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Citizen Wealth: Winning the Campaign to Save Working Families (BK Currents) - Hardcover

Rathke, Wade

 
9781576758625: Citizen Wealth: Winning the Campaign to Save Working Families (BK Currents)
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1576758621 ISBN 13: 9781576758625
Verlag: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

From the founder of ACORN, the nation’s largest grassroots community organization, comes this hard-hitting blueprint for helping working families establish a solid foundation of income and assets that equals true economic security—what Wade Rathke calls citizen wealth. Through compelling stories from the trenches of local, state, and national campaigns, where hardscrabble wins and smart negotiating have produced positive economic change for millions, Rathke shows how activists, government, business, and working people can join together to make citizen wealth a major priority and a visible reality.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Wade Rathke first began organizing more than forty years ago when he dropped out of college to organize against the Vietnam War. Later he organized welfare recipients in Massachusetts, first in Springfield and then statewide from Boston, before leaving for Arkansas to found ACORN in Little Rock in mid-June 1970. A decade later, Wade added labor organizing to his experiences when he and other organizers responded to issues that ACORN members were having in their workplaces, whether home health workers, hotel workers, or fast food workers, and moved to New Orleans to build independent unions that later merged into the Service Employees International Union in 1984.
The common themes of these decades as a welfare rights organizer, community organizer, and labor organizer have been how to unite people at the bottom income levels around their issues to build sufficient power so that they could impact their lives, improve their communities, and change the direction of their country. Dealing with income and assets has been a constant theme of Wade’s organizing, no matter what the venue or vehicle, and he has been delighted to pull all of these strands of his experience together in writing Citizen Wealth. For a generation Wade has been recognized as perhaps the premier organizer of his generation, making this book something of a milestone in that journey.

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From the Bottom Up

Let us try to sing another song rather than another verse, the same as the first. I am not saying it will be easy, and I may have to catch myself as I fall into the same habits. We have memorized so many of the old verses that, at the first note we hear, it is difficult not to start singing immediately what we already know. However, we need new songs in our future with more hope and promise than those we have seen in the past. We are going to try our hardest to find a way to craft them together, so that we can all march to a different tune.

The acceleration in income inequity over the past several decades is well known and well documented. During the last twenty-five years, the gap between rich and poor has grown almost fivefold.1 Federal tax giveaways to those in the higher income brackets have not only created shameful disparities, but have also applied additional pressures on future prospects that now must be shed. We have entire cities in the United States, including Boston, Seattle, New York, and Washington, where working families earning moderate incomes can survive only if, like farmers, they owned their land before the boom times and have not lost it in the waves of refinancing and foreclosures now buffeting the economy. This is an epidemic that has resulted in falling health standards, increased mortality, denied educational and other opportunities, depressed wages and incomes, and a score of other conditions unthinkable in a healthy and successful society. In mid-2008, a record number of Americans (more than 80 percent2) said that they believed the country was on the wrong track. Rather than being a Cassandra warning of dire consequences to come, I argue that such a course is not inevitable or predetermined, especially if we are willing to alter the paradigm and focus on the ways and means of creating citizen wealth.

2
I am not an optimist looking through rose-colored glasses; I am in fact quite the opposite.

Having worked as chief organizer for ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now)—”first and stayed the longest”—for nearly forty years, I have encountered hundreds of campaigns designed to create citizen wealth, or at least to prevent the erosion of the financial health and well-being of our constituency of low- and moderate-income families. These campaigns have been established both in the United States and around the world.3 None of this work has been easy, and all of it has met with fierce opposition at every twist and turn. Therefore, I cannot pretend that anything I am going to advocate from our experience or from the experiences of many other organizations is going to be met with open arms, much less with open wallets. Changing the paradigm to winning wealth for our citizens is going to be a process involving some hand-to-hand combat. My goal is to recruit you as a soldier in this new battle with every word you read.

We have to change the narrative in a clear-eyed and hard-fisted way. The Horatio Alger story of our modern Gilded Age spins out constantly in every news cycle. This includes the People magazine/Forbes 400 versions of the lives of the rich and famous. The outer limits of the absurd gap between rich and poor in the United States are defined by a story on CBS about the status and wealth envy in Manhattan between the mere millionaires and the mega-millionaires.4 We need little more than the current profound recession, frequently cited as the worst economic situation since the Great Depression, to remind all of us of the thin line between security and deprivation and making a mockery of the stories that were so current only months before the bottom fell out.

Meanwhile, there are 300 million other Americans—and at least 32 percent of the 300 million are low and moderate income.5 This particular population is, in fact, singing another verse that is the same as the first. These families are being dropped from health insurance coverage at accelerating rates,6 and they are unable to finance higher education for their children.7 All of this is taking place as the gains in home ownership over the last decade have been erased overnight,8 leaving 3 million to 4 million families to face foreclosure.9 All of these factors contribute to the loss of homes, which is the basis for most definitions of citizen wealth for low- and moderate-income families.10

3
I have traveled a long road to the place where I want to stand with you to fight for citizen wealth. When I was an organizer for the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) in Springfield and Boston, Massachusetts, in the late 1960s, our primary slogan on every sign and banner was ADEQUATE INCOME NOW! Women on welfare did not win then and are certainly not winning now. However, in some ways this unrecognized issue is still at the center of the campaign for citizen wealth. In ACORN we saw something surprising start to happen over the decades. Since we began pitched battles in the mid-1970s against the banks that were exploiting our neighborhoods, we have not only seen the passage of programs that make a difference, like the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) in 1977,11 but we have also seen some of our opponents in these campaigns gradually changing course and becoming partners. These new partners have learned that a business model serving low- and moderate-income families rather than avoiding them is not only important to us, but can also be a valuable franchise and major profit center. In fact, the results of these campaigns are significant. In one decade these ACORN campaigns have, estimated conservatively, won $15 billion in direct economic benefits in the form of direct transfers from the government and corporations to lower-income families.12 This is my definition of creating citizen wealth!

Over the last ten years, ACORN’s Financial Justice Center has been able to focus on developing campaigns against the predatory practices of financial institutions, tax preparers, credit card companies, payday lenders, mortgage companies, and servicers (which are mostly no longer banks). During these hard-fought efforts, the Financial Justice Center has found not only that change is possible, but also that it is possible to create a different and better world. I am speaking of a world in which the interests of customers as consumers and constituents can be reconciled to a more comfortable coexistence with corporate America. We have not found that this is a natural impulse. We have noticed, however, that once firms have been forced to adapt they are able to embrace a new future that is compatible with a vision of citizen wealth that is more constructive than corporate banditry.

4
We want to model good behavior and make the most of the surprising paradox that has emerged from many ACORN campaigns around financial justice and wealth creation. The focus of these campaigns is on governments and corporations that have determinedly resisted initiatives to increase citizen wealth and have then found, to their amazement, that they also benefit from the shift in thinking and new business and service models that reclaim the mission of citizen economic development and improvement as a core pursuit of the American project and promise. Such a premise requires governments to design their citizen wealth programs as a positive good, rather than focusing all their implementation efforts on the negative, obsessed with the rare instances of fraud or error. The public debate on government needs to focus on the increased resources and revenue of a citizenry with greater wealth and on the ability to see “all boats rise” rather than on the usual complaints about small leakage in positive public initiatives in these areas. Similarly, firms need to understand that a wealthier citizenry benefits the bottom line of all enterprises. This is a more...

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Verlag
Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Erscheinungsdatum
2009
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1576758621
ISBN 13 
9781576758625
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
216
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Berrett-Koehler
https://www.dc.com/tv

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