The Vancouver Manifesto

OpenBuildings | Architectural Directory

2010-08-15T14:17:00.000-07:00

It reminds me of the Urbanarium which Gordon Price so vehemently supported during the EcoDensity days.

Heard about it from : http://www.metropolismag.com/pov/20100813/crowdsourcing-architecture-criticism

Gone are the days when you have to trawl through Wikipedia and scores of architecture blogs to reliably research a building online. OpenBuildings.com is the Web site architecture geeks like me have been waiting for: it aims to collect everything there is to know about individual buildings into one mega-resource. Even better, the information is crowdsourced, Wikipedia-style. Readers can submit buildings to the site and upload images, additional information, or even their own opinions.
This last feature is the key difference between Wikipedia and this site. Wikipedia tends to be long on technical information and short on architectural criticism. A typical page on OpenBuildings, on the other hand, has all the basic information you might need—contractors, materials, costs, etc.—but it also has the potential to gather opinions, in the form of user reviews as well as links to articles by professional architecture critics. The site is still in its infancy, so there is little of this discourse so far. But I can’t wait for people to start uploading things like, “I work in this building, and the staircase sucks!”
Some other features are still works in progress, such as a publications tab where users can build a list of books about a building, by linking to the books’ Amazon pages. And I am very distracted by a bar at the bottom of the page where the site’s algorithm suggests “Similar Buildings.” I spent a long time pondering the similarities between New York’s Grand Central Terminal and Jean Nouvel’s National Museum of Qatar.
The site is clearly laid out, easy to search, and slowly building up a following. An iPhone app is also on the way, so you will soon be able to read about a building while you’re standing in front of it. If it takes off, OpenBuildings.com could not only revolutionize walking tours but also bring a breath of fresh, crowdsourced air to architectural discourse.

Yeah- that's racism. And yes- it was Hate Crime

2010-07-30T18:27:00.000-07:00

There are few things that make me angry.
Hah- that's a lie. There are a lot of things that make me angry. But this one deserves your attention.

Jay Phillips was attacked by three White men after they yelled racial slurs.
This isn't my favourite account- because there's so much censoring of the actual hate speech- but WHY these men aren't convicted of a hate crime is so very confusing to me. And why, in the youtube video, the police are SO hesitant to call it a hate crime and say that these guys aren't White Supremacists is ridiculous. So in short. YEAH, that's racism. And yes- it was a HATE crime.

G20. Over. Peace now

2010-06-28T00:16:00.000-07:00

The correlation between the Black Bloc and White Men, G20 and beyond

2010-06-26T18:53:00.000-07:00

I've said it once and I'll likely say it again in the future.
There is something SO fascinating with the correlation between "radical" Left activists and being young, White and male.

Now I've already put in my two cents in about how I feel about Black Bloc tactics: http://thevancouvermanifesto.blogspot.com/2010/02/olympic-log-day-7-black-bloc-organizer.html so I won't belabour the point.

I will remind everyone that none of the media reports, indie or popular, say that anybody has actually gotten HURT, physically. NOR have anybody's homes been vandalized. This is just a reminder to say that property damage as violence is an opinion and point of view NOT held by anarchists who believe that property in itself is inherently violent.

Ok, moving on.

So what is the DEAL with young White men and Black Bloc tactics? (*read that with your best Seinfeld impression*).
Several media have already pointed out here (read the comments) and here (scroll to bottom-satirical but whatevs), as well as twitter (RT: "on behalf of African-Canadians everywhere I would like to point out not one member of the Black Bloc who trashed #G20 is actually black.") observances that nobody using the Black Bloc tactic is actually Black- they all just a bunch of white folk.

I'm not going to offer any answers here- just an observation that anybody on the political spectrum has observed during events associated with the Black Bloc.

Is this some machismo? A testosterone driven tactic?
Is it an act of solidarity? i.e. White folk are more privileged and are "taking the hit" by being on the front line.
Is it just coincidence?

What do you think?

Seriously? Sam Sullivan as Gov General? Have we learned NOTHING from Citizen Sam?

2010-04-11T12:18:00.000-07:00

So apparently after Rick Hansen rejected Governor General, the new scoop is that Sam Sullivan is set to take it. Seriously? I understand what you're trying to do. You're trying to set Canada up as differently-abled-friendly. And yeah, Sam has got some ridiculous language skills. But do we REALLY want a Governor General who once likened himself to Alexander the Great? Who said, quite literally, "I only like to know rich people because rich people get things done" and who had an on screen BREAKDOWN where his behaviour was questionably psychotic/sociopathic? Because all this can be seen in the publicly available movie, Citizen Sam.

Can everyone PLEASE watch this movie so there is more outrage over Sam Sullivan as Governor General?

Olympic Log Day 12: Corporate much? Careful what label you bring with you

2010-02-23T13:20:00.000-08:00

So I'm sure every Olympics is a big corporate barf-fest. But I heard this story on a recent discussion board:

Today, I was like LiveCity Yaletown and my mom brought a bottle of Nestle brand bottled water. The security guy ripped the label from the water, and gave it back to my mom. Apparently, you're not allowed to be seen with non "Coca Cola" branded products inside the place. Yep, there are security guards looking out what brands you're carrying, and if they don't like the brand, they'll rip off the label! It's another reason I lost respect for VANOC.

With a brilliant followup:

I need to test that. I'm gonna go down there and wrap myself in non- sponsoring labels for clothing. What would they do if literally the outfit I was wearing was anticoke???

And apparently CityCaucus.com saw this happening too- so it's a true story, people!

Olympic Log Day 11: Auto Gratuity pisses off locals more than tourists

2010-02-22T12:51:00.001-08:00

You you've heard the reports that during the games many downtown restaurants are charging on averagy 18% auto-gratuity to deal with 1) extra flow/deliveries/hours and 2) those pesky tourists who come from countries that don't customarily tip, thereby protecting our servers. This generally seemed fine to me in the beginning because businesses have to take advantage of a two week party because when everybody leaves that'll be it. Vancouver will be twiddling their thumbs once more. What I didn't forsee, however, was that it would piss off locals MUCH more than tourists. Here is an amazing article that does the math:

Pre Olympics total tip take per night (10 servers 1.5 covers per seat, 3 bartenders, 3 covers per seat): $2,350 (rounded up).
Olympics with enforced 18% gratuity total tip take per night (10 servers 3 covers per seat, 3 bartenders, 4 covers per seat): $5,615 (rounded down).
Olympics with voluntary gratuity, total tip take per night (same servers, bartenders as previous): $3,035 (rounded down).

It's quite clear that even in worst case tipping scenarios, restuarants in high-traffic Olympic areas (like Yaletown) that are packed all day and eve are completely cleaning up on tips when auto-gratuities are enforced - more than double their take pre Olympics. Even with voluntary gratuities, they'd be making as much as $700 or more in tips per shift - but with auto gratuities enforced, they stand to make over $3,000 more, per shift in tips.

Do I even have to break down the smaller, 30-40 seat indie restaurant?
Where it gets BAD - Industry's dirty little secrets
Here's where things get particularly bad - and I'm betting most consumers and many foodie-bloggers don't have a clue about this.

Did you know that management, and in some cases, the owners, take a cut in the tip pool that is sorted every night? In the case of many of the downtown chains (especially those with a big alcohol/bar focus), this is especially true. I'm not saying every restaurant has this policy, but you'd be shocked to find out how many actually do - some of Vancouver's top restaurants, globally recognized, have this policy in place.

Also, management and back of house (chefs, cooks, expediters, etc) do not trust servers - or do not trust them to be truthful with their entire tips take for the evening. This is why the end of the shift tip pool is based on sales, and not the server's word on how much tips they've taken in.

It is standard in Vancouver for servers to contribute four percent of their b]sales take into the house tip pool. Bartenders are typically 2% of their sales. Some restaurants have higher percentages - I know of at least 2 famous restaurants with 5% policy, and one with 6%. But let's go with 4%/2% to keep the numbers conservative.

So let's go back to our downtown chain restaurant with a booze focus restaurant - the 150 seat venue with 10 servers, 3 bartenders. The total sales pre Olympics might be $11,250 for all the seated covers, and $2,700 for the bar ($13,950 per full shift). Sales during the Olympics could skyrocket (based on similar pre Olympic cover sales x extra bonus customers) to $27,000 for all seated covers, $4,200 for bar (or $31,200 per full shift).

Those are huge numbers, to start with. Now let's look at what the house expects to take in tips total, and per server / bartender

Pre Olympics: ($11,250 x 0.04 = $450) + ($2,700 x 0.02 = $54) = $504
Olympics: ($27,000 x 0.04 = $1,080) + ($4,200 x 0.02 = $84) = $1,164

That is more than a 120% increase in tips take per shift for the house!

Just based on these numbers, it's quite clear that restaurants could have scaled down their house tip out percentage for the two weeks of the Olympics, and everyone could have still come out ahead - going to 3% / 1.5% would have still brought everyone - house, back of house, servers, ahead with more money each day - even based on lower voluntary tips.

Still - this isn't the full dirty little secret.

The whole auto gratuity thing isn't to protect servers - servers are cleaning up - enforced tip policy or not. It's not even to protect back of house staff.

One of the primary reasons for auto gratuities is to protect, and even enrich management and the house's take in tips.

At most (not ALL, but most) fine dining restaurants in town, management gets to dip their hands into the tip pool. In some cases, I'd say it is highly deserved - I've seen managers and assistant managers at some restaurants to do everything - bus, expedite, serve, fix, clean bathrooms, you name it.

But I've also seen managers who like to boss people around, and not do much else. At one restaurant (one I no longer frequent), I've been told first hand by staff there that the GM's weekly tip pool take is over $1,000. And management sucks at that restaurant.

Even worse is ownership taking a share of the tip pool. This happens much less and as far as I know, is not the practice at any independent fine / casual dining place where management isn't also ownership. But word is, it does happen with few of the chain restos in town (and no, not Cactus Club or Earls, as far as I know). Where it does happen is pretty bad - people who do nothing day to day in the restaurant's success are taking money from the tip pool - and taking money away from the back of house staff. The tip pool is for people who actually contribute to that meal, that drink, that service you got. Not someone sitting at home (or in their box seat at an Olympics Hockey game) during your meal.

That's pretty bad.

It gets worse
At least worse from my perspective. The tipping pool has become so standardized in Vancouver that back of house staff - the amazing chefs who craft your food, the expediters who get it moving on time, the back of house management, etc - even front of house management - all are paid sub-par salaries and told upon hiring "tips will make up your salary".

In other words, restaurants, from management to lowest bussing staff are ALL UNDERPAID. On top of charging you, the customer premium markups on alcohol (wine, beer, cocktails) and competitive prices on food, they fully expect you to pay a sizable portion of their staff's pay, directly (ie, no middlemen).

Now this leads to something very interesting. Revenue Canada has been coming down on servers quite hard the last decade or so - if a server gets audited, RC will look at their restaurant's books to see what the sales take is for the server's average shift, and will calculate a 12% amount for declared gratuities based on that audit.

However - Revenue Canada does not regularly investigate managers, assistant managers, section managers, etc at restaurants in the same way. And you can be pretty safe in betting that the $1,000 tip-take a week manager I mentioned earlier isn't declaring $52,000 in extra cash income, over and above his salary, to Revenue Canada.

This is just a snippet of the entire article which is definitely worth the entire read here.

Now some the most annoying parts about service is that servers, menus and restaurants don't TELL patrons that auto-gratuity exists until they get whammed with the bill. This is a major faux pas, in my opinion. Moreso- I do believe it is illegal for there to be a mandatory gratuity.

Now I'm sure there are some angry servers out there etc- but I've got to things to end with:

1) I used to be a server- so don't give me the run around that we don't respect servers. I immensely respect the serving job. It's possibly the hardest job I've ever had to do. But gratuity is a "thank you" to a wage. A mandatory gratuity assumes some sort of automatic level of service which NOT all servers grace customers with. In a lot of cases I wouldn't even mind paying the extra 20% if the service was impeccable. But it's the principle that it's automatic without giving customers a chance to decide whether it deserved the 20%

2) If we had LIVABLE WAGES we wouldn't even be talking about TIPS. Servers earn NOTHING. They someimes earn less than minimum wage. Yes it is illegal- but restaurants do it because they can. And we never talk about how in countries where tips aren't customary- wages are usually at a living standard- people generally get paid more and there is a good social security net for the population. So instead of targetting the servers let us target the industry and the practise of UNlivable wages.

Olympic Log Day 10: And the "no-fun city" returns: VPD close liquor stores

2010-02-21T11:32:00.000-08:00

This was a generally poor decision that will lose us a lot of money:

If you tried to grab anything from a liquor store downtown Saturday night - you were out of luck.
At the request of the Vancouver Police Department, liquor inspectors ordered all stores downtown to close at 7 p.m. in hopes of cutting down on the rowdy atmosphere.

Mike Jahnke from Jimmy's Cold Beer and Wine at Homer near Robson says closing early will have a big effect on his business. "Well we do most of our business normally in the evenings between six and eleven, so it's pretty devastating to say the least."

Jahnke says he was only given one hour notice that he would have to close down four hours early. "The liquor inspector came in to our store at six o'clock and served me with a letter indicating that they're going to have to close at 7 p.m. We had a lineup of about 40 people outside our store and they're not happy."

The early closure also upset many potential customers. One man was quick to express his disappointment to us. "Vancouver turned from 'no fun' Vancouver to 'fun' Vancouver. Within halfway into the Olympics, we're back to 'no fun' Vancouver."

Yes, because Vancouver cannot handle rowdiness. Because we would never EVER want rowdiness during the Olympic games, perhaps the most exciting 2 week party in the world right now. VPD FAIL.

Olympic Log Day 9: RCMP charged with sexual assault; shoplifting- way to go, law enforcement...way to go.

2010-02-20T10:55:00.000-08:00

The Vancouver Police Department has forcasted that crime will go up during the Olympics. And to not mar Vancouver's only sustainable industry- tourism- they want to make sure this doesn't happen. Even a week before the Games I parked in a lot downtown- came back to the car and the police had placed a sign/leaflet on my window saying, "There's nothing to steal in this car except this sign." My friend thought it was funny and wanted to put it up. I said, "Are you kidding? If I was a thief I would break into this car BECAUSE it had a stupid sign like this! Further, I'm pretty sure any passerby-er would key the car that had this pompous sign up."

I guess what the VPD weren't counting on is that other law enforcement that were sourced out of province for the games would be the criminals.

A member of the Vancouver 2010 Integrated Security Unit has been charged with theft under $5,000.

Ottawa-based Staff Sgt. Suzanne Denise Marie Martel, a 19-year RCMP veteran, has been accused of shoplifting from a Winners store in Burnaby while off duty.The VISU is overseeing security for the 2010 Winter Games. Martel has been relieved of her duty and has been sent back to Ottawa, according to an RCMP news release.She is scheduled to appear in court in April.Martel is one of seven VISU police officers who have been sent home. None of the others have been charged.There are 6,000 law-enforcement personnel with the unit.

As if that wasn't enough, a new report out says that RCMP (different ones) are being charged for sexual assault!

Two former members of the 2010 Olympic security force are being investigated for sexual assault, CTV News has confirmed.The two alleged assaults happened aboard a cruise ship where out-of-town security force members are residing during the Games.The suspects are RCMP officers. The alleged victims are also police officers.The alleged incidents were apparently fuelled by alcohol. While military officers are forbidden from consuming alcohol on the ships, police officers are not.The Vancouver Police Department is overseeing both investigations.The two suspects are among seven police officers and four Canadian Forces members who have been relieved of their duties with the 2010 Integrated Security Unit because of improper conduct.

This is way to much, people.

Way to go, law enforcement...way to go.

Olympic Log Day 8: What does 9/11 have to do with the Olympics?

2010-02-19T12:19:00.000-08:00

CTV news has been doing a live broadcast at 11:30pm every night on Robson and Burrard. Surrounded by crowds I have been quite entertained in the last few days about the attampt at a political presence/awareness in the background. There are two people holding up a large banner "Investigate 9/11". And they seem to be getting better at centring it one the screenshot for home viewers. Also interesting is that yesterday a couple people started brigning and equally large Canadian Flag banner, holding it right in front of the "Investigate 9/11" Banner and strategically panning it left and right to block the "Investigate 9/11" banner. Quite entertaining. So a quick google search will show this guys response to the banner. I'm incredibly impressed that the banner inspired this through:

(it's "NUclear"- not nuCUlar")

My favourite part is 2:30-the end of the video. Another inane rant. I'm generally tired of good intentioned progressive people that put out public angry rants that make the general political left look silly. This is the exact portrayal that right-wingers enjoy stereotyping.

THIS is also worth watching- [I kind of love conspiracy theory]

Olympic Log Day 7 Part II: "Deranged" fan DOESN'T attack Biden, NOT a threat- Mental Health and safety

2010-02-18T10:39:00.000-08:00

Everyone has heard about the man who breached Olympic security to get "within 12 steps of" [THE] Joe Biden. Am I the only person who is saying- who the hell cares? Not only was this person NOT carrying any weapons, not even a blunt object, but all reports say he wasn't even considered a threat!

