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.

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.

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…)

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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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?

Yesterday morning’s NY Times editorial on the embarrassing revelations that the National Security Council deliberated on the specific “harsh interrogation methods” (that were to be applied in specific cases) reminded me of Michael Kieschnick’s blog a week ago. Provocatively entitled, “Which Torture Method did Cheney Prefer?” it got me thinking.

My response? Simple: dogs. Big, barking, threatening dogs straining at their leashes wanting to sink their teeth into kneeling, naked, blind-folded prisoners. Yes, I’m quite sure of it. Cheney is a hunter guy. He even shoots guns, as his friend Harry Whittington can attest (they say all the birdshot was successfully removed). So, it’s my guess that Cheney made sure they used dogs to “harshly” interrogate those poor souls.

Just how is it that this guy, multiply deferred from the Vietnam draft as a student and then as an expecting parent, ends up as America’s chief of revenge? For isn’t that really what this torture stuff is all about? Getting “them” back for the 9/11 attack?

If we as a people have come down so far on the ladder of civilization that revenge motivates policy, we have fallen far indeed. The corruption of our principals is exceeded only by the corruption of our politics. It is truly time for change.

I read this morning that the Honorable Tom Tancredo, Representative to Congress from Colorado’s 6th District, has found His Holiness the Pope wanting with regard to his sympathetic, supportive stance regarding immigrants. From today’s NY Times:

Accusing the pope of “faith-based marketing,” Mr. Tancredo said Benedict’s comments welcoming immigrants “may have less to do with spreading the Gospel than they do about recruiting new members of the Church.” Mr. Tancredo, a former Catholic who now attends an evangelical Christian church, said it was not in the pope’s “job description to engage in American politics.”

Representative Tancredo is but the most recent example of the remarkable American trait of generational amnesia. All four of his grandparents immigrated to the US from Italy, part of some 4 million Italians who arrived here between 1880 and 1920. As a third generation American, Mr. Tancredo has adopted another uniquely American trait – “we got here first, so you stay away.” A quick review of the history of American Immigration Law reveals repeated exclusions of immigrants based largely on race: Chinese, Japanese, South Asians, and Filipinos all can claim their own special Congressionally approved bans, each in place for years before repeal. The racial underpinnings of our evolving immigration laws will confound any remaining skeptics of the concept of structural racism. Race has clearly been the basis of immigration policy over and over again, and especially so during the period that Mr. Tancredo’s grandparents were making their way to the US.

What’s intriguing about the son of a son of an immigrant becoming the Chief Immigrant Baiter among right wing politicians who collectively seem intent on blaming Spanish-speaking immigrants for every ill, is that it so clearly reflects an element of self-hatred. When Italians came in droves to the big cities of America a century ago, they were termed “Birds of Paradise” arriving to earn some money and return home, just as many, if not most, of our current undocumented workers wish to do (and have done for decades). The irony, of course, is that the conservative response to date, dampened only by the change in Congressional majorities two years ago, has been to erect barriers that prevent transit across the borders, thus effectively trapping these “remittance workers” here indefinitely when they used to return home seasonally.

As a Californian, the issue of immigration imbues both current and historical politics. This state, originally a part of Mexico, has inarguably been built on the labor of its immigrants. What few recall in the current debate, is that California is the only state in the nation that attempted to prevent immigration from other states. In 1937, California enacted the so-called “Anti-Okie Law” which was not overturned until 1941. It’s purpose? – stem the tide of Okies, Arkies, ‘Texicans’, and other predominantly white refugees from the famed Dust Bowl of the thirties in the mid-west. Just as Mexican and Central American migrant laborers do today, they largely came west to pick crops and scrape out a meager living, having suffered through one of the worst environmental calamities to afflict modern America. Okies were demonized more than Arabs are today throughout the media, that is until John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath was made into one of Hollywood’s greatest films.

