Wade Rathke:

The Bolivian Election Mystery

New Orleans In the United States now we wait and watch while President Trump stoops to historically new lows in trying to subvert the vote of the people and resist the inevitable that he lost the election to Biden at the Electoral College and by a more than a five million vote drubbing.  Having failed to game the court system with manufactured instances of voter fraud where he is unable to produce evidence, Trump is now resorting to the dirty trick bag of dictators. Two hyper-partisan Republican election commissioners in Detroit at first tried to refuse to certify the election there in an act that seemed to be blatant racism, and certainly baseless, and then recanted after voters and state officials went crazy at their action.  Trump called them personally to get them to recant again with an affidavit, but the state continues to move to certify,  so he can sue if he wants.  Even more outrageous, he has invited Michigan Republican leaders to the White House to arm twist them to get the party-controlled legislature to send delegates on his slate to the Electoral College.  The Republican head of the state senate seems to be saying this is poppycock, but it just establishes how obsessed Trump is that he thinks he can steal an election in plain sight. If you want to steal an election, you need to have a very tight plan before the votes are counted, not afterwards when everyone already knows the results.  This is election fraud 101.  In Honduras most recently, the president was losing badly and then, suddenly, no results were reported overnight, and when they began again, he was magically reelected.  He had been the beneficiary of a golpista, so he had the support of the military and others for this outrage.  Not so, Trump. A bigger mystery is Bolivia.  The Organizers Forum visited there several years ago, so we have followed events in that country since then.  Evo Morales was trying for a fourth term.  He had been widely supported as the first indigenous president and had delivered in many areas including reducing poverty.  In the election, he was barely trailing and vote-counting was suspended.  When it resumed the next day, Evo barely eked out a victory. The Organization of American States reported election irregularities.  There were massive protests for weeks, and Morales went into exile in Mexico.  Another election has now occurred.  Morales’ party won, and he has returned.  The question remains.  Was their voter fraud last time? This gets interesting.  I tried to track down Francisco Rodriguez who was one of the authors of a report that indicated there likely wasn’t fraud.  He was supposedly at Tulane, but repeated inquires to his website and the university were fruitless.  The report had focused on late-counted votes from rural areas and the results of “methodological and coding errors” that stress the “importance of documenting innocuous explanations for differences in early-and late-counted votes.”  In other words, in Evo’s case, he may have won, but also may have delayed the count creating havoc, rather than fraud. Either way, if Trump were willing to learn lessons, trying to steal an election after the voting is underway and the tally is known is impossible.  His own Republican Party has known this for years, which is why they specialize in voter suppression in order to subvert the election before the count.  After the count, it’s too late, and people everywhere are in the streets to make sure their will is followed, unless of course the military is willing to force the issues.  The US military has made it clear that they will follow the Constitution, not the President, so we are luckier than our southern neighbors. It’s a sad situation, but one where we are fortunate to know the outcome already. The post The Bolivian Election Mystery [https://chieforganizer.org/2020/11/20/the-bolivian-election-mystery/] appeared first on The Chief Organizer Blog [https://chieforganizer.org].

Hipsters of the World Unite

New Orleans Hipsters are absolutely not taking over the world, but it’s hard not to find them almost all over the world.  MoveHub, an international shipping company got some free marketing buzz by putting out a “hipster index” [https://www.movehub.com/blog/the-hipster-index/] over the last couple of years.  They use five factors:  coffee shops, record stores, tattoo parlors, vegan restaurants, and vintage boutiques.  Who knows why, or whether those are the best measures, but, hey, this is marketing, not rocket science, right? I looked at the list.  It’s a curious mashup.  Brighton, England leads.  OK, ACORN has a great chapter there.  One of our members wrote a book about being a Deliveroo driver.  Maybe they are a hipster haven, who knows?  There were a lot of curry shops, including a good one where we met before the meeting.  The biggest complaint other than about high rents and landlord abuse, was the lack of sunshine there, even though we enjoyed bright days.  Portland, USA was next, and they led the list last year.  They might have been too busy demonstrating to be number one this year.  Salt Lake City was number three.  How could that be possible?  Rochester, New York was 16th, ahead of New Orleans at 23.  I can only imagine the city is being out-hipstered for our lack of vegan restaurants, which just can’t compete with red beans and rice and poor-boys.  But, hey, Little Rock is 86th ahead of Chicago at 108.  Baton Rouge of all places is 113, who knew?  How can it be possible that New York City the global center of hipsterism is way down at 145th place? According to a report in The Economist [https://www.economist.com/international/2020/11/07/even-as-traditional-globalisation-has-slowed-a-new-kind-has-sped-up], the World Bank finds that “the share of the world’s population living on more than $10 per day (at 2011 purchasing-power parity) – enough money to buy things other than food and shelter – has swelled from less than a quarter two decades ago to almost two-fifths in 2017.”  The highest riser is East Asia, but all regions have improved on this score.  They also say that Brookings “estimated in 2018 that the number of rich people (those living on $110 per day) will grow by 50% or 100 million people, by 2030.”  The global middle class according to this crew will increase by then to about two-thirds of the world’s population.  The hucksterism that fuels this interest in hipsterism credits education, travel and the internet with globalizing cultural attitudes and consumerism. Maybe so, but how has it not increased women’s rights and status in the global public and commercial marketplace?  Is it possible as incomes rise that the urbanized middle-class could drive gentrification less and equity more?  Please! We need hipsters to unite everywhere, but not over vegan tacos, tattoos, beard trims, and porkpie hats, but instead over bringing everybody forward.  What would it take to make that happen? The post Hipsters of the World Unite [https://chieforganizer.org/2020/11/19/hipsters-of-the-world-unite/] appeared first on The Chief Organizer Blog [https://chieforganizer.org].