So what's the deal? Oh right, he has "mental health issues". I'm appalled at all the news stories who have literally called this man "deranged" and "crazed". I have two criticisms I will expand upon:

I care less about the political correctness of the adjectives "deranged" and "crazy" and care more about the way those terms are used to make the story sensational. Think, for a moment, that the person who got through security was a young White woman (let us imagine her attractive to boot). She would have, no doubt, been casted as a fan that just wanted to meet Biden and everybody would be talking about what a compliment it is to be respected and looked up-to like that. Now, being in the body that this "deranged" man is in (not knowing myself what he looks like but can take a clue)- he was cast as crazed and infatuated.

Now the meat of my point. This only seems like a big deal because of the particular combination of having 1) fooled security and 2) had legit mental health issues. In this society, we prosecute people's bodies. What I mean by this is we expect to know what "crazy" people look like in the same way we know what homeless and poor people look like. And when we misread these cues we act out (i.e. panhandlers without tattered clothing- people will often scoff and roll their eyes at the poor who seem to "dress well"). People generally look like their socio-economic status.

So when we come across a certified crazy we expect him to look like a certified crazy. For this person to get through several rounds of security and not be stopped is a crack in our faith to identify those we (normal people) have to "protect" ourselves from. Because crazy people are always understood as dangreous- and this is just another example of fear tactics of the media to perpetuate that mental health issues are always safety and violence issues.

Olympic Log Day 7: Ujjal Dosanjh gets served on the Colbert Repor

2010-02-17T20:58:00.000-08:00

Yes, Truthiness showed up in our very own Vancouver today as literally, thousands descended upon the muddy Creekside Park near Science World. About 4500 people RSVP'd 'yes' to the facebook invite, and I do believe every single person came. I got there at 8:45am- and the crowd was already thick- taking up 90% of the grass space and left me on the sidewalk.

The show didn't start taping until 10:30-11:00. No, it wasn't live address. Far from it. Colbert made several foibles and the crowd, still enthusiastic to laugh, became less genuine in their laughs as he told the same joke up to a third time to get it right.

Highlights included:

-an eagle FLEW over the crowd before the show! I don't know if it was staged or not. Too much of a coincidence for it to not be staged...but it's Vancouver- that kind of thing does happen naturally.
-Crowd starts chanting, "Stephen, Stephen, Stephen!" Colbert says, "Now in French!" [slight pause] "Stéphane! Stéphane! Stéphane!"
-Micheal Buble was challenged to sing the Canadian national anthem to the tune of the Amercian national anthem. You could tell Colbert practised- both did a pretty stellar job
-"Actors love to live in 'Hollywood North'- because paparazzi ambush the stars AFTER they ask politely if they can ambush the stars"
-"Who's torch is that? can I see it? I'll give it back" [handed the torch]. "Yeah, I'm not going to give it back."
-"I'd like to thank Vancouver for erecting these two balls in my honour"- referring to science world and the dome.
-Ujjal Dosanjh gets SERVED- the kind of thing only Colbert can get away with:
--"You don't look Canadian..oh, i'm sorry, I was expecting somebody that look more like a 'Gordon'"
--"What caste are you?.... Indians are born into castes like I was born a Catholic (and die a Catholic)"
--"You are familiar with the phrase, 'you get what you pay for' yes or no? Well how do you explain your free healthcare and cheap medicine?"
(Colbert did an epic job of baiting Dosanjh)
-And finally, Bob Costas IS a jerk. He made a few slights at Canada.

Overall, Colbert was worth watching, even though you couldn't see him because the crowd was so thick and it was a 3 hour wait for less than half an hour of Colbert actually talking live.

Colbert will be there on Thursday, February 17 morning too. Go early- about 8am early. And don't wear nice shoes..your feet sink into the mud.

Olympic Log Day 6: Black Bloc organizer submits media statement and what we consider to be violence

2010-02-17T00:26:00.000-08:00

*sigh* and the "Black Bloc" has a published letter in the Georgia Straight explaining the protest that has been reported as violent (bolded text is what I find immensely interesting framing and scroll down for commentary):

In defense of the black bloc: A communique from Olympic resisters
February 14th, 2010 – Vancouver, Coast Salish Territories

On February 12th and 13th, 2010, thousands of courageous individuals came together to resist the 2010 Olympic police state and to attack the corporations plundering the land and deepening poverty. We write this communique as participants in and organizers of the black bloc presence at these demonstrations, known as “Take Back Our City” and “2010 Heart Attack.”

On February 12th, the Vancouver Police Department pacified us with a force of mounted police. The next day during 2010 Heart Attack, they deployed riot police armed with M4 carbine assault rifles. They claim this was necessary in order to stop the march from “jeopardizing public safety” – yet the only threats to public safety were in their own hands. Participants in the demonstration only undertook strategic attacks against corporations sponsoring the Olympics and did not harm or attack bystanders.

The media are now busy denouncing the political violence of property destruction, such as the smashing of a Hudson’s Bay Company window, as though it were the only act of violence happening in this city. They forget that economic violence goes on daily in Vancouver. People are suffering and dying from preventable causes because welfare doesn’t give enough to afford rent, food or medicine, and because authorities routinely ignore the medical emergencies of poor or houseless individuals. This economic violence has gotten worse as we lose housing and social services because of the Olympic Games. In response to this assault, thousands took to the streets, hundreds joining what is known as a black bloc.

The black bloc is not a formal organization; it has no leadership, membership, or headquarters. Instead, the black bloc is a tactic: it is something people *do* in order to accomplish a specific purpose. By wearing black clothing and masking our faces, the black bloc allows for greater protection to those who choose active self-defense. The majority of people involved in the black bloc do not participate in property destruction. However, in masking up they express their solidarity with those who choose to take autonomous direct action against the corporations, authorities and politicians who wage war on our communities.

Participation in the black bloc is an act of courage. With only the shirts on our backs and the masks on our faces, we took to the streets against Canada’s largest ever “peacetime” police force. Protected only by black fabric and the support of our comrades, we stood in front of antiriot cops armed with assault rifles, pistols and batons. We proved that $1 billion of “security” couldn’t prevent us from clogging the heart of downtown Vancouver and crashing a party of 100 000 people — and getting away with it.

You won’t ever know who was in the black bloc this weekend, but you *do* know us. We are the people who organize community potlucks, who dance during street festivals, who make art, defend the land, build co-ops, bicycles and community gardens. When we put on our black clothing, we are not a threat to you, but to the elites.

Whoever you are, one day you will join us. As long as government and corporations attack our communities, we’re going defend – and that means attack.

Signed,

Two organizers and participants in the anarchist presence of the “Take back our city” demonstration and “2010 Heart Attack” street march, February 2010, Coast Salish Territories

There is some looming commentary here. "you will never know who was in the black bloc this weekend but you *do* know us" is kind of a menacing statement. And to say, "whoever you are, one day you will join us" is kind of like.. creepy, to say the least. They say the black bloc is a technique, but by saying that we will join them kind of makes them sound like a group.

And by FAR my favourite quote, "By wearing black clothing and masking our faces, the black bloc allows for greater protection to those who choose active self-defense." For some reason I enjoy the idea of "active self-defense" immensly. I'm not going to say that breaking windows is a way to defend oneself... but I do believe that direct action protest IS a type of self-defense that I will support. In previous reports that had the black bloc defenders say taht "property damage is not violence"- I agree and I disagree. Many people thought that the destruction of private property crossed the line. But there was little intelligent conversation about WHY this might be so. You see, anarchists would consider the idea of "private property" an act of violence in iteself. Private property means some type of ownership and the right to exclude.

hmmm.. Sound like colonialism to anyone?? I think people don't think about White Collar crime enough. And people don't think about what is considered to be White Collar crime (aka Wall Street etc). It is quite true that black bloc-technique protesters did NOT incur violence upon people, until provoked by police (where protestors then protected themselves from police- I actually saw little "fighting back").

Another question, however, is if you believe that physical violence against objects are implied threats of physical violence on people. I certianly know that, after a fight, my ex punching the wall right beside me certainly FEELS like a physical threat to me and I would consider that violence even though my ex-partner punching the wall did not physically hurt me.

So what do we think?

Olympic Log Day 5: Pivot's tent city good, Coucillor Geoff Meggs not so much

2010-02-16T01:05:00.000-08:00

Protesters set up a small tent town in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside on Monday to draw attention to the city's homelessness problem.

The demonstration began as a rally in Pigeon Park, located at the intersection of Carrall and Hastings Streets. Surrounded by international news media, participants then erected a number of tents to serve as both statement and temporary solution.

"One of the things about the campaign, it gets people slightly better accommodation than sleeping under a bush. That's good," said one protester in the park.

The gathering was part of the Red Tent campaign, a national movement advocating a federal housing strategy.

Local activists were also present, calling for an end to high-end condo development in the area and what participants see as the antagonizing of impoverished residents by police.

They also criticized the city's decision to host the Olympics, saying homelessness has tripled in the region since Vancouver won its Games bid in 2003. (read rest here)

The Tyee has the details on the demonstration on Saturday here, and the campaign here.

Pivot's front man David Eby has taken a lot of flak for this campaign. But regardless- it is an agreeable, but clearly moderate, way to bring attention to homelessness in Vancouver. At least it's a clear message and doesn't take the "fuck shit up" route.

And for the "WTF" moment of the day- what is the deal with the Vancouver Sun making it look like Geoff Meggs is some sort of activist? hardly. Want more Geoff Meggs regardless? see here.

Olympic Log Day 4: Bilodeau medal ceremony sold out.. and so are hula hoops

2010-02-15T23:59:00.000-08:00

It was a proud day- sitting at a bar- all eyes on the flat screen. Bilodeau was beaming (albeit not as brightly as the Bronze medalist Bryon Wilson from the US- that dude was HA-PPY!). And the Australian silver medalist, and Canadian/Vancouverite defector Dale-Begg Smith just seemed like a Debbie Downer beside the other two.

It was pretty beautiful when everyone started singing the Canadian national anthem (and see rest of video here) (which would also have been nice at the opening ceremonies if the [obviously talented] Nikki Yanofsky didn't sing such a horribly slow and flowery rendition).

And back in the news- that I thought was really funny [that I negleted to see earlier]- Hula hoops are sold out in Vancouver!

A surge in Olympic spirit has led to a shortage of hula hoops in Metro Vancouver, with toy stores and wholesalers reporting the plastic rings are flying off the shelves as people snap them up to create Olympic displays. The iconic five-ring logo, using metre-wide plastic hula hoops, has started appearing in windows, yards and on balconies as Metro Vancouver residents embrace the Olympic spirit

Hah.. funny. I wonder if they are going to start making sets of green hula hoops for Vancouver 2010.

Olympic Log Day 3: Canadian GOLD- Where the love is at

2010-02-14T21:50:00.000-08:00

Let's put aside controversy of agent provocateurs (and see here) and anarchist violence and focus on CANADIAN GOLD.
It has been a long time coming. First gold on home soil. Bring on the nationalism- It's a proud day.

Feb 14, 2010:
-Lunar New Year
-Valentine's Day
-First Olympic Gold for Canada on home soil

Thank you, Alexandre Bilodeau.

Alex Bilodeau of Rosemere, Que., became an instant hero on Sunday night when the 22-year-old captured the gold medal in the men’s moguls competition — the first time a Canadian has won Olympic gold on home soil.

Bilodeau scored 26.75 points to edge Dale Begg-Smith, who was born in Vancouver but skis for Australia. Begg-Smith, the gold medallist from the 2006 Games in Turin, had 26.58 points.

Olympic Log Day 2: Anarchists "fuck shit up"

2010-02-13T14:40:00.001-08:00

Anarchy= a state of society without government or law
Anarchy does NOT = "fuck shit up"

I continue to be saddened by demonstrators who take things TOO far WITHOUT a coherent message. Anarchy comes from the assumption that law enforcement itself is an inherently violent act that produces criminals. It's premise is that, to identify "order" you have to construct "disorder"- and those who are produced as "disorderly" are the people who are most vulnerable (i.e. underhoused people, physical/mentally differently abled people etc). But let me get things straight- protestors who do this go WAY too far. Click here to see video too.

These black-masked protestors who broke the Hudson Bay Company's windows aim was to destroy property. (and see here) were purely destructive to a good movement. Now perhaps their message was anti-capitalism (HBC is appropriating indigenous land and art and using it to make corporatized profit). Or maybe it is a stand against general colonialism (holding the games on stolen land continues to destroy indigenous land and land rights and they are making an equivalent point of "see how you feel when I destroy a piece of property YOU value).

But how are we to KNOW their message when they go downtown, "fuck shit up" and then run away with NO contingency to continue the message or express the PURPOSE?

Again, I plead to activists: MAKE A COHERENT MESSAGE. I feel for you, I really do. It is really hard to fight the good fight. But as people attempting to fight for social justice we have to work EXTRA hard to make sure WE don't seem like the crazy ones. The "brainwash" that makes people unquestionably and uncritically pro-Olympic is a strong and emotional type of hegemony that isn't going to overturn simply by marching down the streets with a sign of your discontent. Activists have to be SMART. We have to produce subversive messages that are creative, hold attention and appeal to people.

Many people CRIED when the torch came across their town. Countless reports of people feeling incredibly emotional and "proud to be Canadian" reinforces the idea that colonial nationalisms are very deeply held. We need to be careful of how we produce a subversive message because becoming conscious of the fact that Canada is still a colonial country is really difficult to come to terms with. It VERY difficult to come to terms with discovering everything you have known, have been taught to believe in is a lie to uphold capitalism, colonialism and patriarchy. So give people a chance to understand and not just REACT to silly acts of protest that "fuck shit up" and whose only purpose is to "disrupt."

Photos from: shotinvancouver.com

Olympic Log Day 1: Selected Photos of Protest Welcome the World

2010-02-12T20:59:00.000-08:00

You know what I love? Intelligent protest. The type that uses the opportunity of an inevitable event [the Olympics] to bring important issues to the forefront/ demonstrate that the Olympics is not immune to politics.

You know what I don't like? Activitsts who proclaim, "[We want to] fuck shit up" or "We are here to disturb- that's the point." Now I don't know if the media had some ridiculous editing skills (which is entirely possible) or if activists need to get better media-training. Or perhaps if it is neither- maybe protestors need to get a better message than just "disrupt." Activists need to work extra hard to make sure their point comes across as intelligent, thought-out rational and with reason. Because there is VERY good reason to be anti-Olympic! But time and time again I see clips of young dishevelled yelling people that produce no substance to the discussion and, frankly, no creativity in demonstration technique.

Anyhow, here are some favourites of Opening Day Olympics:
Vancouver Art Gallery Demonstration

"We want gold medal health care"

Protesting Protest: "They say protest: I say party" (my personal favourite)

Olympic Log T- 1 day: Vancouver Police State

2010-02-11T06:04:00.000-08:00

The police have descended upon Vancouver. Not a block is left without "law enforcement". Police, RCMP, military soldiers, sailors and jet fighers. that's right- JET FIGHTERS are hovering over the city.
Is seems like Vancouver is bracing for international warfare. But I think the real threat- or what people see is the real threat- is anti-Olympic Vancouverites and protestors.

It's true, roaming the streets I see many protestors I recognize from Toronto and Ottawa- they all flew to Vancouver to support the anti-Olympic movement.

People who hold privilege usually trust law enforcement. Which makes sense. If you embody the status-quo and are the beneficiary of oppressive practices you are generally going to enjoy that the people who enforce the law are also enforcing your own ability to espouse hegemony. But let us consider those who don't receive the benefit. Really, it's a question of the "public bathroom test". If you can walk into any restaurant/cafe and use the bathroom easily then you probably don't mind the police presence. However, if you're locked out, getting security to block you from allowing you to alleviate natural bodily functions and then criminalized for having to relieve yourself in public space- you are likely the person who will fear the police. YOU are the one law enforcers are after.

So the least we can do is keep police presence visible- most threat comes from the mere physical presence. But when the cops are concealed? When they are hassling people on the street in pedestrian clothing? NOT COOL:

Taken in Vancouver, Robson & Howe in front of Roots.

The plain clothes cop is hasseling the guys sitting on the street. I believe he was cuffed, but i'm not too sure- his hands remained behind his back though.

Olympic Log T- 2 days: Conflicting feelings over Vancouver 2010

2010-02-10T16:17:00.001-08:00

It is time to start blogging about the Olympics. To start, I will confess that I voted 'yes' for the Olympic bid referendum in 2003. This was prior to really getting politically involved/ educated and like many other Vancouverites, I honestly just thought it would be kickass to get the Olympics in Vancouver. Click here to read more about the bid history.

But as we are nearing the games and it is becoming extremely apparent that cost overuns, gentrification and heavily policing are infringing on the most vulnerable people in the city- it's time to take the blog out and record what will be a real defining point in Vancouver's history.

The Megaphone, a street-news team, has linked up with Pins+Needs, a very cool non-profit that makes buttons for good causes. This team seems to get it- we want to celebrate and do the best we can during this inevitable event, but we also don't want to be blinded by the party and forget our politics or the consequences of Vancouver 2010. So, for a start, I would like you to support the Megaphone through Pins+Needs.

All of the profits from the limited-edition pin will go to Megaphone, a non-profit magazine sold on the streets of Vancouver by homeless and low-income vendors. Megaphone's mandate is to provide economic opportunities for the Downtown Eastside's most maginalized residents, while serving as a forum for issues that affect all Vancouverites.

"I was torn when Vancouver won the Olympic bid," says Bercovitch. "I love the Olympics. I love supporting our athletes. But I couldn't turn a blind eye to the impact the Olympics have had on the Downtwon Eastside, which is often called Canada's poorest postal code. I felt in my gut that we could turn this international event into an opportunity to help those who have the greatest needs."