There is no suitable response to Tancredo’s critique of the Pope other than to quietly say that freedom in America means that even really stupid, rude, wrong things get said at times. That the sayer is a Member of Congress ought to be deeply embarrassing to those Coloradans living in the 6th District, just south of Denver. It surely is to me.

It’s an incredible spring day in NYC today, and I’m reflecting on our latest marker: more Americans have died in Iraq than died on 9/11. One wonders if our misguided taste for revenge has run its course, since how else does one explain what we’ve done?

I learned recently that the folks at American Idol had decided to launch their own charity called “Idol Gives Back” to replace the infrastructure that we’d help put in place with Charity Projects Entertainment Fund on whose Board I sit. CPEF was formed last year after Fox and Idol had agreed with the incredibly talented Comic Relief folks from the UK to experiment with creating an on-air fundraising effort similar to the extraordinary “Red Nose Day” that has raised tens of millions in the UK for the benefit of groups working to alleviate poverty and to address the AIDS epidemic in Africa.

Comic Relief’s super CEO, Kevin Cahill, had sparked the idea of bringing a media savvy, mission focused charitable initiative to the US. On their way to LA, they’d stopped through SF to meet with us to see if Tides could help with the idea. Skipping down to LA after, they’d managed their way into the inner sanctum of American Idol and got their buy in. But it was on an unbelievable fast track and everyone scrambled to bring whatever they had to the table. Comic Relief provided all the know how, the films from the field that are so essential, and the infrastructure to make sure the money was well-used. They organized the phone banks, on-line giving portal, and all the rest. AI worked the concept into their final week’s competition. It was a collaborative effort, for sure.

The results we all know. Expecting maybe $10 to $20 million, they raised over $70 million for a pre-determined group of major charities like Save the Children, the Global Fund, and others. Desperate for skilled staff, Tides recommended three extraordinary consultants to help shape and evaluate the burgeoning grants. Karie Brown, Allison Barlow, and Anne Moses came together on very short notice to carefully structure $7.5 million grants to the US groups and to assist on the African grants. From the NY Times, yesterday:

Overall officials at the nine charities that received the money said they were pleased with the efforts of the “Idol Gives Back” charity, particularly with officials’ rigor in vetting potential uses of the money.

“Sometimes celebrity or entertainment-industry-based charities might not be the most sophisticated organizations in distributing the money they raise,” said Dr. Irwin Redlener, the president and a co-founder, with the musician Paul Simon, of the Children’s Health Fund. “But the ‘American Idol’ group got up to speed more rapidly than I’ve ever seen before. And they did a tremendous amount of investigation and due diligence among the organizations that could be potential recipients.”

So what did Fox do for this year’s event? They stiff-armed their partners, organized their own charity named after the event, and will be going it on their own. One can imagine that once they saw how much money was involved, they decided they wanted to control the action. Understandable in most circumstances, but it follows a narrative that has been often repeated in Hollywood where effective grantmaking often gives way to other considerations.
Among the first decisions for the “new” Idol Gives Back: to replace UNICEF and America’s Second Harvest with Brad Pitt’s glitzy “Make It Right” project focused on rebuilding the Lower Ninth. Hmmm.

When you google “Make it right” you get news stories about Bush’s original quote that they were going to “make it right” when asked about the abysmal failure of FEMA. When you google “Make It Right Campaign” you are given pages of Hollywood star sites, but nothing about MIR except links to Brad Pitt’s interviews announcing it. So what is it?
Announced last year with great fanfare, MIR has one of the sweetest websites you can imagine, and they’ve recruited notable “green stars” like Bill McDonough & Associates to their “core team.” More than a dozen architectural firms are listed as well. Progress to date? You tell me. I can’t find a press mention of any houses built or families helped. Is it real? Time will tell, but without the kind of rigor last year’s Idol grants program had, it’s anyone’s guess.
PS: you can find their site by googling “make it right New Orleans”. Who knew?

