The Center offered some minimal services like a small meeting room and a coming computer center, but mostly this was a beehive for campaign-based advocacy in and around the core of the African-American community.  More recently they had spent the last year helping found Florida New Majority in 2009 to increase civic engagement dramatically.    Using targeted canvass programs in several urban areas around the state more than 15,000 had joined through that program and participated in civic activities leading to the mid-terms, thereby filling a vacuum in Florida, as Hashim mentioned, created by the dissolution of ACORN in the state.

via Visiting with the Miami Workers’ Center « Wade Rathke: Chief Organizer Blog.

People are going to organize no matter what. You can take down one organization but another one will take its place. It is the same thing with organized labor. Corporations and right wingers can attack unions all they want…but guess what? They will not go anywhere. People will organize. They organized unions before the NLRA and they will continue to do so no matter what you try and do.

Yes, since Reagan fired the air traffic controllers the weakening of unions has been effective–we know this. Yet if workers were given an opportunity to join a union they would–we know this too. Because this is known I am glad to see alternatives to unions being tried out along side traditional unionism practices–alternatives like worker centers and the AFL-CIO’s Working America.

It is that drive to organize that cannot be denied you’d have to take away the right of assembly for it not to be effective anymore! Whether it is for a building, neighborhood or workplace people are going to organize because strength lies in numbers.

I get a lot of e-Activism type emails day in and day out. Yet I have to say that I found what ACORN is doing (thanks to Democracy in Action/Wired for Change) with this email action quite remarkable. The email is sent on behalf of Dennis Leary (no, not the actor) on behalf of his 84 year-old mother Irene. His mother is about to loose her home and he’s asking for our help to send a message to the bank.

Dear Jason,

I love my mom. Her name is Irene. She’s 84-years-old, and she is the most important person in the world to me. Today, her bank is selling the house she has lived in for 34 years, and it’s breaking my heart. The unbelievable part of it is that OneWest — the bank — doesn’t even have to talk with my mom before selling her house right out from under her. That’s because OneWest is among four big mortgage service companies that haven’t signed on to President Obama’s program to help stop foreclosures. It’s the “Making Home Affordable” plan, and even though OneWest is the recipient of federal bailout money, they are still taking my mom’s home away today.

Irene addressing her son explains how she found herself in this situation.

Your father was receiving dialysis three times a week and suffering from chronic, congestive heart failure. He was vulnerable and realized he was on the verge of passing. He was worried that he’d leave me with $30,000 to $40,000 in credit card debt. With those concerns, we sought advice.

OneWest advised us we would qualify for a loan based on our credit scores and the loan would “solve our problems.” They definitely preyed upon our vulnerability.

Your father died a month after we received the loan. Our fixed income was $2,388.81 per month. With his passing, the income dropped to $1,600.00 per month. I continued to make payments, but they kept going up and up. They went up so much that even if my husband was still alive, we could not have made them.

ACORN is also asking people to call the the corporation and ask that they not sell Irene’s home.

I was reading this email from ACORN which I think was absolutely great.

This morning, the New York Times lectured Jon Stewart because he "treated his guest like a C.E.O. subpoenaed to testify before Congress — his point was not to hear Mr. Cramer out, but to act out a cathartic ritual of indignation and castigation."

That’s right. Jon Stewart is angry — and so are we. We’re angry at the speculators and banks that got us into this mess and we’re angry at the media and government that looked the other way.

The NY Times is rather silly in taking on Stewart I have to say. ACORN has set up a page (they’re using democracyinaction.org cool!) where you can send John Stewart a thank you message.

They also picked a quote that Stewart said on his show last night which I think really sums up his and our disdain for what the financial press has allowed to happen. I will also say that in the end the ultimate anger should remain with the banks.

"This thing was 10 years in the making … The idea that you could have on the guys from Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch and guys that had leveraged 35 to 1 and then blame mortgage holders, that’s insane. "

Yep.

I got this ACORN media advisory today and considering the post I just read on Barbara Ehrenreich’s blog—I think this is important.

National City, the seventh largest mortgage servicer in the nation, is responsible for 1.2 million loans valued at $187 billion. Many of them are delinquent or will soon become delinquent. In order to prevent all of those loans from going into foreclosure, massive numbers of streamlined modifications are necessary. ACORN is demanding that National City provide fixed-rate, affordable modifications to all delinquent loans that they are responsible for servicing.

WHO: ACORN Members

WHEN: Tuesday, July 29, 2008

WHERE: National City Mortgage, 1801 Old Hwy 8 NW Suite 123 & 123 New Brighton, MN 55112

TIME: 11:00 a.m.

“As one of the larger lenders that fueled this crisis, and as one of the largest mortgage servicers in the nation, National City has a responsibility to solve this crisis with swift and decisive action to save the homes of hundreds of thousands of families,” ACORN member Al Ynigues, said, “Your slogan is, “We care about doing what’s right.” Now is the time for National City to prove it.”

As for the post I read today on Barbara Ehrenreich’s blog she talked about people who are facing foreclosure committing suicide.

Dry your eyes, already: Death is an effective remedy for debt, along with anything else that may be bothering you too. And try to think of it too from a lofty, corner-office, perspective: If you can’t pay your debts or afford to play your role as a consumer, and if, in addition – like an ever-rising number of Americans – you’re no longer needed at the workplace, then there’s no further point to your existence. I’m not saying that the creditors, the bankers and the mortgage companies actually want you dead, but in a culture where one’s credit rating is routinely held up as a three-digit measure of personal self-worth, the correct response to insoluble debt is in fact, “Just shoot me!”

The alternative is to value yourself more than any amount of money and turn the guns, metaphorically speaking, in the other direction. It wasn’t God, or some abstract economic climate change, that caused the credit crisis. Actual humans -often masked as financial institutions – did that, (and you can find a convenient list of names in Nomi Prins’s article in the current issue of Mother Jones.) Most of them, except for a tiny few facing trials, are still high rollers, fattening themselves on the blood and tears of ordinary debtors. I know it’s so 1930s, but may I suggest a march on Wall Street?

This is why what ACORN is beginning to do is so important. People have more power than they think they do.

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