"With Pins+Needs Canadians can show the world that we are proud of Canada, but also that we care about all our citizens," she says.

The True Patriot Love Pin is available for a $1 donation. The five designs are available through select independent retailers and at PinsandNeeds.com until March 21.

Standing Ovation goes to Olbermann

2010-01-14T18:21:00.000-08:00

Pat Robertson is Evil:

Foreign aide & Haiti: 17 High school students that should stay and do what they intended to do in Haiti

2010-01-13T20:04:00.000-08:00

You are not going to like what I have to say- but I am going to say it (prematurely even before I know the decisions that are going to definitively be made)

On Tuesday, 17 high school students from Mount Sentinel School in South Slocan travelled to Haiti to set up a farm in a local community –an aid mission. An unfortunate set of events later- a 7.3- devastating earthquake- and these students are left in Haiti possibly freaking out and scared. Their parents are probably in worse shape- and wanting them home asap.

My response? Suck it up and stay. If these students leave they will set an example as selfish people. Their mission was to give aid. Don’t run away at the time when they need aid the most.

On “foreign aide”: Individuals who go to foreign countries to try to help and come back thinking they are better people, by and large, are fools. Especially those who are overeducated people who are likely there to put something impressive on their resume so they can get into a good college and tell a great story of how they “helped” so many people.

If those students come back they will be mirroring the same thing- they will be considered “brave” for going to an impoverished place and surviving disaster. You know what? People in poverty face danger, uncertainty and death EVERYDAY. Foreign aid workers come in for a fraction of time to go in and get out with a great story and patting themselves on the back for “doing a good thing”. Foreign aid workers have the privilege of coming back to the comforts of the hegemonic world (or for some of you- “the First World”).

Now if you really wanted to help other places and do “development work”- you wouldn’t occupy other countries and think about the real detrimental result of the privileged lifestyles.

These students are “ready to work”- so I hope they stay and don’t take the easy way out.

As the news has reported, they are safe and well fed at their location- and they will be KEPT safe for the very fact that they are Canadian- A privilege that many Haitians aren’t guaranteed in their daily lives.

Discipline & Punish: Christopher Skinner's murder representing the body of gay men

2009-10-25T14:09:00.000-07:00

On October 18th, 2009, Christopher Skinner was beaten by four people and, once on the ground, his assailants got into their SUV and ran him over. This happened in Downtown Toronto, literally steps from where I live.

Christopher Skinner was a gay man. It was speculated that he was attacked because he was gay. A hate crime. Because of the multiple CCTV's in DT Toronto, the attack was caught on tape, but the people, nor the SUV license was taken.
His soon-to-be-husband declared it a hate crime and many early reports, from main stream media as well as the gay community claimed it was a hate crime.

So how do we know it was a hate crime?- Did his assailants know him? Did they know he was gay? Did he "look gay"? Were his pants a little too tight? His walk a little too feminine? What were the stereotypes that Skinner was exhibiting that would have signaled to his attackers that he is gay?
We just don't and can't know for sure until we find the attackers.

In fact, new reports now demonstrate that Skinner appeared to be hailing a cab home and may have accidentally scratched an SUV that passed him by- evidently pissing off the people within it enough to beat and run him over. Now media is declaring that the hate-crime label is misguided. But regardless, we can still ask the same question- was he attacked because he was gay? Would his attackers acted the same if the person hailing a cab was in a different body? A body that didn't appear as an "easy target"? Would they have acted the same if this were a gruff-looking male? Or how about a female?

Regardless of motive, circumstance, the reaction received by the Queer community is overwhelming as there is still fear that it was, in fact, a hate crime.
I argue that it doesn't matter the reason for Skinner's death because, either way, it still has same effect of a hate-crime. Skinner's beaten and run over body represents the fear within the Queer community of gay-bashing. The outpour of the Queer community is due to the shored up fear that they live with every day- the fact that their bodies are always at risk. The instant 'hate-crime-reaction' externalized this hidden fear. At this moment of crisis it exposed the fact that gay men (and women) must, and do, watch their back every day of their lives for fear that people, who want to demonstrate their dominance, will inflict violence on their bodies.

This is the same fear with which women walk down the streets at night. No matter how independent or strong a woman thinks they are, there is that little voice in the back of your head that warns you to walk a little faster when getting home.

This phenomena is what Foucault calls "Discipline and Punsh"- Bodies are subordinated through either real violence or threats of violence. Once the body is conditioned to know the limits within which they can exist you don't need to routinely demonstrate actual violence because it is instilled within the person- the person is disciplined. But every now and then, if a person "steps out of its place", vionece will be demonstrated- the body will be punished for going beyond its circumscribed area. The reaction of the Queer community was a demonstration of how deeply these limits are felt and how deeply they understand the potential for vioence to be inflicted on their own bodies.

Vigil Tonight at 8pm for Christopher Skinner- Church & Wellesley

Ladner Love: He sings too

2009-06-15T10:40:00.000-07:00

Good LORD, how did I miss this?
Peter Ladner singing? He's so dreamy.
He lost the municipal election, but he didn't lose my heart <3

Check it out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUvLFfw4U-w

Block Party

2009-06-15T10:04:00.000-07:00

Block parties

I wish block parties were back in style.

Barbeques every few houses apart.

Beer and drink stations like Sports Day.

I wish block parties were back in style.

Baking pies and delivering them to neighbours.

Borrowing a cup of milk like the country side.

I wish block parties were back in style.

But I’m not going to do anything about it.

Because I live in a condo. Like we can even have a block party....

Someone is out to get Richard Florida, and it's not me!

2009-04-29T10:20:00.000-07:00

I am proud to say that the citizens of Toronto have had enough of Richard Florida. Or well, enough to begin this website: http://creativeclassstruggle.wordpress.com/

for some backgrounder on my e-relationship with Richard, see: "Dear Richard Florida..."
And Richard's response: "My newest favoritist critic"

While I am wary of most critics who haven't actually read his entire body of work, I am pro-anybody who wants to think critically about the work that he has produced and the brand that he has produced. Now Florida's work is still correlationary, bad, pop culture referenced, personal-anecdotal-evidenced research. In short, far from academically rigourous. But I can't deny that he has changed his tune. He is on the "diversity is key" bend. And it really is for the purposes of playing the odds. You see, Florida wants us to attract the best and brightest, which in his alliterative terms means Talented (educated), Tolerant (of ethnic backgrounds, sexual orientation, etc), and Technology (people who will booster existing base of quaternary industry smarts/tech industry). But to do this his solution is to make the general living climate good to attract everyone (even those not in the creative class) and then some of them are BOUND to be part of the creative class and booster our economy. In short, Florida is playing the odds.

Another thing I have noticed, is that Mayor Miller is slutting Richard Florida out now. In public speeches Miller used to refernce creativity and allude to the creative class. Now he's just going all out and saying Richard Florida's name. To make matters worse, Mayor Miller is developing the same SPEECH patterns as Richard Florida when attempting to make a point. Miller is becoming a VERY anecdotal speaker. Dear Mayor Miller, if I have to hear a story about your mother one more time so you can make a point and answer a question that is entirely unrelated, I might have to punch myself in the face to relieve the pain.

Long story short, there's a movement started to bring down "Brand Florida" and you should be "creative" and join. I guarantee Richard will be there, or at least send one of his posse.

http://creativeclassstruggle.wordpress.com/

Breast Feeding

2009-04-08T18:43:00.000-07:00

Not that this video didn't make me cringe, but why is this really so wrong?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxv6R9fUO74

When should we stop breast feeding? Why do we stop breastfeeding?
Why do we find it SO disgusting to drink our own mothers' milk after a certain age but we'll drink gallons of cow milk, goat milk etc.?

Not that asking the above questions was the central reason for this post..
What I REALLY wanted to address were the absolute disgusting remarks that were made ABOUT the video in the comment section on youtube.

I found it absolutely disgusting that people were referring to this mother as an abuser. I found it absolutely disgusting that people said she was getting sexual pleasure out of this. I found it atrocious that they referred to both the mother and the children in the videos as "dykes" (ongoing comments make accusations of them having some sort of incest lesbian affair).

These comments are horribly sexist, heteronormative and culturally imperialist. There were so many hateful remarks, not questioning the validity of breastfeeding past a certain age, but rather was prescriptive of what women should do with their bodies and what it means to be a "good mother".

In fact, it is so interesting to see how loving this mother truly is and how maternal she is, which is like, a serious "mothering-woman skill". And then as soon as a woman overextends that maternal action, she all of a sudden becomes "sick" or a pedophile.

Furthermore, the way people attacked her for her and her children's sexual orientations- as if breastfeeding, pleasure or non-pleasure with the experience of breastfeeding, and sexual orientation are at all related.

I don't necessarily think breastfeeding at the age of 8 is Kosher, but I DO understand that my understanding of breastfeeding and the conditions under which breastfeeding should happen are culturally and socially defined. I'm not going to make hateful remarks just because I disagree.

Back at it- but from Toronto

2009-03-29T11:52:00.000-07:00

So after being away for sucha long time I am incredibly surprised to see that people are still visiting my blog and posting comments.
I unsuccessfully tried to branch out and do "The Toronto Manifesto". It didn't work out so well just because *I* even got tired of posting to a different website. I like me old blogger account and I'll post things from where I am, regardless if it's from Vancouver.

So here I go on my journey- from Toronto.
Thanks for being loyal readers of The Vancouver Manifesto.

Canadian Federal Election- Google's spoiling ballots

2008-10-14T18:44:00.000-07:00

I went to vote today, of course. And I must say that it was a terrible experience followed by a surprisingly simple array of steps.
Let me explain.
I woke up 8:00am so I could be there birhgt and early and vote. I had work at 10 and could not be late so I gave myself an hour.
The poles dont' open until 9:30, I was then told.
I was irritated. very irritated.

I went to work, then went back to the polling station after work
For those of you who don't know, I've recently moved to Toronto (which also explains why I haven't been updating as often). A simple library card with my picture on it and any mail that had my name on it with my new address was sufficient. I say, I could have just made that up. There is no way that they really know what riding I was supposed to vote in. I could have typed my own address and meandered my vote to another riding..maybe I should have picked on where the Liberals weren't such a stronghold.

I then proceeded to vote NDP, although I was mighty tempted to choose the communist party. and yes, there was even a Marxist-Leninist party in my riding. But no, I think it serves me better to vote NDP and prove that the NDP has a strong base even in a stronghold like the Liberals.

I'm curious to see how many spoiled ballots there were.
Especially since google has advertised the even twith a check mark. And if you didn't spoil your ballot- you should have selected your MP with an "x"

David Eby: Official loser.

2008-09-21T03:11:00.000-07:00

But alas, Vision Vancouver failed to nominate David Eby.
Who woulda thunk it? I thought David Eby was a shoe in. Who can resist that freakishly tall man with a soft-spot for housing social justice?
I certainly can't, especially when he offers to come to my house to talk himself up. No, that was not meant to sound condescending at all. I really was pushing for David.

I don't get it. What happened? To my knowledge, the only thing that David Eby could have done wrong is run a strong slate for housing and homeless issues. *gasp* may I maybe infer that Vision Vancouver's membership is too moderate to push a candidate like Eby through?

Now dare I ask Mr. Eby to run with COPE?
No, Dave really does lose face if he attempts to put together his fallen [short lived] political career.
Go back to Pivot, Eby. If they will let you back in.

Now to everybody, why did he lose?

a) Moderate Vision Vancouver voters (Vision as a "progressive centre left" is a myth)
b) There were just too many other great candidates ahead of him (or ones more closely tied socially/politically/historically to the Vision campaign)
c) Distaste for the housing/homelessness slate
d) Inexperienced in politics
e) Freakishly tall
f) All of the above
g) Some of the above
h) Choose your own adventure.

A date with David Eby?

2008-07-26T16:27:00.000-07:00

David Eby is thoughtfully opening his schedule up to Vancouver citizens who want to know what he's all about. As you may know he is running for Vision Vancouver, but must first win a nomination in the Vision primary on September 20th.

In short, he's inviting YOU to contact HIM so you will sign up with Vision Vancouver and help his nomination.
So, to get all partisan on yo ass, TheVancouverManifesto is asking you to sign up with Vision and nominate this kind fellow.

Just the fact that he is has been going TO the people in small groups shows that he is a politician that can uphold transparency and accessability.

David Eby is good people, read his call for supporters:

Dearest loyal blog readers, I'm asking you to invite me into your homes to meet your friends and families.

Yes, believe it or not, a politician in your very own home, not unlike Mr. Burns' run for state governor and the three-eyed fish incident on the Simpsons. But hopefully with a better ending.

Here's what's going on. I'm in a rush to sign up as many members to Vision Vancouver as possible to help me make sure I win the Vision primary on September 20th and show up on the ballot in November. The deadline to sign people up for the primary is August 20th.

The best way that I've found to sign people up is to speak with small groups about the issues I care about, and to share with those groups why I think they should support me.

People have been hosting me and a small group of their friends (usually about 5, sometimes less, sometimes more) for brief, 1-2 hour coffees/after work drinks, to get a sense of who I am and what I'm about.

I'd love to come to your house, hear your concerns about the city, and make my best pitch. It's like Avon, but instead of being about makeup, it's about making our city better.

To invite me over to meet your friends and talk homelessness, affordable housing and anything else civic, drop me a line at david@davideby.ca .

Home Depot pro-affordable housing? Oh, the Irony

2008-07-26T12:03:00.000-07:00

Home Depot, along with other home hardware/home furnishing stores must deal with the subprime housing crisis/defaults/ and loss of homes. Funny enough, when people don't have homes they tend to not spend money on things that you would need for a home. Martha Stewart learned that last year when stores were refusing to pick up her new home furnishing line. Home Depot must be picking that up too. Apparently home depot is now "committed to affordable housing". Bah.. yeah right. read this:

Home Depot campaign helps make affordable housing a reality
Jun. 2, 2008
The Home Depot Canada and Habitat for Humanity Canada are challenging communities across the country to help make a meaningful difference in the lives of families in need with the launch of its second annual Buy a House, Build a Home Paper House Campaign. From May 29 to June 29, Canadians can positively affect the lives of families in need of safe, decent, affordable housing by purchasing a paper house for only $2 at any Home Depot location or by donating online at www.homedepot.ca. Each dollar raised will be donated to Habitat for Humanity Canada for affordable housing projects coast-to-coast. A portion of sales from all CIL Dulux paint, CGC drywall products and Square D (a brand of Schneider Electric) electrical products will also be donated.
When Canadians purchase a paper house from The Home Depot they are not only helping to change lives across the country, they are also making a difference in their own backyard, a press release from the company stated. As part of the Paper House campaign, The Home Depot will donate a special affordable housing build grant to the Habitat for Humanity affiliate in the community that raises the most money.
The Paper House Campaign is just one part of The Home Depot’s commitment to affordable housing. Since 1996, The Home Depot has been the largest supporter of Habitat for Humanity in Canada and currently donates over $3 million in funding and products and thousands of volunteer hours each year in support of affordable housing projects coast-to-coast. The Home Depot Canada’s unique Return to Vendor Program allows returned building supplies and products to be redirected to Habitat for Humanity ReStores, where it is resold with proceeds supporting building programs.
In 2007, The Home Depot Canada supported 35 affordable housing projects through Habitat for Humanity. Combining its commitment to affordable housing with its dedication to the environment, throughout 2008 The Home Depot will support sustainable build projects to help create energy-efficient homes that provide lasting benefits to families in need.

This was basically a campaign to ensure that people would have houses and then buy stuff. The irony..because not too long ago Home Depot was evicting the poor from their homes:

Homeless evicted from Toronto's 'tent city'
Last Updated: Wednesday, September 25, 2002 12:24 PM ET
CBC News
Security officers began Tuesday morning to evict about 100 squatters living in a vacant lot in Toronto's south end that has become known as "Tent City."
Over the past few years the land has become an enclave of homeless people living in ramshackle dwellings.
Toronto Mayor Mel Lastman said the city was prepared to help the squatters. "We've got shelter space available," he said.
"We are going to do everything we can to help these people with drug and alcohol addiction."
Security officers hired by Home Depot, the renovation supply and hardware company that owns the land, began removing the homeless people as police stood by to keep order and to arrest squatters resisting the eviction.
Police spokeswoman Louise Gray said the squatters would be removed within a few days.
Mel LastmanCompany 'within its rights'
Home Depot said it decided to force the squatters to leave for health and safety reasons.
The company said it had been trying to find a resolution to the occupation by working with various organizations and the city. But worsening problems with drugs and prostitution forced immediate action.
The mayor said the company was within its rights to act when and how it did.
"Home Depot has the right ... to have trespassers removed off their property, and they exercised that right today using their own people," Lastman said.
Lastman noted there had been illegal garbage dumping on the land, as well as illegal hydro hookups and a number of fire code violations.
The squatters built the shantytown rather than stay in homeless shelters.
City councillor Jack Layton, who is also running for the leadership of the federal NDP, said the evictions underline the homelessness problem in the city.
"As we've been pointing out for years, we need some affordable housing built," said Layton. "At least at Tent City they'd built themselves a warm place for the winter.
"Now some of them will likely end up in the streets."
In June, officials from the city, province and federal government vowed to clean up Tent City and other areas of Toronto's waterfront.

