boom in wheat prices drove speculators and real estate sharpies to plow up the prairie for perceived short term profits, and then kept plowing up more ground to compensate for falling prices as the market got saturated. Banks, largely unregulated at the time, took depositors’ funds and invested them in the frenzy, leading to the failure of thousands of banks. And then, the drought hit and went on for 6 years. No rain and scant snow across vast areas of northern Texas, Oklahoma, and elsewhere. And the land just blew away. Dust storms were so thick, drivers had to navigate from one telephone pole to the next. In less than a decade, people in the mid-west subdivided cattle ranches into homesteads, ripped up the grass for wheat, briefly made huge profits, and then sank into inexorable poverty as the rains deserted them, and the soil took flight.

Though Egan doesn’t focus on politics much, it is interesting when he does. Hoover, elected in 1928, declared in an early address, “Americans are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of the land.” Then, as the Dust Bowl and collapse of the stock market took their toll, Hoover was forever saying that we are about to turn the corner back to prosperity, as though his wish for it would make it so. “All the evidences indicate that the worst effects of the crash on unemployment will have passed during the next sixty days,” he declared on March 3, 1930 (p. 95). Egan goes on, “By the end of that year, eight million people were out of work. The banking system was in chaos. The big financial institutions had once looked invincible, with the stone fronts, the copper lights, the marbled floors, run by the best people in town. Now bankers were seen as crooks, fraud artists who took people’s homes, their farms, and their savings. In 1930, 1350 banks failed….The next year, 2294 banks went bust.” The political seachange that occurred in 1932 was unlike any other we saw in the 20th Century.

I’ve been thinking about Egan’s book as I listen to the many convention speeches about what is right and what is wrong with America from the perspective of the two major parties. Democrats see a people who need more from their government. They seem to want a government that plays a balancing role by regulating markets, a government that provides opportunity and a safety net, and a government that works. Republicans seem to want less government, less taxes, and less regulation of business, despite their record of having grown government with huge deficits over recent years. It was fascinating indeed to watch their Vice Presidential candidate decry special interest funding while she has pursued earmarks in Washington for her city and hired lobbyists to garner a share at the federal trough.

It would be very difficult to argue that we face in 2008 circumstances even remotely like those of 1931 when a quarter of the population was unemployed. Our economy may not be zipping along, but it is not in the tank (despite the best efforts of the sub-prime lending hustlers). The challenge, though, is how to galvanize public action on two related issues that will require a political shift in will as occurred with the election of Roosevelt in 1932; those issues are climate change and energy independence. Right now, it doesn’t seem likely that those issues will affect the election much in one way or another, but if you talk with any experts in those fields, the globe must curtail the growth of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere or the climate system will spin out of control with unforeseeable results – mostly catastrophic, one might imagine.

Somehow, chants such as one heard last night – “Drill, baby, drill!!!” – seem unlikely to move us in the right direction.

Unlike most of my trips in the Grand Canyon, this year we stopped at Phantom Ranch to let hikers off and to meet new guests for the second half. Most often, we simply float by, eschewing the opportunity to call home from the one phone accessible to river runners during the trip. After putting one of Tides’ longtime clients on a mule to ride out (he’s recovering from knee surgery), I called home. No answer. Then I called Ellen Friedman, Tides wonderful EVP, to find out how things were going at the office. Big mistake.

I learned from her that the NY Times had published the story identifying me as the person who purchased the note held by ACORN obligating Dale Rathke to repay money he had stolen 8 years ago. I was shocked, both by the news and by Ellen’s depiction of the deep, unsettling response the news provoked among staff, board members, and among some of our clients and allies. And there was nothing I could do. A line of other river runners was waiting to use the phone, and our hikers, including my daughter, were waiting a half-mile downstream. I simply had to take it in and imagine what was happening back home.

This occurred on the 22nd – day seven of our two week trip. Phantom Ranch sits at the confluence of Bright Angel Creek and the Colorado River in the middle of what is known as the Upper Granite Gorge, a section of the Canyon where the river’s extraordinary erosive power has revealed in one of the few sites on the globe the “metamorphic” rock that underlies our oceans and continents. Formed by the pressure and heat of the earth’s core, the Vishnu Shist is a hard, black, intense rock that erodes at near vertical angles and produces the most challenging rapids of the trip.

Three hours after talking with Ellen, we arrived at Crystal Rapid, one of the most dangerous runs of the trip. After an upper section where one has to avoid a series of huge “holes” (where the main current flows over obstacles below and then recirculates, making passage without flipping a boat highly unlikely), the river then divides around a “rock garden” into two separate channels. It is this rock garden that terrifies people. Already this year, three boats have wrapped on rocks and stranded passengers and crew alike – requiring helicopter rescues and huge effort to extricate them. For a river guide, to go into the rock garden is a failure. It means you made a bad decision, you reacted poorly, you failed to read the water, and you messed up big time. The whole trip is stalled for a day or two during the rescue, and then has to run out the rest of the trip as quickly as possible to make the scheduled take out day at Diamond Creek, 127 miles away.