Clock Ticking on Trump Expiration Date

New Orleans The Trump meltdown is going from the dangerous to the ridiculous to the absurd now, and then back again to the dangerous.  Everyone knows Trump has lost, but the foot dragging of sycophants fearful of tweeting reprisals continues to attempt to try to disguise the fact that the emperor no longer has any clothes. His efforts to collect honoraria and make speeches in front of oil and extraction groups once he’s living in Mar-de-Largo are forcing him to try and speed walk holding an auction for drilling leases in the Artic Wildlife Refuge in Alaska that have the Bureau of Land Management asking for comments, which they will undoubtedly ignore, so they can hold the event three days before Biden’s inauguration.  I’m not a lawyer, but I think I would have a fair chance of overturning that in court, and real lawyers will make mincemeat of this craven move. Various agency staff are meeting with Biden and his team “off premises,” meaning outside of government buildings, to facilitate a transition being blocked by toadies willing to break their oaths of service.  The military is announcing that that will brief Biden fully as well, if Trump doesn’t yield by December.  People are pushing him back from attacking Iran. He fires the head of the Defense Department for refusal to use troops against Black Lives Matter protestors this fall and for not evacuating troops fast enough from war zones to suit him, likely endangering those still on the ground among other things.  He appoints a bunch of no-names whose only qualifications are that they will do what he says.  Does that make us feel safer?  Oh, no!  He fires the cybersecurity chief for elections, because he made sure the voting was secure and accurate, rather than mouthing the falsehoods from the West Wing. Come on, man, have you no shame!?!  Or, perhaps an even better question, have you no pride? These are tinpot dictator moves.  We’re past bad loser sulking and ranting.  This is un-American. I stumbled on former President Obama being interviewed on BET on the eve of his book plodding on shelves for sale with over 700 pages.  He reviewed the steps taken as a president turns over the keys to the White House at the inaugural ceremony, and then waves goodbye to America on a government helicopter returning him to his life as a citizen, while the new president takes over.  He wondered if Trump would even participate in the inaugural, but he hoped he would.  He ended his point, nodding his head, and said, “hope springs eternal.” Somebody needs to tell Trump that being a bad loser is bad for his brand.  He might hear that finally, because for every day he drags this out, he’s shrinking his base from 70 million to little more than the hardcore, and with that goes his future as anything other than a marginal mouth in the media. The post Clock Ticking on Trump Expiration Date [https://chieforganizer.org/2020/11/18/clock-ticking-on-trump-expiration-date/] appeared first on The Chief Organizer Blog [https://chieforganizer.org].