Interview with Alinsky

2008-07-25T12:24:00.000-07:00

found this blast from the past swimming around in several places on the internet. Playboy interviews Alinsky (father of community organizing and author of Rules for Radicals)

Empowering People, Not Elites
Interview with Saul Alinsky
(24,403 words)
Saul Alinsky is, along with Thomas Paine, Henry George, and Dorothy Day, one of the great American leaders of the nonsocialist left.

Response to our earlier article dealing with Alinsky has been so great that we worked to obtain this extensive interview with him, conducted by Playboy magazine in 1972. It is, by far, the most detailed conversation with Alinsky that we know of. The interview will be appearing in weekly installments here at The Progress Report.

Part One

For the past 35 years, the American establishment has come under relentless attack from a bespectacled, conservatively dressed community organizer who looks like an accountant and talks like a stevedore. According to The New York Times, Saul Alinsky "is hated and feared in high places from coast to coast" for being "a major. force in the revolution of powerless people -- indeed, he is emerging as a movement unto himself." And a Time magazine essay concluded that "it is not too much to argue that American democracy is being altered by Alinsky's ideas."

In the course of nearly four decades of organizing the poor for radical social action, Alinsky has made many enemies, but he has also won the respect, however grudging, of a disparate array of public figures: French philosopher Jacques Maritain has called him "one of the few really great men of this century," and even William Buckley, Jr., a bitter ideological foe, has admitted that "Alinsky is twice formidable, and very close to being an organizational genius." He was preceded by his reputation on a recent tour of Asia, where he was hailed by political and student leaders from Tokyo to Singapore as the one American with concrete revolutionary lessons for the impoverished Third World.

Not bad for a slum kid from the South Side of Chicago, where he was born on January 30, 1909. After working his way through the University of Chicago, Alinsky attended graduate school for two years, then dropped out to work as an Illinois state criminologist. In the mid-Thirties, as a side line, he began to work as an organizer with the then-radical C.I.O., in which he soon became a close friend and aide to John L. Lewis. Then, in 1939, he phased himself out of active participation in the labor movement and into the role of community organizer, starting in his own back yard -- the Chicago slums. His efforts to turn scattered, voiceless discontent into a united protest aroused the admiration of Illinois governor Adlai E. Stevenson, who said Alinsky's aims "most faithfully reflect our ideals of brotherhood, tolerance, charity and the dignity of the individual." In 1940, Alinsky elicited a generous grant from liberal millionaire Marshall Field III, who provided funds to establish the Industrial Areas Foundation, which has remained Alinsky's primary base of operation. Throughout the next decade, with Field's financial backing, Alinsky repeated his initial success in a score of slum communities across the nation, from Kansas City and Detroit to the barrios of Southern California.

In the Fifties, he turned his attention to the black ghetto, and again began in Chicago. His actions quickly earned the enmity of Mayor Richard J. Daley (who, while remaining firmly opposed to Alinsky's methods over the years, recently conceded that "Alinsky loves Chicago the same as I do"). He also redoubled his travel schedule as an "outside agitator." After long but successful struggles in New York State and a dozen different trouble spots around the country, he flew to the West Coast, at the request of the Bay Area Presbyterian Churches, to organize the black ghetto in Oakland, California. Hearing of his plans, the panic-stricken Oakland City Council promptly introduced a resolution banning him from the city, and an amendment by one councilman to send him a 50-foot length of rope with which to hang himself was carried overwhelmingly. (Alinsky responded by mailing the council a box of diapers.)

When Oakland police threatened to arrest him if he entered the city limits, he crossed the Bay Bridge with a small band of reporters and TV cameramen, armed only with a birth certificate and a U.S. passport. "The welcoming committee of Oakland police looked and felt pretty silly," Alinsky fondly recalls. Oakland was forced to back down, and Alinsky established a local all-black organization to fight the establishment.

By the late Sixties, Alinsky was leaving most of the field work to his aides and concentrating on training community organizers through the Industrial Areas Foundation Training Institute, which he calls a "school for professional radicals." Funded principally by a foundation grant from Midas Muffler, the school aims at turning out 25 skilled organizers annually to work in black and white communities across the nation. "Just think of all the hell we've kicked up around the country with only four or five full-time organizers," Alinsky told newsmen at the school's opening session. "Things will really move now."

He was right -- if his subsequent success as a radical organizer can be measured by the degree of opposition and exasperation he aroused among the guardians of the status quo. A conservative church journal wrote that "it is impossible to follow both Jesus Christ and Saul Alinsky." Barron's, the business weekly, took that odd logic a step further and charged that Alinsky "has a record of affiliation with Communist fronts and causes." And a top Office of Economic Opportunity official, Hyman Bookbinder, characterized Alinsky's attacks on the antipoverty program (for "welfare colonialism") as "outrageously false, ignorant, intemperate headline-seeking."

Perhaps the one achievement of his life that has drawn almost universally favorable response was the publication of his new book, "Rules for Radicals," which has received glowing reviews in practically every newspaper and magazine in the country. To show his staff exactly how he felt about all this unaccustomed approbation, he called them in to say, "Don't worry, boys, we'll weather this storm of approval and come out as hated as ever." It provided Alinsky with some consolation that the book provoked a hostile reaction in at least one major city -- his own. The Chicago Tribune greeted the publication of "Rules for Radicals" with a lead editorial headlined "ALINSKY'S AT IT AGAIN" and concluded:

"Rubbing raw the sores of discontent may be jolly good fun for him, but we are unable to regard it as a contribution to social betterment. The country has enough problems of the insoluble sort as things are without working up new ones for no discernible purpose except Alinsky's amusement." To which Alinsky responded: "The establishment can accept being screwed, but not being laughed at. What bugs them most about me is that unlike humorless radicals, I have a hell of a good time doing what I'm doing."

Interview with Saul Alinsky, Part Two

Saul Alinsky is, along with Thomas Paine, Henry George, and Dorothy Day, one of the great American leaders of the nonsocialist left.

Response to our earlier article dealing with Alinsky has been so great that we worked to obtain this extensive interview with him, conducted by Playboy magazine in 1972. It is, by far, the most detailed conversation with Alinsky that we know of. The interview will be appearing in weekly installments here at The Progress Report.

Part One - Let's Talk

To find out more about why Alinsky is doing what he's doing, and to probe the private complexities of the public man, PLAYBOY sent Eric Norden to interview him. The job, Norden soon discovered, was far from easy: "The problem was that Alinsky's schedule is enough to drive a professional athlete to a rest home, and he seems to thrive on it. I accompanied him from the East Coast to the West and into Canada, snatching tape sessions on planes, in cars and at airport cocktail lounges between strategy sessions with his local organizers, which were more like military briefings than bull sessions. My first meeting with him was in TWA's Ambassador Lounge at Chicago's O'Hare Airport. He was dressed in a navy-blue blazer, buttondown oxford shirt and black knit tie. His first words were a growled order for Scotch on the rocks; his voice was flat and gravelly, and I found it easier to picture him twisting arms to win Garment District contracts than organizing ghettos. As we traveled together and I struggled to match his pace, I soon learned that he is, if nothing else, an original. (Alinsky to stewardess: 'Will you please tell the captain I don't give a f--- what our wind velocity is, and ask him to keep his trap shut so I can get some work done?')"

"Nat Hentoff wrote last year, 'At 62, Saul is the youngest man I've met in years,' and I could see what he meant. There is a tremendous vitality about Alinsky, a raw, combative ebullience, and a consuming curiosity about everything and everyone around him. Add to this a mordant wit, a monumental ego coupled with an ability to laugh at himself and the world in general, and you begin to get the measure of the man.

"And yet late at night, in a Milwaukee motel room, his face was gray, haggard and for once he showed the day's toll (three cities, two speeches, endless press conferences and strategy sessions). A vague sadness hung around him, as if some barrier had broken down, and he began to talk -- off the record -- about all the people he's loved who have died. There were many, and they seemed closer at night, in airport Holiday Inn rooms, sleeping alone with the air conditioner turned high to drown out the roar of the planes. He talked on for an hour, fell abruptly silent for a minute, then sprang to his feet and headed for the door. 'We'll really f--- 'em tomorrow!' The race was on again."

Norden began the interview by asking Alinsky about his latest and most ambitious campaign: to organize nothing less than America's white middle class.

PLAYBOY: Mobilizing middle-class America would seem quite a departure for you after years of working with poverty-stricken black and white slum dwellers. Do you expect suburbia to prove fertile ground for your organizational talents?

ALINSKY: Yes, and it's shaping up as the most challenging fight of my career, and certainly the one with the highest stakes. Remember, people are people whether they're living in ghettos, reservations or barrios, and the suburbs are just another kind of reservation -- a gilded ghetto. One thing I've come to realize is that any positive action for radical social change will have to be focused on the white middle class, for the simple reason that this is where the real power lies. Today, three fourths of our population is middle class, either through actual earning power or through value identification. Take the lower-lower middle class, the blue-collar or hard-hat group; there you've got over 70,000,000 people earning between $5000 and $10,000 a year, people who don't consider themselves poor or lower class at all and who espouse the dominant middle class ethos even more fiercely than the rich do. For the first time in history, you have a country where the poor are in the minority, where the majority are dieting while the have-nots are going to bed hungry every night.

Christ, even if we could manage to organize all the exploited low-income groups -- all the blacks, chicanos, Puerto Ricans, poor whites -- and then, through some kind of organizational miracle, weld them all together into a viable coalition, what would you have? At the most optimistic estimate, 55,000,000 people by the end of this decade -- but by then the total population will be over 225,000,000, of whom the overwhelming majority will be middle class. This is the so-called Silent Majority that our great Greek philosopher in Washington is trying to galvanize, and it's here that the die will be cast and this country's future decided for the next 50 years. Pragmatically, the only hope for genuine minority progress is to seek out allies within the majority and to organize that majority itself as part of a national movement for change. If we just give up and let the middle classes go to the likes of Agnew and Nixon by default, then you might as well call the whole ball game. But they're still up for grabs -- and we're gonna grab 'em.

PLAYBOY: The assumption behind the Administration's Silent Majority thesis is that most of the middle class is inherently conservative. How can even the most skillful organizational tactics unite them in support of your radical goals?

ALINSKY: Conservative? That's a crock of crap. Right now they're nowhere. But they can and will go either of two ways in the coming years -- to a native American fascism or toward radical social change. Right now they're frozen, festering in apathy, leading what Thoreau called "lives of quiet desperation:" They're oppressed by taxation and inflation, poisoned by pollution, terrorized by urban crime, frightened by the new youth culture, baffled by the computerized world around them. They've worked all their lives to get their own little house in the suburbs, their color TV, their two cars, and now the good life seems to have turned to ashes in their mouths. Their personal lives are generally unfulfilling, their jobs unsatisfying, they've succumbed to tranquilizers and pep pills, they drown their anxieties in alcohol, they feel trapped in longterm endurance marriages or escape into guilt-ridden divorces. They're losing their kids and they're losing their dreams. They're alienated, depersonalized, without any feeling of participation in the political process, and they feel rejected and hopeless. Their utopia of status and security has become a tacky-tacky suburb, their split-levels have sprouted prison bars and their disillusionment is becoming terminal.

They're the first to live in a total mass-media-oriented world, and every night when they turn on the TV and the news comes on, they see the almost unbelievable hypocrisy and deceit and even outright idiocy of our national leaders and the corruption and disintegration of all our institutions, from the police and courts to the White House itself. Their society appears to be crumbling and they see themselves as no more than small failures within the larger failure. All their old values seem to have deserted them, leaving them rudderless in a sea of social chaos. Believe me, this is good organizational material.

The despair is there; now it's up to us to go in and rub raw the sores of discontent, galvanize them for radical social change. We'll give them a way to participate in the democratic process, a way to exercise their rights as citizens and strike back at the establishment that oppresses them, instead of giving in to apathy. We'll start with specific issues -- taxes, jobs, consumer problems, pollution -- and from there move on to the larger issues: pollution in the Pentagon and the Congress and the board rooms of the megacorporations. Once you organize people, they'll keep advancing from issue to issue toward the ultimate objective: people power. We'll not only give them a cause, we'll make life goddamn exciting for them again -- life instead of existence. We'll turn them on.

PLAYBOY: You don't expect them to beware of radicals bearing gifts?

ALINSKY: Sure, they'll be suspicious, even hostile at first. That's been my experience with every community I've ever moved into. My critics are right when they call me an outside agitator. When a community, any kind of community, is hopeless and helpless, it requires somebody from outside to come in and stir things up. That's my job -- to unsettle them, to make them start asking questions, to teach them to stop talking and start acting, because the fat cats in charge never hear with their ears, only through their rears. I'm not saying it's going to be easy; thermopolitically, the middle classes are rooted in inertia, conditioned to look for the safe and easy way, afraid to rock the boat. But they're beginning to realize that boat is sinking and unless they start bailing fast, they're going to go under with it. The middle class today is really schizoid, torn between its indoctrination and its objective situation. The instinct of middle-class people is to support and celebrate the status quo, but the realities of their daily lives drill it home that the status quo has exploited and betrayed them.

PLAYBOY: In what way?

ALINSKY: In all the ways I've been talking about, from taxation to pollution. The middle class actually feels more defeated and lost today on a wide range of issues than the poor do. And this creates a situation that's supercharged with both opportunity and danger. There's a second revolution seething beneath the surface of middle-class America -- the revolution of a bewildered, frightened and as-yet-inarticulate group of desperate people groping for alternatives -- for hope. Their fears and their frustrations over their impotence can turn into political paranoia and demonize them, driving them to the right, making them ripe for the plucking by some guy on horseback promising a return to the vanished verities of yesterday. The right would give them scapegoats for their misery -- blacks, hippies, Communists -- and if it wins, this country will become the first totalitarian state with a national anthem celebrating "the land of the free and the home of the brave." But we're not going to abandon the field to them without a long, hard fight -- a fight I think we're going to win. Because we'll show the middle class their real enemies: the corporate power elite that runs and ruins the country -- the true beneficiaries of Nixon's so-called economic reforms. And when they swing their sights on that target, the sh-- will really hit the fan.

PLAYBOY: In the past, you've focused your efforts on specific communities where the problems -- and the solutions -- were clearly defined. But now you're taking on over 150,000,000 people. Aren't you at all fazed by the odds against you?

ALINSKY: Are you kidding? I've been doing this for 30 years now, and the odds haven't bothered me yet. In fact, I've always taken 100-to-one odds as even money. Sure, it's true that the middle class is more amorphous than some barrio in Southern California, and you're going to be organizing all across the country instead of in one city. But the rules are the same. You start with what you've got, you build up one community around the issues, and then you use the organization you've established as an example and a power base to reach other communities. Once you're successful in, say, Chicago -- one of the cities where we're organizing the middle class -- then you can go on to Cincinnati or Boston or Dubuque and say, "OK, you see what we did in Chicago, let's get movin' here." It's like an ink-blot effect, spreading out from local focal points of power across the whole country. Once we have our initial successes, the process will gather momentum and begin to snowball.

It won't be easy and, sure, it's a gamble -- what in life isn't? Einstein once said God doesn't throw dice, but he was wrong. God throws dice all the time, and sometimes I wonder if they're loaded. The art of the organizer is cuttin' in on the action. And believe me, this time we're really going to screw the bastards, hit 'em where it hurts. You know, I sort of look at this as the culmination of my career. I've been in this fight since the Depression; I've been machine-gunned, beaten up, jailed -- they've even given me honorary degrees -- and in a way it's all been preparation for this. I love this goddamn country, and we're going to take it back. I never gave up faith at the worst times in the past, and I'm sure as hell not going to start now. With some luck, maybe I've got ten more good productive years ahead of me. So I'm going to use them where they count the most.

PLAYBOY: How did you ever get into this line of work?

ALINSKY: I actually started organizing in the middle Thirties, first with the C.I.O. and then on my own. But I guess I would have followed the same path if there hadn't been a Depression. I've always been a natural rebel, ever since I was a kid. And poverty was no stranger to me, either. My mother and father emigrated from Russia at the turn of the century and we lived in one of the worst slums in Chicago; in fact, we lived in the slum district of the slum, on the wrong side of the wrong side of the tracks, about as far down as you could go. My father started out as a tailor, then he ran a delicatessen and a cleaning shop, and finally he graduated to operating his own sweatshop. But whatever business he had, we always lived in the back of a store. I remember, as a kid, the biggest luxury I ever dreamed of was just to have a few minutes to myself in the bathroom without my mother hammering on the door and telling me to get out because a customer wanted to use it. To this day, it's a real luxury for me to spend time uninterrupted in the bathroom; it generally takes me a couple of hours to shave and bathe in the morning -- a real hang-up from the past, although I actually do a lot of my thinking there.

Interview With Alinsky, Part Three, Raw Beginnings

PLAYBOY: Were your parents politically active?

ALINSKY: A lot of Jews were active in the new socialist movement at that time, but not my parents. They were strict Orthodox; their whole life revolved around work and synagogue. And their attitude was completely parochial. I remember as a kid being told how important it was to study, and the worst threat they could think of was that if I didn't do well at Yeshiva, I'd grow up with a goyischer kop -- with a gentile brain. When I got into high school, I remember how surprised I was to find all those gentile kids who were so smart; I'd been taught that gentiles were practically Mongoloids. And that kind of chauvinism is just as unhealthy as antiSemitism.

PLAYBOY: Did you encounter much antiSemitism as a child?