Dwelling on my call with Ellen while running three major rapids leading up to Crystal, I was distracted and off. And my daughter, having just hiked in, was my passenger. At the scout, I looked very carefully at the “river right” entry to Crystal and the upper part of the rapid because we were running at nearly 20,000 cubic feet per second – nearly twice the level we’ve been seeing over recent years. It’s a different run that I hadn’t done in 5 or 6 years. So I was very careful. But I failed to scout the lower part of the rapid. I didn’t see how at this level the water moved strongly to the right, and to miss the Rock Garden, you had to keep working the boat right as strongly as you can. At lower levels, once through the upper section, you can simply push left and have a clean run, but not at 20,000.

We clambered back into the boats and began to peel off, trying to catch the entry just right. I thought I timed it a little late, and we ended up on the side of one of the big holes, but squeezed through and had a clean run. Whew. Now it was just a matter of choosing to go right or left above the Garden. I’d come out a little more center than the others, so I started to push left in relief we’d made it through.

At the top of the Rock Garden is a rock called “big red” – a huge piece of sandstone that has tumbled down here over the thousands of years from way up on the Rim. As I was pushing left in relief at having gotten through the upper section, I glanced downstream at Big Red and realized that I was floating straight into it. I acted quickly and spun the boat around so I could pull, instead of push, on the oars giving me much more leverage. But pull as I might, the water wanted to go right and my raft, weighing at least half a ton, was losing the bet. I began to curse at myself. How could I have been so stupid?! I was putting my daughter at risk, I was embarrassing myself, I was about to wrap a boat on Big Red like a rookie, private boater, and it was all my fault for not having walked downstream and looked at the water. A simple step that would have given me the information I needed to make a good decision. And, I was terrified.

I stopped pulling on the oars as I looked to both the left and right of Red to see that the left side of the Rock Garden was unrunnable. So was the right, but there was more water going that direction, so I got in a couple of push strokes on the oars – not a lot of leverage, but some, as we bounced into Big Red. Thunk. One more stroke in the water moving to Red’s right, and then we were stopped dead on a large grey rock – perched as they call it. Going nowhere, but somehow the tubes stayed afloat and we didn’t wrap the boat. I recalled the kind of technical moves we use in the Sierras, dipped my right, upstream oar into the fast moving water, and miraculously, we spun off, bounced over several other pour-overs, and were back in the current.

Lessons learned? I could write a book, there have been so many.

Two come immediately to mind: first, confidentiality is largely a 20th century idea that is entirely unreliable in the modern, technical age. My attempts to act personally on my convictions would have been far better done in the full light of day where I could have been clear I was simply trying to help the new leadership of ACORN move on. I created many more difficulties, including with colleagues I hold in the highest esteem, by trying to be anonymous.

Lesson two: never call the office when you are running rapids.

While this blog reflects my personal opinions, it is also an institutional vehicle for Tides and should reflect the institutional positions of the organization–which is why I am removing this post.

Buried away in our non-profit bunker, where things political are verboten, some of us struggle with how to hold true to our commitments and values. So, let me begin by saying that I do not advocate on behalf of either of the presidential candidates. This is my day job, and I’m simply not allowed to do that – a fair trade for all the privileges that accompany the non-profit status of my employer. But another tenet of my employment is that Tides has organizationally stood by the cause of racial justice for decades. It is with that in mind that I share these thoughts.

Over the weekend, a brouhaha emerged over John McCain’s assertion that Barack Obama had played the “race card” when, in a stump speech he’s used for some time, he suggested that the other side would “try to make you scared of me” by saying he’s “not patriotic enough,” he has “a funny name,” and that he doesn’t “look like a lot of those other presidents on dollar bills.” It’s a stretch (more…)

As some of you know, we had this little conference a week ago called Momentum. It was amazing.

The idea was to bring together leaders in the progressive community and expose them to one another and to a set of speakers capable of sharing some of the most important emerging thinking about ideas and policies, and the tools, strategies, and ways of seeing they get considered. To do this, we chose to take a risk: do everything in plenary sessions, limit speakers to 18 minutes each, severely limit introductions and have no questions or comments from the audience. Instead, we created ample “open space” that permitted speakers and participants to explore ideas and topics that folks were interested in. We also mixed in music and art as much as we could.
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Sy Hersh’s recent piece (New Yorker Magazine, July 7 & 14 , 2008 Issue) is one of the most frightening pieces I have read in years. In it, with his deft storytelling, he paints a picture of a struggle between the military command structure and the White House (primarily Dick Cheney) that has been pursuing an independent strategy to destabilize Iran.

Two things astonish: first, what was long thought a settled matter about the ability of the military command structure to oversee all field activities involving the use of lethal force, particularly important in a theater of operations such as the Middle East where what happens in a neighboring country can have very direct impact on our troops on the ground, turns out not to be the case. After all the scandals involving White House sanctioned “special operations,” Congress finally locked down the ability for independent action outside the military lines of command via the 1986 Defense Reorganization Actl…or did it? Remember the Iran Contra debacle? (more…)