Notes from the Left Coast

Drummond Pike’s Blog

I’ve spent the last couple of months working harder, and more excitedly, on something than I ever have, at least so far as my aging, addled memory can recall. It is, believe it or not, all about a repurposed conference that Tides has done a couple of times before. Momentum. Now, you might ask, why in the world would a normal person get so exercised about organizing a conference? Here’s why.

I graduated from college in 1970 in the middle of Nixon’s first term (he was impeached during his 2nd). At the time, the Woodstock generation was in ascendancy and grinding through a social change agenda as though ordained by the gods. Civil rights had finally come to people of color, farmworkers had succeeded in forming a union (still hard fought by agribusiness), the women’s movement was emerging as a force to change seemingly intractable traditions, and the Vietnam War seemed to linger just to remind us why attaining and exercising power was so important. For me personally, Bobby Kennedy’s race in 1968 inspired a sense of what was possible, despite his tragic assassination. Looking forward, at 21, to the coming years, I was so certain that our generation was going to transform American society into an enlightened, tolerant, moral force in the world. How could it not? (more…)

I was amazed yesterday to learn that someone actually reads these blogs out there. Turns out that I’d tried to make a point - one that I believe in - but that I’d done so in a flip manner. Institutions, it turns out, are people. And people react to being criticized. All very normal. It would help, of course, if I could learn to remember this when writing about others.

So, I wrote a blog about the Chronicle of Philanthropy and the controversy about a column they published on structural racism - a relatively new and, in many circles, respected analysis. Its title included the name of Reverand Wright - the controversial former pastor of Barack Obama’s now former church. In both the column and in the lengthy response to numerous letters to the Editor, the author sprinkled quite liberally references to both Obama and (more…)

Wade Rathke has done something some would never have predicted. Resigned as ACORN’s Chief Organizer. Who ever would have imagined?

I met Wade in 1972, as best I can recall. Marge Tabankin and I were running the Youth Project (she was my boss) and had developed a bit of a competition to find the most impressive new organizers “out there.” The YP, begun in the Center for Community Change’s basement, was an operation to leverage foundation $$ into community organizing that involved young people – an attempt to bring the national movements of the day down into the everyday lives of disenfranchised communities. I came up with Mike Miller from Organize, Inc. in SF – a skilled, talented follower of Saul Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation approach: parish based, working class organizing. Alinsky had defined the field in many ways and his Rules for Radicals was found on the shelves of an entire college generation at the time. Margie’s choice was this kid named Wade Rathke.
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An interesting report in this morning’s NY Times: “Challenging the IRS” which describes an emerging aggressive strategy by the “Alliance Defense Fund” (described as “a conservative legal group”) that is recruiting 50 pastors across the country to engage in simultaneous electoral advocacy on September 28th. The purpose, it is suggested, is to raise the visibility of the issue of the IRS prohibition on tax exempt organizations, including churches, from express advocacy for or against candidates running for public office.

As we all know, over the past 28 years or more, we have seen a rising, often very conservative, element in the faith community engaging closer and closer to the line separating church and state. This time honored principle in American democracy seems to matter less to the likes of Bill Keller, the evangelist whose “Liveprayer.com” is under investigation because he admonished his followers that “a vote for Romney was a vote for Satan.” (more…)

This has been one weird week. As fuel prices rise, I feel like I’m a one man band causing scarcity across the country. Here’s the past week:

Last Friday, flew to Chicago at the end of a busy day in SF and overnighted at the O’Hare Hilton. Now there’s a fun time. At least I avoided the tunnel and broke out into the big outdoors to a fantastic 70 degree evening in Chicago. Gorgeous weather as I crossed the traffic bound street to some odd stares of a couple of cabbies. Up early the next day to catch a plane to Hartford, Conn. where, thank the goddess, Kim had hired a car to get me to the Threshold meeting in an obscure NW corner of the state in Lakeville. Turned out the previous day they’d been hit with a storm that left dozens of stately trees lying across streets and driveways. Looked like a tornado had hit. Jumped into the Threshold swirl, as Ann B. once termed it, and helped out with orientation. Had a great walk with my old friend, Roger Miliken from Maine. Once my partner on a wilderness fast for four nights alone in the White Mountains, he’s become a regular guide for others in a questing frame of mind. Found myself drawn back to that deep time, as Roger and I walked in pitch black darkness down to the lake and caught up.