ALINSKY: Not personally, but I was aware of it. It was all around us in those days. But it was so pervasive you didn't really even think about it; you just accepted it as a fact of life. The worst hostility was the Poles, and back in 1918 and 1919, when I was growing up, it amounted to a regular war. We had territorial boundaries between our neighborhoods, and if a Jewish girl strayed across the border, she'd be raped right on the street. Every once in a while, it would explode into full-scale rioting, and I remember when hundreds of Poles would come storming into our neighborhood and we'd get up on the roofs with piles of bricks and pans of boiling water and slingshots, just like a medieval siege. I had an air rifle myself. There'd be a bloody battle for blocks around and some people on both sides had real guns, so sometimes there'd be fatalities. It wasn't called an urban crisis then; it was just two groups of people trying to kill each other. Finally the cops would come on horses and in their clanging paddy wagons and break it up. They were all Irish and they hated both sides, so they'd crack Polish and Jewish heads equally. The melting pot in action. You don't have that hostility in Chicago anymore; now Italians, Poles, Jews and Irish have all joined up and buried the hatchet -- in the blacks. But in those days, every ethnic group was at each other's throat.

I remember once, I must have been ten or eleven, one of my friends was beaten up by Poles, so a bunch of us crossed over into Polish turf and we were beating the shit out of some Polish kids when the cops pulled us in. They took us to the station house and told our mothers, and boy, did they blow their tops. My mother came and took me away, screaming that I'd brought disgrace on the family. Who ever heard of a good Jewish boy being arrested, she moaned to the cops, and she promised the sergeant I'd be taken care of severely when I got home. When we left, my mother took me right to the rabbi and the rabbi lectured me on how wrong I was. But I stood up for myself. I said, "They beat us up and it's the American way to fight back, just like in the Old Testament, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. So we beat the hell out of them. That's what everybody does." The rabbi just looked at me for a minute and then said very quietly, "You think you're a man because you do what everybody does. But I want to tell you something the great Rabbi Hillel said: 'Where there are no men, be thou a man.' I want you to remember it." I've never forgotten it.

PLAYBOY: Did you beat up any more Polish kids?

ALINSKY: No, the rabbi's lesson sank home. I don't even tell Polish jokes.

PLAYBOY: Were you a devout Jew as a boy?

ALINSKY: I suppose I was -- until I was about 12. I was brainwashed, really hooked. But then I got afraid my folks were going to try to turn me into a rabbi, so I went through some pretty rapid withdrawal symptoms and kicked the habit. Now I'm a charter member of Believers Anonymous. But I'll tell you one thing about religious identity: Whenever anyone asks me my religion, I always say -- and always will say -- Jewish.

PLAYBOY: Did you rebel in areas other than religion?

ALINSKY: Yes, in little ways I've been fighting the system ever since I was seven or eight years old. I mean, I was the kind of kid who'd never dream of walking on the grass until I'd see a KEEP OFF THE GRASS sign, and then I'd stomp all over it. I remember one time when I was ten or eleven, a rabbi was tutoring me in Hebrew and my assignment was to read the Old Testament and then he'd ask me a series of questions. One particular day I read three pages in a row without any errors in pronunciation, and suddenly a penny fell onto the Bible. I looked up and the rabbi told me that God had rewarded me for my achievement. Shit, I was awe-struck. All that day and through the night, I thought about it. I couldn't even sleep, I was so excited, and I ran over all the implications in my mind.

Then the next day the rabbi turned up and he told me to start reading. And I wouldn't; I just sat there in silence, refusing to read. He asked me why I was so quiet, and I said, "This time it's a nickel or nothing." He threw back his arm and slammed me across the room. I sailed through the air and landed in the corner and the rabbi started cursing me unto the fourth generation. I'd rebelled against Godl But there were no lightning bolts, nothing, just a rabid rabbi on the verge of a coronary.

It wasn't defiance so much as curiosity in action, which seems to others to be defiance. My father, for example -- he was far from permissive and I'd get my share of beatings, with the invariable finale, "You ever do that again and you know what's going to happen to youl" I'd just nod, sniffling, and skulk away. But finally one day, after he'd really laid into me, he stood over me swinging his razor strap and repeated, "You know what's going to happen to you if you do that again?" and I just said through my tears, "No, what's going to happen?" His jaw dropped open, he was completely at a loss, he didn't know what the hell to say. He was absolutely disorganized. I learned my lesson then: Power is not in what the establishment has but in what you think it has.

PLAYBOY: Was your relationship with your father uniformly hostile?

ALINSKY: Yeah, pretty much so. My parents were divorced when I was 18 and my father, who'd begun to make some money out of his crummy sweatshops, moved out to California. For the next few years, I shuttled back and forth between them, living part of the time with my mother in Chicago and the rest with my father in California. I shouldn't really say living with him, because the minute I'd arrive, he'd shunt me off to a furnished room somewhere and I'd never see him till I'd leave. Our only words to each other were "Hello" and then, three months later, "Goodbye." It was a funny kind of life. When I was 16, I started shackin' up with some old broad of 22 -- and believe me, at 16, 22 is positively ancient. Between moving around in Chicago with my mother and going back and forth to California, I must have attended a dozen different schools; in fact, I wound up with four high school diplomas when I went to college. That's one of the reasons I always stayed close to my kids when they were growing up; I didn't want them to have to go through that.

PLAYBOY: A psychoanalytic interpretation of your life might conclude that your subsequent career as a radical was motivated more by hatred of your father than by opposition to the establishment.

ALINSKY: Parlor psychoanalysis isn't my bag. Anyway, I don't think I ever hated the old man; I never really knew him, and what little I did know just didn't interest me. And the feeling must have been reciprocated. I remember, when I graduated from college at the height of the Depression, I had exactly four bucks between me and starvation, and my mother was so broke I didn't want to add to her troubles. So in desperation I sent a registered letter to my father, asking trim for a little help, because I didn't even have enough for food. I got the receipt back showing he'd got the letter, but I never heard from him. He died in 1950 or 1951 and I heard he left an estate of $140,000. He willed most of it to an orchard in Israel and his kids by his previous marriage. To me he left $50.

PLAYBOY: How did you feel when you learned of his death?

ALINSKY: Maybe the best way I can explain it is to tell you what happened when my mother heard he'd died. She understood his body had been shipped to Chicago and she called me up and asked me to check all the undertaking establishments to see if he was there and what arrangements had been made. I didn't want to, but she insisted, so I sat down with the phone book and started running through the funeral parlors. After a half hour or so of this, I heard hysterical laughter coming out of the living room and I went in to find my wife, Helene, doubled up in hysterics. I asked her what the hell was so funny and when she finally got control of herself she said, "Do you have any idea what you're doing?" I said, "Why, what are you talking about?" and she said, "Let me give an imitation of you: 'Hello, Weinstein's undertaking parlor? Oh, well, look, do me a favor, will you? My name is Alinsky, my father's name is Benjamin, would you mind looking in the back room and seeing if by any chance you've got his body laid out there?'" And as I listened to her, I understood all the deadly silences I'd been getting at the other end of the phone. That was how much it affected me.

PLAYBOY: Were you equally estranged from your mother?

ALINSKY: Oh, no, we were very close. Momma's great, she's still around and going strong. She speaks more Yiddish than English, but she collects all my clippings, even though she's confused about what I'm doing, and she gloats over the fact that I'm the center of a lot of attention. "My son the revolutionary," you know. Once I was the lead speaker at a mass meeting in Chicago and I thought she'd enjoy seeing it, so I had her picked up and taken to the auditorium. Afterward, I drove her home and I said, "Momma, how did you like my speech?" And she said, all upset, "That's a fine thing you did, to do a thing like that, what will people think of your mother, how will they think I brought you up?" I said, "Momma, what was it I said?" And she said, "You don't know? You ask me, when twice, twice you wiped your nose with your hand when you were talking? What a terrible thing!" You know, I'm 68 years old and what are her first words to me on the phone? "Have you got your rubbers? Are you dressed warm? Are you eating right?" As a Jewish mother, she begins where other Jewish mothers leave off. To other people, I'm a professional radical; to her, the important thing is, I'm a professional. To Momma, it was all anticlimactic after I got that college degree.

Interview with Saul Alinsky, Part Four

College and Criminals

PLAYBOY: Were you politically active in college?

ALINSKY: Not in any organized sense. I started going to the University of Chicago in 1926, when the campus was still shook up over the Loeb-Leopold case. I suppose I was a kind of instinctive rebel -- I got into trouble leading a fight against compulsory chapel -- but it was strictly a personal rebellion against authority. During my first few years in school, I didn't have any highly developed social conscience, and in those placid days before the Depression, it was pretty easy to delude yourself that we were living in the best of all possible worlds. But by my junior year, I was beginning to catch glimpses of the emperor's bare ass. As an undergraduate, I took a lot of courses in sociology, and I was astounded by all the horse manure they were handing out about poverty and slums, playing down the suffering and deprivation, glossing over the misery and despair. I mean, Christ, I'd lived in a slum, I could see through all their complacent academic jargon to the realities. It was at that time that I developed a deep suspicion of academicians in general and sociologists in particular, with a few notable exceptions.

It was Jimmy Farrell who said at the time that the University of Chicago's sociology department was an institution that invests $100,000 on a research program to discover the location of brothels that any taxi driver could tell them about for nothing. So I realized how far removed the self-styled social sciences are from the realities of everyday existence, which is particularly unfortunate today, because that tribe of head-counters has an inordinate influence on our so-called antipoverty program. Asking a sociologist to solve a problem is like prescribing an enema for diarrhea.

PLAYBOY: Was sociology your major in college?

ALINSKY: God, no. I majored in archaeology, a subject that fascinated me then and still does. I really fell in love with it.

PLAYBOY: Did you plan to become a professional archaeologist?

ALINSKY: Yeah, for a while I did. But by the time I graduated, the Depression was in full swing and archaeologists were in about as much demand as horses and buggies. All the guys who funded the field trips were being scraped off Wall Street sidewalks. And anyway, much as I loved it, archaeology was beginning to appear pretty irrelevant in those days. I was starting to get actively involved in social issues, and during my last year in college, a bunch of us took up the plight of the Southern Illinois coal workers, who were in a tough organizational fight -- tough, Christ, the poor bastards were starving -- and we got some food and supplies together and chartered some trucks and drove down to help them.

PLAYBOY: Was it at this time that you became active in radical politics?

ALINSKY: It was at this time I became a radical -- or recognized that I'd always been a radical and started to do something concrete about it. But I wasn't a full-time activist; I remained in school, and I suppose a lot of my ideas about what could and should be done were as muddled as those of most people in those chaotic days.

PLAYBOY: What did you do after graduation?

ALINSKY: I went hungry. What little money my mother had was wiped out in the Crash and, as I've told you, my old man wasn't exactly showering support on me. I managed to eke out a subsistence living by doing odd jobs around the university at ten cents an hour. I suppose I could have gotten some help from a relief project, but it's funny, I just couldn't do it. I've always been that way: I'd rob a bank before I accepted charity. Anyway, things were rough for a while and I got pretty low. I remember sitting in a crummy cafeteria one day and saying to myself: "Here I am, a smart son of a bitch, I graduated cum laude and all that shit, but I can't make a living, I can't even feed myself. What happens now?" And then it came to me; that little light bulb lit up above my head.

I moved over to the table next to the cashier, exchanged a few words with her and then finished my coffee and got up to pay. "Gee, I'm sorry," I said, "I seem to have lost my check." She'd seen that all I had was a cup of coffee, so she just said, "That's OK, that'll be a nickel." So I paid and left with my original nickel check still in my pocket and walked a few blocks to the next cafeteria in the same chain and ordered a big meal for a buck forty-five -- and, believe me, in those days, for a buck forty-five I could have practically bought the fuckin' joint. I ate in a corner far away from the cashier, then switched checks and paid my nickel bill from the other place and left. So my eating troubles were taken care of.

But then I began to see other kids around the campus in the same fix, so I put up a big sign on the bulletin board and invited anybody who was hungry to a meeting. Some of them thought it was all a gag, but I stood on the lectern and explained my system in detail, with the help of a big map of Chicago with all the local branches of the cafeteria marked on it. Social ecology! I split my recruits up into squads according to territory; one team would work the South Side for lunch, another the North Side for dinner, and so on. We got the system down to a science, and for six months all of us were eating free. Then the bastards brought in those serial machines at the door where you pull out a ticket that's only good for that particular cafeteria. That was a low blow. We were the first victims of automation.

PLAYBOY: Didn't you have any moral qualms about ripping off the cafeterias?

ALINSKY: Oh, sure, I suffered all the agonies of the damned-sleepless nights, desperate 'soul-searching, a tormented conscience that riddled me with guilt -- Are you kidding? I wouldn't have justified, say, conning free gin from a liquor store just so I could have a martini before dinner, but when you're hungry, anything goes -- There's a priority of rights, and the right to eat takes precedence over the right to make a profit -- And just in case you're getting any ideas, let me remind you that the statute of limitations has run out.

But you know, that incident was interesting, because it was actually my first experience as an organizer -- I learned something else from it, too; after the cafeterias had outflanked us, a bunch of the kids I'd organized came up to me and said, "OK, Saul, what do we do next?" And when I told them I didn't have the slightest idea, they were really pissed off at me. It was then I learned the meaning of the old adage about how 'favors extended become defined as rights.'

PLAYBOY: Did you continue your life of crime?

ALINSKY: Crime? That wasn't crime -- it was survival -- But my Robin Hood days were short-lived; logically enough, I was awarded the graduate Social Science Fellowship in criminology, the top one in that field, which took care of my tuition and room and board -- I still don't know why they gave it to me -- maybe because I hadn't taken a criminology course in my life and didn't know one goddamn thing about the subject -- But this was the Depression and I felt like someone had tossed me a life preserver -- Hell, if it had been in shirt cleaning, I would have taken it. Anyway, I found out that criminology was just as removed from actual crime and criminals as sociology was from society, so I decided to make my doctoral dissertation a study of the Al Capone mob -- an inside study.

PLAYBOY: What did Capone have to say about that?

ALINSKY: Well, my reception was pretty chilly at first -- I went over to the old Lexington Hotel, which was the gang's headquarters, and I hung around the lobby and the restaurant. I'd spot one of the mobsters whose picture I'd seen in the papers and go up to him and say, "I'm Saul Alinsky, I'm studying criminology, do you mind if I hang around with you?" And he'd look me over and say, "Get lost, punk." This happened again and again, and I began to feel I'd never get anywhere. Then one night I was sitting in the restaurant and at the next table was Big Ed Stash, a professional assassin who was the Capone mob's top executioner. He was drinking with a bunch of his pals and he was saying, "Hey, you guys, did I ever tell you about the time I picked up that redhead in Detroit?" and he was cut off by a chorus of moans. "My God," one guy said, "do we have to hear that one again?" I saw Big Ed's face fall; mobsters are very sensitive, you know, very thin-skinned. And I reached over and plucked his sleeve. "Mr. Stash," I said, "I'd love to hear that story." His face lit up. "You would, kid?" He slapped me on the shoulder. "Here, pull up a chair. Now, this broad, see . . ." And that's how it started.

Big Ed had an attentive audience and we became buddies. He introduced me to Frank Nitti, known as the Enforcer, Capone's number-two man, and actually in de facto control of the mob because of Al's income-tax rap. Nitti took me under his wing. I called him the Professor and I became his student. Nitti's boys took me everywhere, showed me all the mob's operations, from gin mills and whorehouses and bookie joints to the legitimate businesses they were beginning to take over. Within a few months, I got to know the workings of the Capone mob inside out.

PLAYBOY: Why would professional criminals confide their secrets to an outsider?

ALINSKY: Why not? What harm could I do them? Even if I told what I'd learned, nobody would listen. They had Chicago tied up tight as a drum; they owned the city, from the cop on the beat right up to the mayor. Forget all that Eliot Ness shit; the only real opposition to the mob came from other gangsters, like Bugs Moran or Roger Touhy. The Federal Government could try to nail 'em on an occasional income tax rap, but inside Chicago they couldn't touch their power. Capone was the establishment. When one of his boys got knocked off, there wasn't any city court in session, because most of the judges were at the funeral and some of them were pallbearers. So they sure as hell weren't afraid of some college kid they'd adopted as a mascot causing them any trouble. They never bothered to hide anything from me; I was their one-man student body and they were anxious to teach me. It probably appealed to their egos.

Once, when I was looking over their records, I noticed an item listing a $7500 payment for an out-of-town killer. I called Nitti over and I said, "Look, Mr. Nitti, I don't understand this. You've got at least 20 killers on your payroll. Why waste that much money to bring somebody in from St. Louis?" Frank was really shocked at my ignorance. "Look, kid," he said patiently, "sometimes our guys might know the guy they're hitting, they may have been to his house for dinner, taken his kids to the ball game, been the best man at his wedding, gotten drunk together. But you call in a guy from out of town, all you've got to do is tell him, 'Look, there's this guy in a dark coat on State and Randolph; our boy in the car will point him out; just go up and give him three in the belly and fade into the crowd.' So that's a job and he's a professional, he does it. But one of our boys goes up, the guy turns to face him and it's a friend, right away he knows that when he pulls that trigger there's gonna be a widow, kids without a father, funerals, weeping -- Christ, it'd be murder." I think Frank was a little disappointed by my even questioning the practice; he must have thought I was a bit callous.

Interview with Saul Alinsky, Part Five

Saul Alinsky is, along with Thomas Paine, Henry George, and Dorothy Day, one of the great American leaders of the nonsocialist left.