Macron Protests Too Much on Anti-Islamic Actions

New Orleans Ben Smith, formerly of Politico, joined the New York Times over the last year as their media columnist and has quickly become a must-read in my book.  His sources are amazing, his scoops unique, and his perspective wide-ranging and invaluable.  The Times seems to know this, not only because they give him more space in the paper every Monday than any other columnists gets, except perhaps the Hollywood and Los Angeles specials that Maureen Dowd writes from time to time.  He’s even allowed to write inside-stories on the Times, both ringing their bell on internal conflicts and a recent fanboy column on Trump political writer Maggie Haberman. He probably won’t win a Pulitzer prize until he has a full year on the job, but he has already earned it in my book, and I’d take a bet right now that he’s in line. I know this already sounds like too much inside-baseball to many of you, who are now wishing I would get to the point, whatever that might be, so let’s do that.  Ben Smith has carved out enough of a position already as the independent arbiter of media insight and criticism that the President of France Emmanuel Macron called him the other day to complain about the coverage he and his country are getting over their anti-Muslim policies.  This is the same Macron who Smith notes has never been willing to give an interview to the Times’ Paris Bureau.  Other than President Trump calling his buddies, formerly his BFFs at Fox and other outlets, who does that?  Macron and more to come perhaps? Macron’s beef is that we don’t get France.  His brief is that race, religion, and ethnicity have no meaning in France compared to the universal concept of being a citizen dating back to the French Revolution.  Identity politics do not matter for the French according to Macron, and their policies around their Muslim citizens are a reaction to the death toll they have experienced from “Islamist” terrorism and separation of the church and state.  Everybody must assimilate the same, because they don’t go for this diversity mess of the United States. ACORN’s French affiliate, the Alliance Citoyenne, has faced a different experience than Macron describes.  The government’s campaign against Muslim dress codes for women including the hijab face coverings are both anti-Muslim and misogynist.  In 2019, we led a campaign in Grenoble, Lyon and elsewhere to gain access for our Muslim members and their children in public pools, as our members jumped in the water in their burkinis.  We have more recently been trying to get Muslim women equal access to sports teams. Make no mistake, Macron’s complaints to the contrary, his policies are sweeping.  Muslim women in hijab have been banned from public transportation and public employment.  More recently, Macron expanded that ban to exclude Muslim women in hijab from working for any private company, nonprofit or for profit, that receives any public money or support. It’s hard to not see Macron’s position as purely political as another French election faceoff with the far-right, anti-immigrant party of LePen’s looms again.  No women have been arrested or linked directly to any of the terrorism that has afflicted the French, yet the policies seem specifically directed at Muslim women.  Something is wrong here, and Macron is protesting too much, despite his savvy call to Smith and his complaint that he is an unhappy reader of the New York Times, making him one of many along with the rest of us. The post Macron Protests Too Much on Anti-Islamic Actions [https://chieforganizer.org/2020/11/17/macron-protests-too-much-on-anti-islamic-actions/] appeared first on The Chief Organizer Blog [https://chieforganizer.org].

Essential Workers and Pay Equity

New Orleans In a moment of youthful recklessness more than fifty years ago, I allowed myself to get into one of those dangerous political conversations with the father of a woman I was seeing.  He was a good, decent guy and Republican to the core, even in those days when Louisiana was deep, deep blue, so blue that my own father once said you had to register as a Democrat, or you would only get to vote every four years.  Hard to believe, but those were the days. In September 1968, garbage workers in New Orleans, who were then employed by the city directly, struck for recognition of their union and a pay increase.  Drivers were making $235 per month and hoppers, the laborers on the back of the truck, were making $231 per month.  They were demanding a $15 per month increase. The conversation started innocently enough.  He, like everyone else, wanted his garbage collected.  As a smart aleck twenty-year old, essentially, I asked him what it was worth to him?  He was a manufacturers representative selling to railroads who had taken over the family business.  I started asking him to compare a garbage worker to the value of the service and labor performed, rather than the way it was valued usually.  Asking him to value garbage collection compared to other jobs on the basis of equity, he followed me down the rat hole, at first unknowingly without giving it much thought, and finally more angrily, as we reached the point where he fell in my logic trap and was forced to begrudgingly agree that a garbage worker should be paid the same as a lawyer, perhaps more because it was harder, nastier work and more important to the community.  I’m not sure he ever forgave me, as he huffed out of his living room. In this time of the pandemic we are being taught the value of essential workers as a matter of life and death not some idle conversation.   Pay equity rather than the pay gap needs to be the conversation.  Comparable worth and equal pay for work of equal value and effort, regardless of race or gender needs to be the policy, not just my youthful argument. A law just took effect in New Zealand that seeks to move in this critical direction.  The law focuses on occupations that have become gender-based and because of that bias, pay less.  When we visited New Zealand in 2018, talking to union brothers and sisters, we heard about the court victory where a woman caregiver won a raise when compared to male occupations, like prison guards.  Negotiations between industry, unions, and government had led to increases in wages of between 15 and 49% for 55,000 government workers. That’s huge!  It hasn’t spread to the private sector there yet, and certainly, it hasn’t spread globally, but it needs to be part of all of the discussions about wages.  In the United States we are finally hoping for an increase in the minimum wage, but it is neither foolish nor reckless now, in the wake of a new understanding of essential work, for us to begin to talk about pay equity between jobs as well as between people in the same jobs. The post Essential Workers and Pay Equity [https://chieforganizer.org/2020/11/16/essential-workers-and-pay-equity/] appeared first on The Chief Organizer Blog [https://chieforganizer.org].