Gary Blecher’s new blog (http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/81147/?page=entire) is about as insightful a piece as I’ve read on what is happening in Iraq. You know we are all becoming inured to the pain and tragedy of this war as it drags on, and it’s hard to track it daily in the press. Depressing doesn’t describe it. It’s kind of like having your face assaulted by repeated pies. The stupidity of the decision to start it, the unbelievable arrogance and lack of planning once we achieved “mission accomplished”, and now the repeated failure to understand the place, its history, and, now, the dynamics of this failed state that we have created. How could it get worse?

Blecher accurately depicts what’s happened over this recent period: the Kurds have withdrawn north and are arming themselves for the uncertain times ahead. (Whether the Turks like it or not, we have delivered their worst nightmare: a virtually independent Kurdish homeland. As a result, eastern Turkey will become increasingly violent and unstable, something Chalmers Johnson would call “blowback” – the unpredictable consequences of our interventions….but I digress.) The Sunnis have also withdrawn from their initial support of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, fueled as it was by foreign fighters, and are now relatively pacified with the “awakening” councils and a return to tribal authority. US financing of our former insurgent opponents has made this work relatively well. But the Shia, that is another story.

Blecher argues, accurately I think, that the complex game that Muqtada al Sadr is playing is more analogous to the way Mao managed a guerrilla insurgency than anything else. Pitted against one another are two Shia militias. The first, we have heard a great deal about – the Mahdi Army of the rebellious, nationalist mullah Muqtada al Sadr whose operatives control large portions of Baghdad, Basra, and other key urban centers. What we don’t hear much about are the Badr Brigade – those fighters who were closely associated with the revered Mullah Al Sistani, a more established religious leaders considered closer to the middle class and educated Shia. His history, though, is interesting. He lived in exile in Iran during the Saddam period and his fighters fought alongside the Iranian Army against the Iraqi Army in the lengthy and brutal war between the two between 1980 and 1988.

Blecher suggests that the Badr Brigade is now largely what constitutes the Iraqi Army, so what we were hearing about this past week, termed by President Bush as “a decisive moment”, was really a sectarian conflict between the Sistani / Malaki faction and the Sadrists’ Mahdi Army. As we have learned, the Iraqi Army showed itself unable to prevail and suffered massive abandonment. The Mahdi Army fought classically urban tactics in their neighborhoods until the US decided it needed to enter the fray to prop up the failing initiative. This is when Sadr did his Mao thing – he withdrew his fighters unilaterally. Mao, after all, pioneered the notion that fighters are more important than territory, thus rewriting the rules of armed conflict. Land can be recaptured later, he reasoned, and outside elements cannot survive long engagements. In Blecher’s eyes, this is all a very long term conflict, often orchestrated by the Iranians who play both sides with money and weapons inputs. The only player who won’t be around in the long term is the US, just as Mao predicted.

The question, we all know, is “how can we get out?” When in the region not long ago speaking with refugees, I came to the conclusion that we progressives have to come up with an exit strategy that somehow results a sustainable security for the civilian population, for without that, there is another time bomb waiting for an unstable region: how to absorb the 10% plus of the Iraqi population that has fled the country. This dilemma: how to leave a conflict that we can have no real impact on resolving while ensuring that innocent civilians aren’t slaughtered in the ensuing vacuum is the most challenging question a new administration will face. To do this, we will have to come to grips with the failure of our traditional defense approach that is the world’s best at conventional warfare. It’s just not a conventional time.

Doesn’t anyone in the Pentagon remember the Maginot Line? This one is going to be a lot more difficult than learning that tanks and mobile forces can drive around fixed fortifications. We’ve been avoiding this lesson since Vietnam, but if we fail to learn it this time, we better start learning to fail. It’s already being repeated in more places than any of us want to think about. Somalia, anyone? Congo? Sudan? Southern Phillipines? Afghanistan? Columbia?