Worthwhile Struggles

PLAYBOY: Didn't you have any compunction about consorting with -- if not actually assisting -- murderers?

ALINSKY: None at all, since there was nothing I could do to stop them from murdering, practically all of which was done inside the family. I was a nonparticipating observer in their professional activities, although I joined their social life of food, drink and women: Boy, I sure participated in that side of things -- it was heaven. And let me tell you something, I learned a hell of a lot about the uses and abuses of power from the mob, lessons that stood me in good stead later on, when I was organizing.

Another thing you've got to remember about Capone is that he didn't spring out of a vacuum. The Capone gang was actually a public utility; it supplied what the people wanted and demanded. The man in the street wanted girls: Capone gave him girls. He wanted booze during Prohibition: Capone gave him booze. He wanted to bet on a horse: Capone let him bet. It all operated according to the old laws of supply and demand, and if there weren't people who wanted the services provided by the gangsters, the gangsters wouldn't be in business. Everybody owned stock in the Capone mob; in a way, he was a public benefactor. I remember one time when he arrived at his box seat in Dyche Stadium for a Northwestern football game on Boy Scout Day and 8000 scouts got up in the stands and screamed in cadence, "Yea, yea, Big Al. Yea, yea, Big Al." Capone didn't create the corruption, he just grew fat on it, as did the political parties, the police and the overall municipal economy.

PLAYBOY: How long were you an honorary member of the mob?

ALINSKY: About two years. After I got to know about the outfit, I grew bored and decided to move on -- which is a recurring pattern in my life, by the way. I was just as bored with graduate school, so I dropped out and took a job with the Illinois State Division of Criminology, working with juvenile delinquents. This led me into another field project, investigating a gang of Italian kids who called themselves the 42 Mob. They were held responsible by the D.A. for about 80 percent of the auto thefts in Chicago at the time and they were just graduating into the outer fringes of the big-time rackets. It was even tougher to get in with them than with the Capone mob, believe me. Those kids were really suspicious and they were tough, too, with hair-trigger tempers. I finally got my chance when one of the gang's leaders, a kid named Thomas Massina, or Little Dumas, as he called himself, was shot and killed in a drugstore stick-up. The minute I heard about it, I went over to the Massina house, hoping to get in good with Dumas' friends. But they were as leery as ever.

By a stroke of luck, though, I heard Mrs. Massina, Dumas' mother, weeping and wailing, repeating the same thing over and over in Italian. I asked one of the kids what she was saying and he said she was bemoaning the fact that she didn't have any pictures of Dumas since he was a baby, nothing to remember him by. So I left right away, picked up a photographer friend of mine and rushed down to the morgue. I showed my credentials and the attendant took us in to the icebox, where Dumas was laid out on a slab. We took a photograph, opening his eyes first, then rushed back to the studio to develop it. We carefully retouched it to eliminate all the bullet holes, and then had it hand-tinted. The next morning, I went back to the wake and presented the photograph to Mrs. Massina. "Dumas gave this to me just last week," I said, "and I'd like you to have it." She cried and thanked me, and pretty soon word of the incident spread throughout the gang. "That Alinsky, he's an all-right motherfucker," the kids would say, and from that moment on they began to trust me and I was able to work with them, all because of the photograph. It was an improvised tactic and it worked.

PLAYBOY: It was also pretty cynical and manipulative.

ALINSKY: It was a simple example of good organizing. And what's wrong with it? Everybody got what they wanted. Mrs. Massina got something to hold onto in her grief and I got in good with the kids. I got to be good friends with some of them. And some of them I was able to help go straight. One of the members is now a labor organizer and every time things get hot for me somewhere, he calls me up and growls, "Hey, Saul, you want me to send up some muscle to lean on those motherfuckers?" I just thank him and say I can handle it, and then we chat about the old days. Anyway, after I finished working with the 42 Mob, I left the division of criminology and went to work as a criminologist at the state prison in Joliet, but I was already getting bored with the whole profession and looking for something new.

PLAYBOY: Why were you getting bored this time?

ALINSKY: There were a lot of factors involved. For one thing, most of the people I was working with -- other criminologists, wardens, parole officers -- were all anesthetized from the neck up. God, I've never in my life come across such an assemblage of morons. I was beginning to think the whole field was some kind of huge outpatient clinic. And on a human level, I was revolted by the brutalization, the dehumanization, the institutionalized cruelty of the prison system. I saw it happening to me, too, which was another important motivation for me to get out. When I first went up to Joliet, I'd take a genuine personal interest in the prisoners I'd interview; I'd get involved with their problems, try to help them. But the trouble with working in an institution, any institution, is that you get institutionalized yourself. A couple of years and 2000 interviews later, I'd be talking to a guy and I was no longer really interested. I was growing callous and bored; he wasn't important to me as a human being anymore; he was just inmate number 1607. When I recognized that happening inside me, I knew I couldn't go on like that.

I'll tell you something, though, the three years I spent at Joliet were worth while, because I continued the education in human relationships I'd begun in the Capone mob. For one thing, I learned that the state has the same mentality about murder as Frank Nitti. You know, whenever we electrocuted an inmate, everybody on the staff would get drunk, including the warden. It's one thing for a judge and a jury to condemn a man to death; he's just a defendant, an abstraction, an impersonal face in a box for two or three weeks. But once the poor bastard has been in prison for seven or eight months -- waiting for his appeals or for a stay -- you get to know him as a human being, you get to know his wife and kids and his mother when they visit him, and he becomes real, a person. And all the time you know that pretty soon you're going to be strapping him into the chair and juicing him with 30,000 volts for the time it takes to fry him alive while his bowels void and he keeps straining against the straps. So then you can't take it as just another day's work. If you can get out of being an official witness, you sit around killing a fifth of whiskey until the lights dim and then maybe, just maybe, you can get to sleep. That might be a good lesson for the defenders of capital punishment: Let them witness an execution. But I guess it wouldn't do much good for most of them, who are probably like one of the guards at Joliet when I was there -- a sadistic son of a bitch who I could swear had an orgasm when the switch was thrown.

PLAYBOY: Did you agitate for penal reform while you were at Joliet?

ALINSKY: There wasn't much I could do, because as a state criminologist, I wasn't directly involved in the actual prison administration. Oh, I made a lot of speeches all over the place telling well meaning people that the whole system wasn't working, that rehabilitation was a joke and our prisons wer vanguard of the 14th Century, and they all applauded enthusiastically and went home with their souls cleansed -- and did nothing. Those speeches got me a reputation as a troublemaker, too. You know, all the experts in criminology and all the textbooks agreed that the primary causes of crime were social conditions -- things like poor housing, racial discrimination, economic insecurity, unemployment -- but if you ever suggested doing something to correct the root causes instead of locking up the results, you were considered something of a kook. A number of times my superiors called me aside and said, "Look, Saul, don't sound off like that. People will think you're a Red or something." Finally, I quit Joliet and took a job with the Institute for Juvenile Research, one of those outfits that were always studying the causes of juvenile delinquency, making surveys of all the kids in cold-water tenements with rats nibbling their toes and nothing to eat -- and then discovering the solution: camping trips and some shit they called character building. Frankly, I considered that job pretty much a sinecure to free me for more important work.

PLAYBOY: Such as?

ALINSKY: The causes that meant something in those days -- fighting fascism at home and abroad and doing something to improve the life of the masses of people who were without jobs, food or hope. I'd spend all my free time raising funds for the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War and for Southern sharecroppers, organizing for the Newspaper Guild and other fledgling unions, fighting the eviction of slum tenants who couldn't pay their rent, agitating for public housing, when it was still considered a subversive concept. This was the time I began to work alongside the C.I.O. You know, a lot of kids today are bored when their old man tells them what he went through in the Depression, and rightly so in most cases, because it's generally used as a cop-out for doing nothing today. And God knows, too many people who were radicals in the Thirties have since finked out, from either fear of McCarthyism in the Fifties or co-optation by the system or just plain hardening of the political arteries. But there are still a lot of lessons to be learned from those days, lessons that apply explicitly and directly to what's happening today.

Interview with Saul Alinsky, Part Si

xRadicals Amid the Depression

PLAYBOY: How close was the country to revolution during the Depression?

ALINSKY: A lot closer than some people think. It was really Roosevelt's reforms that saved the system from itself and averted total catastrophe. You've got to remember, it wasn't only people's money that went down the drain in 1929; it was also their whole traditional system of values. Americans had learned to celebrate their society as an earthly way station to paradise, with all the cherished virtues of hard work and thrift as their tickets to security, success and happiness. Then suddenly, in just a few days, those tickets were canceled and apparently unredeemable, and the bottom fell out of everything. The American dream became a nightmare overnight for the overwhelming majority of citizens, and the pleasant, open-ended world they knew suddenly began to close in on them as their savings disappeared behind the locked doors of insolvent banks, their jobs vanished in closed factories and their homes and farms were lost to foreclosed mortgages and forcible eviction. Suddenly the smokestacks were cold and lifeless, the machinery ground to a halt and a chill seemed to hang over the whole country.

People tried to delude themselves and say, "None of this is real, we'll just sleep through it all and wake up back in the sunlight of the Twenties, back in our homes and jobs, with a chicken in every pot, two cars in every garage." But they opened their eyes to the reality of poverty and hopelessness, something they had never thought possible for themselves, not for people who worked hard and long and saved their money and went to church every Sunday. Oh, sure, poverty might exist, far off in the dim shadowy corners of society, among blacks and sharecroppers and people with funny names who couldn't speak English yet, but it couldn't happen to them, not to God's people. But not only did the darkness fail to pass away, it grew worse. At first people surrendered to a numbing despair, but then slowly they began to look around at the new and frightening world in which they found themselves and began to rethink their values and priorities.

We'll always have poor people, they'd been taught to believe from pulpit and classroom, because there will always be a certain number of misfits who are too stupid and lazy to make it. But now that most of us were poor, were we all dumb and shiftless and incompetent? A new mood began stirring in the land and a mutual misery began to eat away the traditional American virtues of rugged individualism, dog-eat-dog competition and sanctimonious charity. People began reaching out for something, anything, to hang on to -- and they found one another. We suddenly began to discover that the ruthless law of the survival of the fittest no longer held true, that it was possible for other people to care about our plight and for us to care about theirs. On a smaller scale, something similar occurred in London during the blitz, when all the traditional English class barriers broke down in the face of a common peril.

Now, in America, new voices and new values began to be heard, people began citing John Donne's "No man is an island," and as they started banding together to improve their lives, they found how much in common they had with their fellow man. It was the first time since the abolitionist movement, for example, that there was any significant black-white unity, as elements of both races began to move together to confront the common enemies of unemployment and starvation wages. This was one of the most important aspects of the Thirties: not just the political struggles and reforms but the sudden discovery of a common destiny and a common bond of humanity among millions of people. It was a very moving experience to witness and be part of it.

PLAYBOY: You sound a little nostalgic.

ALINSKY: Yeah, those were exciting days to be alive in. And goddamn violent days, too. Whenever people wail to me about all the violence and disorder in American life today, I tell them to take a hard look back at the Thirties. At one time, you had thousands of American veterans encamped along the Anacostia petitioning the Government for a subsistence bonus until they were driven out at bayonet point by the Army, led by "I shall return" MacArthur. Negroes were being lynched regularly in the South as the first stirrings of black opposition began to be felt, and many of the white civil rights organizers and labor agitators who had started to work with them were tarred, feathered, castrated -- or killed. Most Southern politicians were members of the Ku Klux Klan and had no compunction about boasting of it.

The giant corporations were unbelievably arrogant and oppressive and would go to any lengths to protect their freedom -- the freedom to exploit and the freedom to crush any obstacle blocking the golden road to mammon. Not one American corporation -- oil, steel, auto, rubber, meat packing -- would allow its workers to organize; labor unions were branded subversive and communistic and any worker who didn't toe the line was summarily fired and then blacklisted throughout the industry. When they defied their bosses, they were beaten up or murdered by company strikebreakers or gunned down by the police of corrupt big-city bosses allied with the corporations, like in the infamous Memorial Day Massacre in Chicago when dozens of peaceful pickets were shot in the back.

Those who kept their jobs were hired and fired with complete indifference, and they worked as dehumanized servomechanisms of the assembly line. There were no pensions, no unemployment insurance, no Social Security, no Medicare, nothing to provide even minimal security for the worker. When radicals fought back against these conditions by word or deed, they were hounded and persecuted by city police and by the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover, who back in those days was already paranoid, while in Washington the House Un-American Activities Committee hysterically sounded the alarm against the gathering Bolshevik hordes. As bloody strikes and civic disorder swept the nation, the big cry was for law and order. Nobody talked about pollution then; yet the workers in coal and steel towns were shrouded in a perpetual pall of soot and black dust, while in cities like Chicago, people in the meatpacking areas grew up amid a stench so overpowering that if they ever ventured out into the country, the fresh air made them sick. Yeah, those were the good old days, all right. Shit, the country was far more polarized and bitter then than it is today.

PLAYBOY: When did you involve yourself full time in the radical movement?

ALINSKY: Around 1938. I stuck to my job with the Institute for Juvenile Research as long as I could, doing as little as I could, while I grew more and more active in the movement. But unlike most of the people I was working with, I still had my feet in both camps, and if things ever got too hot, I always had a cushy job I could lean back on, which began to bother me. Also, it was bugging me that suddenly people were calling me an expert in criminology, newspapers were describing me as the top man in my field and I was being asked to speak at all these chicken-shit conferences and write papers and all that crap. It just shows the crummy state of criminology; anybody who has even a flickering shadow of intelligence automatically becomes a national authority.

So all this bothered me, and apart from everything else, I was just plain bored again; I knew the field, I'd gotten all there was to get out of it and I was ready to move on to more challenging pastures. But I still had the problem of making a living, and for a while I sort of rationalized, "Oh, well, at least this way I've got my integrity. If I took a job in business, I'd have to butter customers up, agree with them. But here I'm free to speak my mind." Integrity! What shit. It took me a while to realize that the only difference between being in a professional field and in business was the difference between a five-buck whore and a $100 callgirl.

The crunch came when I was offered a job as head of probation and parole for Philadelphia at a salary of $8000 a year, with the added bonus of a visiting lectureship at the University of Pennsylvania for $2400 a year and a weekly column in the Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger on how to keep your kiddies on the straight and narrow. Remember, $10,400 then was equal to $30,400 now [in 1972; that's over $100,000 today]. So this was the turning point for me. I could picture myself in a nice house in the suburbs, just two hours from New York, with all its theaters and concerts, with money in the bank, a car, all the goodies. And I could already hear the rationalizations I'd make: "I'd better not jeopardize this setup. After all, I can do so much more for the cause by stimulating students than by getting personally involved. I can write speeches or papers and put the real message between the lines or in footnotes, and really have an impact." Or: "This will give me the financial freedom to participate effectively." Bullshit. Once you get fat and comfortable and reach the top, you want to stay there. You're imprisoned by your own so-called freedoms. I've seen too many lean and hungry labor leaders of the Thirties grow fat-bellied and fat-headed. So I turned down the job and devoted myself to full-time activity in the radical movement.

Interview with Saul Alinsky, Part Seven

Organizing the Back of the Yards

PLAYBOY: What was your first organizational effort?

ALINSKY: My first solo effort was organizing the Back of the Yards area of Chicago, one of the most squalid slums in the country. I was helped a hell of a lot by the moonlighting I'd done as an organizer for the C.I.O., and I'd got to know John L. Lewis very well; I later mediated between him and F.D.R. when their political alliance grew shaky. We became close friends and I learned a lot from him. But I always felt that my own role lay outside the labor movement. What I wanted to try to do was apply the organizing techniques I'd mastered with the C.I.O. to the worst slums and ghettos, so that the most oppressed and exploited elements in the country could take control of their own communities and their own destinies. Up till then, specific factories and industries had been organized for social change, but never entire communities. This was the field I wanted to make my own -- community organization for community power and for radical goals.

PLAYBOY: Why did you pick the Back of the Yards district as your first target?

ALINSKY: It appealed to me for a number of reasons. For one thing, it was the area behind the Chicago Stockyards that Upton Sinclair wrote about in The Jungle at the turn of the century, and nothing at all had been done to improve conditions since then. It was the nadir of all slums in America. People were crushed and demoralized, either jobless or getting starvation wages, diseased, living in filthy, rotting unheated shanties, with barely enough food and clothing to keep alive. And it was a cesspool of hate; the Poles, Slovaks, Germans, Negroes, Mexicans and Lithuanians all hated each other and all of them hated the Irish, who returned the sentiment in spades.

Native fascist groups like the German American Bund, Father Coughlin's National Union for Social Justice and William Dudley Pelley's Silver Shirts were moving in to exploit the discontent, and making lots of converts. It wasn't because the people had any real sympathy for fascism; it was just that they were so desperate they'd grab on to anything that offered them a glimmer of hope, and Coughlin and Pelley gave them handy scapegoats in the Jews and the "international bankers." But I knew that once they were provided with a real, positive program to change their miserable conditions, they wouldn't need scapegoats anymore. Probably my prime consideration in moving into Back of the Yards, though, was because if it could be done there, it could be done anywhere. People would say to me, "Saul, you're crazy; try any place but Back of the Yards. It's impossible, you'll never get anywhere." You've got to remember that, to most people in those days, the concept that the poor have the intelligence and ingenuity to solve their own problems was heresy; even many radicals who paid it lip service in principle were elitist in practice. So the more I was told it was impossible the more determined I was to push ahead.