Threshold has become a treasure and a long time partner/ally of Tides, and both of us have thrived from the synergy. I was remarking to John H., who is just finishing up with his (more…)

There has been a battle raging in the philanthropic rag, “Chronicle on Philanthropy” that was inspired by a fear-mongering conservative named William Schambra of the Bradley Center for Philanthropy and Civic Renewal at the Hudson Institute. He started with the worst of fear-mongering which you can derive from the title to his prominent editorial, “Philanthropy’s Jerimiah Wright Problem.” The article basically tried to equate Wright’s outlandish rhetoric (albeit taken out of context) with a body of very thoughtful work being done by a number of non-profits and foundations that addresses an emerging analysis called structural racism. (more…)

From the front page of the NY Times today described the first day of the economic policy debate that will likely dominate the upcoming presidential campaigns. Why? Simple: folks are hurting. For all the good and bad things happening in the world, it’s pretty clear that no amount of social “wedge issues,” like gay marriage, choice, or whether America is a “Christian country” or not, will obscure the pain of the subprime meltdown or $4 gasoline. Cooper and Rohter in the Times wrote, “It is a battle between Republican supply-side economics and a Democratic tradition that uses government levers to try to reduce inequality and spur the economy.” Indeed, this may well emerge as the clearest ideologically-based choice voters have had since 1932.

We have had for nearly 3 decades an unchallenged rhetoric that argues that we have to “free up” capital by lowering taxes on investments (capital gains) in order to stimulate the economy. While progressives have been shouting unheard into the media wind that real wages have been flat for YEARS and that letting the rich get richer doesn’t really help working people, somehow the notion hasn’t gotten traction that the economic policy elite wasn’t really moving on the right set of tracks. Some, like ex-Nixon speech writer Kevin Phillips, have been decrying the emergence of a new Golden Age, more similar to the 1890’s or 1920’s when the rich were fabulously so, while ordinary folks wallowed unable to get ahead. This disparity between the rich and the poor, he argued in Wealth and Democracy, threatens democracy at its roots when the wealthy gain unfettered access to the power of government, turning it to their purposes.

So, have Naomi Klein’s “disaster capitalists” been hiding out in the candy store after hours, gorging themselves on no-bid contracts, crop subsidies, military cost overruns, and government policy aided media monopolies? Sure seems so. Just listen to Larry Lessig on the toxic power of lobbyists, or Dan Rather on why corporate interests, particularly conglomerates that own some media but also a lot of other things, have everything to gain from a muzzled media. News has become all-Paris Hilton all the time. And meanwhile, who has noticed the corruption that seems to have broken out in DC?

Let’s hope the people have, and maybe that’s why folks are finally looking so closely at the economy as we enter this election process. How refreshing!

Someone to watch closely on this: Jason Furman, the new economic policy guy in the Obama campaign. Labor folks are unhappy with his strong ties to Robert Rubin, the bigtime Wall Street insider and former Secretary of the Treasury under Clinton.

One of my Sunday morning rituals is to read Frank Rich’s column in the NY Times “Week in Review” section. Rich is such a refreshing voice these days, speaking truth to power in such an erudite fashion, and how necessary he is now that the doyens of public opinion have decided to add William Kristol to the regular weekly line-up of pundits. The latter seems caught between competing shortcomings: often on the facts, but now increasingly on their interpretation.

But it is neither Rich nor Kristol that caught my attention this Sunday. No, it was…..the “Public Editor”! This fellow, Clark Hoyt, is intended to referee when folks get factually out of line – often relatively minor transgressions. But this column – hmmm – how to say? It was mind-blowing. You see there was this column on May 12th authored by one Edward N. Luttwak, the military historian, in which he basically said that Obama would be unwelcome in the Muslim world because he was an “apostate” for having rejected his father’s religion and followed his mother’s Christian tradition. He argued quite convincingly that nothing could retrieve Obama from his fate and that he would be subject to assassination that authorities in Muslim countries could do nothing about because Islam sanctions the murder of apostates. For those of us who so want Obama, or anyone else, to return the U.S. to a positive and respected role in the international community, the column was disturbing to say the least, for it undermined our hopes for a renewed era of international comity.

So….more than TWO WEEKS LATER….it all turns out to be a bunch of hooey. Check out Hoyt’s column yourself. He couldn’t find an Islamic scholar who agreed with this wacko historian Luttwak. Not a one. And the editors of the Times? It turned out they hadn’t even asked a scholar to comment. They “consulted the Koran” (the editors, that is) and reviewed articles, but no experts were sought out. One actually might begin to question the judgment of the Times’ Editorial Board, if I can say such a blasphemous thing. Does that make me an apostate?