PLAYBOY: How did you go about organizing a community like Back of the Yards?

ALINSKY: Well, the first thing I did, the first thing I always do, is to move into the community as an observer, to talk with people and listen and learn their grievances and their attitudes. Then I look around at what I've got to work with, what levers I can use to pry closed doors open, what institutions or organizations already exist that can be useful. In the case of Back of the Yards, the area was 95 percent Roman Catholic, and I recognized that if I could win the support of the Church, we'd be off and running. Conversely, without the Church, or at least some elements of it, it was unlikely that we'd be able to make much of a dent in the community.

PLAYBOY: Wasn't the Catholic Church quite conservative in those days?

ALINSKY: Nationally it certainly was, which was why a little two-bit Hitler like Coughlin was never censured or silenced until the war. But Chicago in those days was a peculiar exception; under Cardinal Mundelein and Bishop Bernard Sheil, it was the most socially progressive archdiocese in the country. Sheil was a fine man, liberal and prolabor, and he was sympathetic to what I wanted to do in Back of the Yards, but the key thing was to win over the local priests; some of whom were much more conservative. Now, it's always been a cardinal principle of organizing for me never to appeal to people on.the basis of abstract values, as too many civil rights leaders do today. Suppose I walked into the office of the average religious leader of any denomination and said, "Look, I'm asking you to live up to your Christian principles, to, make Jesus' words about brotherhood and social justice realities." What do you think would happen? He'd shake my hand warmly, say, "God bless you, my son," and after I was gone he'd tell his secretary, "If that crackpot comes around again, tell him I'm out."

So in order to involve the Catholic priests in Back of the Yards, I didn't give them any stuff about Christian ethics, I just appealed to their self-interest. I'd say, "Look, you're telling your people to stay out of the Communist-dominated unions and action groups, right?" He'd nod. So I'd go on: "And what do they do? They say, 'Yes, Father,' and walk out of the church and join the C.I.O. Why? Because it's their bread and butter, because the C.I.O. is doing something about their problems while you're sitting here on your tail in the sacristy." That stirred 'em up, which is just what I wanted to do, and then I'd say, "Look, if you go on like that you're gonna alienate your parishioners, turn them from the Church, maybe drive them into the arms of the Reds. Your only hope is to move first, to beat the Communists at their own game, to show the people you're more interested in their living conditions than the contents of your collection plate. And not only will you get them back again by supporting their struggle, but when they win they'll be more prosperous and your donations will go up and the welfare of the Church will be enhanced." Now I'm talking their language and we can sit down and hammer out a deal. That was what happened in Back of the Yards, and within a few months the overwhelming majority of the parish priests were backing us, and we were holding our organizational meetings in their churches. To fuck your enemies, you've first got to seduce your allies.

PLAYBOY: How did you win the backing of the community at large?

ALINSKY: The first step was getting the priests; that gave us the right imprimatur with the average resident. But we still had to convince them we could deliver what we promised, that we weren't just another do-gooder social agency strong on rhetoric and short on action. But the biggest obstacles we faced were the apathy and despair and hopelessness of most of the slum dwellers. You've got to remember that when injustice is complete and crushing, people very seldom rebel; they just give up. A small percentage crack and blow their brains out, but the other, 99 percent say, "Sure, it's bad, but what can we do? You can't fight city hall. It's a rotten world for everybody, and anyway, who knows, maybe I'll win at numbers or my lottery ticket will come through. And the guy down the block is probably worse off than me."

The first thing we have to do when we come into a community is to break down those justifications for inertia. We tell people, "Look, you don't have to put up with all this shit. There's something concrete you can do about it. But to accomplish anything you've got to have power, and you'll only get it through organization. Now, power comes in two forms -- money and people. You haven't got any money, but you do have people, and here's what you can do with them." And we showed the workers in the packing houses how they could organize a union and get higher wages and benefits, and we showed the local merchants how their profits would go up with higher wages in the community, and we showed the exploited tenants how they could fight back against their landlords. Pretty soon we'd established a community-wide coalition of workers, local businessmen, labor leaders and housewives -- our power base -- and we were ready to do battle.

PLAYBOY: What tactics did you use?

ALINSKY: Everything at our disposal in those days -- boycotts of stores, strikes against the meat packers, rent strikes against the slumlords, picketing of exploitive businesses, sit-downs in City Hall and the offices of the corrupt local machine bosses. We'd turn the politicians against each other, splitting them up and then taking them on one at a time. At first the establishment dismissed us with a sneer, but pretty soon we had them worried, because they saw how unified we were and that we were capable of exerting potent economic and political pressure. Finally the concessions began trickling in -- reduced rents, public housing, more and better municipal services, school improvements, more equitable mortgages and bank loans, fairer food prices.

I'll give you an example here of the vital importance of personal relationships in organizing. The linchpin of our struggle in Back of the Yards was unionization of the packing-house workers, because most of the local residents who worked had jobs in the stockyards, and unless their wages and living standards were improved, the community as a whole could never move forward. Now, at that time the meat barons treated their workers like serfs, and they had a squad of vicious strikebreakers to terrorize any worker who even opened his mouth about a union. In fact, two of their goons submachined my car one night at the height of the struggle. They missed me and, goddamn it, I missed them when I shot back. So anyway, we knew that the success or failure of the whole effort really hinged on the packing-house union. We picketed, we sat down, we agitated; but the industry wouldn't budge. I said, "OK, we can't hurt 'em head on, so we'll outflank 'em and put heat on the downtown banks that control huge loans to the industry and force them to exert pressure on the packers to accept our demands." We directed a whole series of tactics against the banks, and they were a little wobbly at first, but then they formed a solid front with the packers and refused to give in or even to negotiate.

We were getting nowhere on the key issue of the whole struggle, and I was getting worried. I racked my brain for some new means of applying pressure on the banks and finally I came up with the answer. In those days, the uncontested ruler of Chicago was the old-line political boss Mayor Kelly, who made Daley's machine look like the League of Women Voters. When Kelly whistled, everybody jumped to attention, from the local ward heeler to the leading businessman in town. Now, there were four big-city machines in the country at that time -- Kelly's in Chicago, Pendergast's in Kansas City, Curley's in Boston and Hague's in Jersey City -- and between them they exercised a hell of a political clout, because they were the guys who delivered the swing states to the Democrats at election time. This meant that Roosevelt had to deal with them, but they were all pretty disreputable in the public eye and whenever he met with them he smuggled them through the back door of the White House and conferred in secret in some smoke-filled room. This was particularly true in Kelly's case, since he was hated by liberals and radicals all across the country because of his reactionary anti-labor stand and his responsibility for the Memorial Day Massacre in Chicago in 1937. In fact, the left despised Kelly as intensely in those days as they did Daley after the Chicago Democratic Convention [1968].

Now, Kelly was a funny guy; he was a mass of contradictions -- like most people -- and despite his antilabor actions he really admired F.D.R.; in fact, he worshiped him, and nothing hurt him more than the way he was forced to sneak into the White House like a pariah -- no dinner parties, none of those little Sunday soirees that Eleanor used to throw, not even a public testimonial. He desperately wanted acceptance by F.D.R. and the intellectuals in his brain trust, and he really smarted under the second-class status the President conferred on him. I'd studied his personality carefully, and I knew I'd get nowhere appealing to him over labor's rights, but I figured I might just be able to use this personal Achilles' heel to our advantage.

Finally I got an audience with Kelly and I started my spiel. "Look, Mayor," I said, "I know I can't deliver you any more votes than you've already got" -- in those days they didn't even bother to count the ballots, they weighed 'em, and every cemetery in town voted; there was a real afterlife in Chicago -- "but I'm going to make a deal with you." Kelly just looked bored; he was probably asking himself why he'd even bothered to see this little pip-squeak radical. "What've you got to deal with, kid?" he asked me. I told him, "Right now you've got a reputation as the number-one enemy of organized labor in the country. But I'll make you a liberal overnight. I'll deliver the national C.I.O. endorsement for you and the public support of every union in Chicago. I've arranged for two of the guys who were wounded in the Memorial Day Massacre to go on the radio and applaud you as a true friend of the workingman. Within forty-eight hours I'll have turned you into a champion of liberalism" -- Kelly still looked bored -- "and that'll make you completely acceptable to F.D.R. on all occasions, social and political."

Suddenly he sat bolt upright in his chair and his eyes bored into mine. "How do I know you can deliver?" he asked. I handed him a slip of paper. "That's the unlisted number of John L. Lewis in Alexandria, Virginia. Call him, tell him I'm here in your office, tell him what I said, and then ask him if I can deliver." Kelly leaned back in his chair and said, "What do you want?" I said, "I want you to put the screws on the meat packers to sign a contract with the union." He said, "It's a deal. You'll get your contract tomorrow." We did, and from that time on victory for Back of the Yards was ensured. And I came out of that fight convinced that the organizational techniques we used in Back of the Yards could be employed successfully anywhere across the nation.

PLAYBOY: Were you right?

ALINSKY: Absolutely. Our tactics have to vary according to the needs and problems of each particular area we're organizing, but we've been very successful with an overall strategy that we adhere to pretty closely. For example, the central principle of all our organizational efforts is self-determination; the community we're dealing with must first want us to come in, and once we're in we insist they choose their own objectives and leaders. It's the organizer's job to provide the technical know-how, not to impose his wishes or his attitudes on the community; we're not there to lead, but to help and to teach. We want the local people to use us, drain our experience and expertise, and then throw us away and continue doing the job themselves. Otherwise they'd grow overly dependent on us and the moment we moved out the situation would start to revert to the status quo ante. This is why I've set a three-year limit on the time one of our organizers remains within any particular area. This has been our operating procedure in all our efforts; we're outside agitators, all right, but by invitation only. And we never overstay our welcome.

Interview with Saul Alinsky, Part Eight

Success versus Co-optation

PLAYBOY: How does a self-styled outside agitator like yourself get accepted in the community he plans to organize?

ALINSKY: The first and most important thing you can do to win this acceptance is to bait the power structure into publicly attacking you. In Back of the Yards, when I was first establishing my credentials, I deliberately maneuvered to provoke criticism. I made outrageous statements to the press, I attacked every civic and business leader I could think of, and I goaded the establishment to strike back. The Chicago Tribune, one of the most right-wing rags in the country at the time, branded me a subversive menace and spokesmen for the meat packers denounced me as a dangerous enemy of law and order. Now, these were the same forces that were screwing the average Joe in Back of the Yards, and the minute he saw those attacks he said, "That guy Alinsky must be all right if he can get those bastards that pissed off; he must have something or they wouldn't be so worried." So I used what I call psychological jujitsu on the establishment, and it provided me with my credentials, my birth certificate, in all the communities I ever organized.

But over and above all these devices, the ultimate key to acceptance by a community is respect for the dignity of the individual you're dealing with. If you feel smug or arrogant or condescending, he'll sense it right away, and you might as well take the next plane out. The first thing you've got to do in a community is listen, not talk, and learn to eat, sleep, breathe only one thing: the problems and aspirations of the community. Because no matter how imaginative your tactics, how shrewd your strategy, you're doomed before you even start if you don't win the trust and respect of the people; and the only way to get that is for you to trust and respect them. And without that respect there's no communication, no mutual confidence and no action. That's the first lesson any good organizer has to learn, and I learned it in Back of the Yards. If I hadn't, we would never have won, and we could never have turned that liellhole into a textbook model of progressive community organization. Twenty-five years later, the Back of the Yards Council is still going strong, and a whole generation has grown up not even knowing that their neighborhood was once one of the foulest slums in the country. Even Mayor Daley lives there now -- about the only argument I'd ever buy for restrictive covenants.

PLAYBOY: Mayor Daley's presence in Back of the Yards symbolizes what some radicals consider the fatal flaw in your work: the tendency of communities you've organized eventually to join the establishment in return for their piece of the economic action. As a case in point, Back of the Yards is now one of the most vociferously segregationist areas of Chicago. Do you see this as a failure?

ALINSKY: No, only as a challenge. It's quite true that the Back of the Yards Council, which 20 years ago, was waving banners attacking all forms of discrimination and intolerance, today doesn't want Negroes, just like other middle-class white communities. Over the years they've won victory after victory against poverty and exploitation and they've moved steadily up the ladder from the have-nots to the have-a-little-want-mores until today they've thrown in their lot with the haves. This is a recurring pattern; you can see it in the American labor movement, which has gone from John L. Lewis to George Meany in one generation. Prosperity makes cowards of us all, and Back of the Yards is no exception. They've entered the nightfall of success, and their dreams of a better world have been replaced by nightmares of fear -- fear of change, fear of losing their material goods, fear of blacks. Last time I was in Back of the Yards, a good number of the cars were plastered with Wallace stickers; I could have puked. Like so many onetime revolutionaries, they've traded in their birthright for property and prosperity. This is why I've seriously thought of moving back into the area and organizing a new movement to overthrow the one I built 25 years ago.

PLAYBOY: This process of co-optation doesn't discourage you?

ALINSKY: No. It's the eternal problem, but it must be accepted with the understanding that all life is a series of revolutions, one following the other, each bringing society a little bit closer to the ultimate goal of real personal and social freedom. I certainly don't regret for one minute what I did in the Back of the Yards. Over 200,000 people were given decent lives, hope for the future and new dignity because of what we did in that cesspool. Sure, today they've grown fat and comfortable and smug, and they need to be kicked in the ass again, but if I had a choice between seeing those same people festering in filth and poverty and despair, and living a decent life within the confines of the establishment's prejudices, I'd do it all over again. One of the problems here, and the reason some people just give up when they see that economic improvements don't make Albert Schweitzers out of everybody, is that too many liberals and radicals have a tender-minded, overly romantic image of the poor; they glamorize the povertystricken slum dweller as a paragon of justice and expect him to behave like an angel the minute his shackles are removed. That's crud. Poverty is ugly, evil and degrading, and the fact that have-nots exist in despair, discrimination and deprivation does not automatically endow them with any special qualities of charity, justice, wisdom, mercy or moral purity. They are people, with all the faults of people -- greed, envy, suspicion, intolerance -- and once they get on top they can be just as bigoted as the people who once oppressed them. But that doesn't mean you leave them to rot. You just keep on fighting.

PLAYBOY: Spokesmen for the New Left contend that this process of accommodation renders piecemeal reforms meaningless, and that the overthrow and replacement of the system itself is the only means of ensuring meaningful social progress. How would you answer them?

ALINSKY: That kind of rhetoric explains why there's nothing left of the New Left. It would be great if the whole system would just disappear overnight, but it won't, and the kids on the New Left sure as hell aren't going to overthrow it. Shit, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin couldn't organize a successful luncheon, much less a revolution. I can sympathize with the impatience and pessimism of a lot of kids, but they've got to remember that real revolution is a long, hard process. Radicals in the United States don't have the strength to confront a local police force in armed struggle, much less the Army, Navy and Air Force; it's just idiocy for the Panthers to talk about all power growing from the barrel of a gun when the other side has all the guns.

America isn't Russia in 1917 or China in 1946, and any violent head-on collision with the power structure will only ensure the mass suicide of the left and the probable triumph of domestic fascism. So you're not going to get instant nirvana -- or any nirvana, for that matter -- and you've got to ask yourself, "Short of that, what the hell can I do?" The only answer is to build up local power bases that can merge into a national power movement that will ultimately realize your goals. That takes time and hard work and all the tedium connected with hard work, which turns off a lot of today's rhetorical radicals. But it's the only alternative to the continuation of the present system. It's important to look at this issue in a historical perspective. Every major revolutionary movement in history has gone through the same process of corruption, proceeding from virginal purity to seduction to decadence. Look at the Christian church as it evolved from the days of the martyrs to a giant holding company, or the way the Russian Revolution degenerated into a morass of bureaucracy and oppression as the new class of state managers replaced the feudal landowners as the reigning power elite. Look at our American Revolution; there wasn't anybody more dedicated to the right of revolution than Sam Adams, leader of the Sons of Liberty, the radical wing of the revolution. But once we won the fight, you couldn't find a worse dictatorial reactionary than Adams; he insisted that every single leader of Shays' Rebellion be executed as a warning to the masses. He had the right to revolt, but nobody had the right to revolt against him. Take Gandhi, even; within ten months of India's independence, he acquiesced in the law making passive resistance a felony, and he abandoned his nonviolent principles to support the military occupation of Kashmir. Subsequently, we've seen the same thing happen in Goa and Pakistan. Over and over again, the firebrand revolutionary freedom fighter is the first to destroy the rights and even the lives of the next generation of rebels.

But recognizing this isn't cause for despair. All life is warfare, and it's the continuing fight against the status quo that revitalizes society, stimulates new values and gives man renewed hope of eventual progress. The struggle itself is the victory. History is like a relay race of revolutions; the torch of idealism is carried by one group of revolutionaries until it too becomes an establishment, and then the torch is snatched up and carried on the next leg of the race by a new generation of revolutionaries. The cycle goes on and on, and along the way the values of humanism and social justice the rebels champion take shape and change and are slowly implanted in the minds of all men even as their advocates falter and succumb to the materialistic decadence of the prevailing status quo.

So whenever a community comes to me and asks me for help and says, "We're being exploited and discriminated against and shafted in every way; we need to organize," what am I going to say? "Sorry, guys, if I help organize you to get power and you win, then you'll all become. just like Back of the Yards, materialistic and all that, so just go on suffering, it's really better for your souls." And yet that's what a good many so-called radicals are in fact saying. It's kind of like a starving man coming up to you and begging you for a loaf of bread, and your telling him, "Don't you realize that man doesn't live by bread alone?" What a cop-out. No, there'll be setbacks, reverses, plenty of them, but you've just got to keep on sluggin'. I knew when I left Back of the Yards in 1940 that I hadn't created a utopia, but people were standing straight for the first time in their lives, and that was enough for me.

Interview with Saul Alinsky, Part Nine

After Success, Further Organizing Projects

PLAYBOY: What was your next organizational effort after your success in Back of the Yards?

ALINSKY: Well, in the aftermath of Back of the Yards, a lot of people who'd said it couldn't be done were patting me on the back, but none of them were offering any concrete support for similar organizational efforts. Then in 1940 Bishop Sheil brought me together with Marshall Field III, one of those rare birds, a millionaire with a genuine social .conscience. There was a funny kind of chemistry between us right from the beginning, and Field became really enthusiastic about what I was trying to do. And what's more, unlike a lot of do-gooding fat cats, he was willing to put his money where his mouth was. He gave me a grant that would allow me the freedom and mobility to repeat the Back of the Yards pattern in other communities, and with his money I established the Industrial Areas Foundation in Chicago, which is still my primary base of operations. Between Field and Sheil, I got $10,000 as an annual budget for salary, office, staff and travel expenses. Those were the days! I started moving across the country, working in different slum areas and forming cadres of volunteer organizers to carry the work on when I'd left. Those were pretty hectic times; I remember I had cards made up reading, "HAVE TROUBLE, WILL TRAVEL."

PLAYBOY: Did you run into much trouble yourself?

ALINSKY: Yeah, I was about as popular as the plague. I used to save on hotel bills, because the minute I'd arrive in a new town the cops would slap me right in jail. There wasn't any crap about habeas corpus and the rights of the accused in those days; if they thought you were a troublemaker, they just threw you behind bars, and nobody bothered to read you your constitutional rights. I really used to enjoy jail, though. When you jail a radical, you're playing right into his hands. One result is that the inherent conflict between the haves and the have-nots is underlined and dramatized, and another is that it terrifically strengthens your position with the people you're trying to organize. They say, "Shit, that guy cares enough about us to go to jail for us. We can't let him down now." So they make a martyr out of you at no higher cost than a few days or weeks of cruddy food and a little inaction.

And actually, that inaction itself is a valuable gift to a revolutionary. When you're out in the arena all the time, you're constantly on the run, racing from one fight to another and from one community to another. Most of the time you don't have any opportunity for reflection and contemplation; you never get outside of yourself enough to gain a real perspective and insight into your own tactics and strategy. In the Bible the prophets could at least go out into the wilderness and get themselves together, but about the only free time I ever had was on a sleeper train between towns, and I was generally so knocked out by the end of the day I'd just pass out the minute my head hit the pillow. So my wilderness, like that of all radicals, turned out to be jail.

It was really great; there weren't any phones and, outside of one hour every day, you didn't get any visitors. Your jailers were generally so stupid you wouldn't want to talk to 'em anyway, and since your surroundings were so drab and depressing, your only escape was into your own mind and imagination. Look at Martin Luther King; it was only in Montgomery jail that he had the uninterrupted time to think out thoroughly the wider implications of his bus boycott, and later on his philosophy deepened and widened during his time in prison in Birmingham, as he wrote in "Letter from a Birmingham Jail." So jail is an invaluable training ground for radicals.

PLAYBOY: It also removes you from active participation in your cause.

ALINSKY: Oh, I'm predicating this on the jail sentence being no more than two months at the maximum. The problem you face with a heavy sentence is that you're knocked out of action for too long and can lose your touch, and there's also the danger that if you're gone from the fight long enough, everybody will forget about you. Hell, if they'd given Jesus life instead of crucifying him, people would probably be lighting candles to Zeus today. But a relatively short jail term is a wonderful opportunity to think about what you're doing and why, where you're headed and how you can get there better and faster. It's in jail that you can reflect and synthesize your ideas, formulate your long-term goals with detachment and objectivity and shape your philosophy.

Jail certainly played an important role in my own case. After Back of the Yards, one of our toughest fights was Kansas City, where we were trying to organize a really foul slum called the Bottoms. The minute I'd get out of the Union Station and start walking down the main drag, a squad car would pull up and they'd take me off to jail as a public nuisance. I was never booked; they'd just courteously lock me up. They'd always give me a pretty fair shake In jail, though, a private cell and decent treatment, and it was there I started writing my first book, Reveille for Radicals. Sometimes the guards would come in when I was working and say, "OK, Alinsky, you can go now," and I'd look up from my papers and say, "Look, I'm in the middle of the chapter. I'll tell you when I want out." I think that was the first and only time they had a prisoner anxious not to be released. After a few times like that, word reached the police chief of this nut who loved jail, and one day he came around to see me. Despite our political differences, we began to hit it off and soon became close friends. Now that he and I were buddies, he stopped pickin' me up, which was too bad -- I had another book in mind -- but I'll always be grateful to him for giving me a place to digest my experiences. And I was able to turn his head around on the issues, too; pretty soon he did a hundred percent somersault and became prolabor right down the line. We eventually organized successfully and won our major demands in Kansas City, and his changed attitude was a big help to that victory.

PLAYBOY: Where did you go after Kansas City?

ALINSKY: I divided my time between a half-dozen slum communities we were organizing, but then we entered World War Two, and the menace of fascism was the overpowering issue at that point, so I felt Hitler's defeat took temporary precedence over domestic issues. I worked on special assignment for the Treasury and Labor Departments; my job was to increase industrial production in conjunction with the C.I.O. and also to organize mass war-bond drives across the country. It was relatively tame work for me, but I was consoled by the thought I was having some impact on the war effort, however small.

PLAYBOY: You didn't think of fighting Hitler with a gun?

ALINSKY: Join the Army? No, I'd have made a lousy soldier. I hate discipline too much. But before Pearl Harbor, I was offered a commission in the OSS. From what little I was told, it sounded right up my alley; none of the discipline and regimentation I loathed. Apparently General "Wild Bill" Donovan thought my experience in fighting domestic fascism could have an application to the resistance movements we were supporting behind enemy lines. I agreed. I was really excited; I pictured myself in a trench coat and beret, parachuting into occupied France and working with the maquis against the Nazis. But it wasn't meant to be. The Assistant Secretary of State blocked my commission because he felt I could make a better contribution in labor affairs, ensuring high production, resolving worker-management disputes, that sort of thing. Important, sure, but prosaic beside the cloak-and-dagger stuff. I've got to admit that one of the very, very few regrets I have in life was being blocked from joining the OSS.

Interview with Saul Alinsky, Part Ten

After World War Two -- Jousting with McCarthy and Organizing an African American Slum

PLAYBOY: What did you do after the war?

ALINSKY: I went back to community-organization work, crisscrossing the country, working in slums in New York and Detroit and Buffalo and in Mexican barrios in California and the Southwest. Reveille for Radicals became the number one best seller, and that helped drum up more support for our work, but then the Cold War began to freeze and McCarthyism started sweeping the country, making any radical activity increasingly difficult. In those days everybody who challenged the establishment was branded a Communist, and the radical movement began to disintegrate under the pressure.

PLAYBOY: What was your own relationship with the Communist Party?

ALINSKY: I knew plenty of Communists in those days, and I worked with them on a number of projects. Back in the Thirties, the Communists did a hell of a lot of good work; they were in the vanguard of the labor movement and they played an important role in aiding blacks and Okies and Southern sharecroppers. Anybody who tells you he was active in progressive causes in those days and never worked with the Reds is a goddamn liar. Their platform stood for all the right things, and unlike many liberals, they were willing to put their bodies on the line. Without the Communists, for example, I doubt the C.I.O. could have won all the battles it did. I was also sympathetic to Russia in those days, not because I admired Stalin or the Soviet system but because it seemed to be the only country willing to stand up to Hitler. I was in charge of a big part of fund raising for the International Brigade and in that capacity I worked in close alliance with the Communist Party.

When the Nazi-Soviet Pact came, though, and I refused to toe the party line and urged support for England and for American intervention in the war, the party turned on me tooth and nail. Chicago Reds plastered the Back of the Yards with big posters featuring a caricature of me with a snarling, slavering fanged mouth and wild eyes, labeled, "This is the face of a warmonger." But there were too many Poles, Czechs, Lithuanians and Latvians in the area for that tactic to go over very well. Actually, the greatest weakness of the party was its slavish parroting of the Moscow line. It could have been much more effective if it had adopted a relatively independent stance, like the western European parties do today. But all in all, and despite my own fights with them, I think the Communists of the Thirties deserve a lot of credit for the struggles they led or participated in. Today the party is just a shadow of the past, but in the Depiession it was a positive force for social change. A lot of its leaders and organizers were jerks, of course, but objectively the party in those days was on the right side and did considerable good.

PLAYBOY: Did you consider becoming a party member prior to the Nazi-Soviet Pact?

ALINSKY: Not at any time. I've never joined any organization -- not even the ones I've organized myself. I prize my own independence too much. And philosophically, I could never accept any rigid dogma or ideology, whether it's Christianity or Marxism. One of the most important things in life is what judge Learned Hand described as "that ever-gnawing inner doubt as to whether you're right." If you don't have that, if you think you've got an inside track to absolute truth, you become doctrinaire, humorless and intellectually constipated. The greatest crimes in history have been perpetrated by such religious and political and racial fanatics, from the persecutions of the Inquisition on down to Communist purges and Nazi genocide. The great atomic physicist Niels Bohr summed it up pretty well when he said, "Every sentence I utter must be understood not as an affirmation, but as a question." Nobody owns the truth, and dogma, whatever form it takes, is the ultimate enemy of human freedom.

Now, this doesn't mean that I'm rudderless; I think I have a much keener sense of direction and purpose than the true believer with his rigid ideology, because I'm free to be loose, resilient and independent, able to respond to any situation as it arises without getting trapped by articles of faith. My only fixed truth is a belief in people, a conviction that if people have the opportunity to act freely and the power to control their own destinies, they'll generally reach the right decisions. The only alternative to that belief is rule by an elite, whether it's a Communist bureaucracy or our own present-day corporate establishment. You should never have an ideology more specific than that of the founding fathers: "For the general welfare." That's where I parted company with the Communists in the Thirties, and that's where I stay parted from them today.

PLAYBOY: Did the McCarthy era affect you personally?

ALINSKY: No, not directly, but the general malaise made it much more difficult to organize for radical goals. And in the long run, McCarthy really did a terrible injury to the country. Before McCarthy, every generation had its radicals who were prepared to stand up and fight the system. But then McCarthy transformed the country into a graveyard of fear; liberals who had casually joined the party or its front groups broke and ran for cover in an orgy of opportunism, many of them betraying their friends and associates to save their own skins. The fire-breathing radicals of the Thirties turned tail and skulked away, leaving behind a pitiful legacy of cowardice. And there was no one left except a few battered holdouts to hand the torch on to the next generation of radicals. That's why so many kids today sneer at their parents as cop-out artists, and they're right.

The saddest thing is that if liberals and radicals had just held a united front against McCarthy, they could have stopped him cold. I remember in the early Fifties his committee came to see me; they told me that if I didn't supply them with lists of names of people I'd known, they'd subpoena me and McCarthy would destroy my reputation. I just laughed in their faces, and before I threw 'em out I said, "Reputation? What reputation? You think I give a damn about my reputation? Call me as a witness; you won't get any Fifth Amendment from me. He can force me to answer yes and no, but once I get out into the corridor with the press, then he can't stop me from talking about the way he courted Communist support for his Senate fight against La Follette in '46. Tell McCarthy to go to hell." They had come in all arrogant, expecting me to crawl and beg, but when they left they were really whitefaced and shook up. I continued organizing throughout the Fifties without any trouble from Washington, although I caught a lot of flak from local police in the communities where I was working.

PLAYBOY: What was your major organizational effort of this period?

ALINSKY: The Woodlawn district of Chicago, which was a black ghetto every bit as bad as Back of the Yards had been in the Thirties. In 1958, a group of black leaders came to me and explained how desperate conditions were in Woodlawn and asked our help in organizing the community. At first, I hesitated; we had our hands full at the time, and besides, I'd never organized a black slum before and I was afraid my white skin might prove an insurmountable handicap. Friends of mine in the civil rights movement who knew I was considering the idea told me to forget it; nobody could organize Woodlawn; the place made Harlem look like Grosse Pointe; it was impossible. But there was only one way to find out: Try it. So the decision was go.

At first, it did look as if my whiteness might be a major obstacle, but then, as always, the good old establishment came to my rescue. The University of Chicago, which controlled huge hunks of real estate in the area, was trying to push through an urban-renewal program that would have driven out thousands of Woodlawn residents and made their property available for highly profitable real-estate development, which naturally made the U. of C. a universally hated and feared institution in Woodlawn. The saying in the ghetto then was "Urban renewal means Negro removal."

Once I announced my intentions to organize Woodlawn, the man in the street looked on me as just another white do-gooder. All the university needed to do to knock me out of action effectively was to issue a statement welcoming me to the neighborhood and hailing me as an illustrious alumnus. Instead, their spokesmen blasted hell out of me as a dangerous and irresponsible outside agitator, and all the Chicago papers picked up the cue and denounced me as a kind of latter-day Attila the Hun. Off the record, the university was charging that I was funded by the Catholic Church and the Mafia! Crazy. Well, this was great; right away, people in Woodlawn began to say, "Christ, this guy must not only be OK, he must have something on them if he bugs those bastards so much," and they became receptive to our organizing pitch.

Anyway, we quickly gained the support of all the Catholic and Protestant churches in the area and within a few months we had the overwhelming majority of the community solidly behind us and actively participating in our programs. Incidentally, my leading organizer at the time was Nicholas von Hoffman, who has since become a writer and is now with The Washington Post. Nick's contribution was crucial. We picketed, protested, boycotted and applied political and economic pressure against local slumlords and exploitive merchants, the University of Chicago and the political machine of Mayor Daley -- and we won.

We stopped the urban-renewal program; we launched a massive voter-registration drive for political power; we forced the city to improve substandard housing and to build new low-cost public housing; we won representation on decisionmaking bodies like the school board and anti-poverty agencies; we got large-scale job-training programs going; we brought about major improvements in sanitation, public health and police procedures. The Woodlawn Organization became the first community group not only to plan its own urban renewal but, even more important, to control the letting of contracts to building contractors; this meant that unless the contractors provided jobs for blacks, they wouldn't get the contracts. It was touching to see how competing contractors suddenly discovered the principles of brotherhood and racial equality.

Once TWO had proved itself as a potent political and economic force, it was recognized even by Mayor Daley, although he tried to undercut it by channeling hundreds of thousands of Federal anti-poverty dollars to "safe" projects; Daley has always wanted -- and gotten -- all Federal money disbursed through City Hall to his own housebroken political hacks. But perhaps our most important accomplishment in Woodlawn was intangible; by building a mass power organization, we gave the people a sense of identity and pride. After living in squalor and despair for generations, they suddenly discovered the unity and resolve to score victories over their. enemies, to take their lives back into their own hands and control their own destinies. We didn't solve all their problems overnight, but we showed them that those problems could be solved through their own dedication and their own indigenous black leadership. When we entered Woodlawn, it was a decaying, hopeless ghetto; when we left, it was a fighting, united community.

PLAYBOY: Were the tactics you employed in Woodlawn different from those you would have used in a white slum?

ALINSKY: Race doesn't really make that much difference. All tactics means is doing what you can with what you have. Just like in Back of the Yards, we had no money at our disposal in Woodlawn, but we had plenty of people ready and willing to put themselves on the line, and their bodies became our greatest asset. At one point in the Woodlawn fight, we were trying to get Chicago's big department stores to give jobs to blacks. A few complied, but one of the largest stores in the city -- and one of the largest in the country -- refused to alter its hiring practices and wouldn't even meet with us. We thought of mass picketing, but by now that had become a rather stale and familiar tactic, and we didn't think it would have much of an impact on this particular store. Now, one of my basic tactical principles is that the threat is often more effective than the tactic itself, as long as the power structure knows you have the power and the will to execute it; you can't get anywhere bluffing in this game, but you can psych out your opponent with the right strategy.

Anyway, we devised our tactic for this particular department store. Every Saturday, the busiest shopping day of the week, we decided to charter buses and bring approximately 3,000 blacks from Woodlawn to this downtown store, all dressed up in their Sunday best. Now, you put 3,000 blacks on the floor of a store, even a store this big, and the color of the entire store suddenly changes: Any white coming through the revolving doors will suddenly think he's in Africa. So they'd lose a lot of their white trade right then and there. But that was only the beginning. For poor people, shopping is a time-consuming business, because economy is paramount and they're constantly comparing and evaluating prices and quality. This would mean that at every counter you'd have groups of blacks closely scrutinizing the merchandise and asking the salesgirl interminable questions. And needless to say, none of our people would buy a single item of merchandise. You'd have a situation where one group would tie up the shirt counter and move on to the underwear counter, while the group previously occupying the underwear counter would take over the shirt department. And everybody would be very pleasant and polite, of course; after all, who was to say they weren't bona-fide potential customers? This procedure would be followed until one hour before closing time, when our people would begin buying everything in sight to be delivered C. O. D. This would tie up delivery service for a minimum of two days, with additional heavy costs and administrative problems, since all the merchandise would be refused upon delivery.

With the plan set, we leaked it to one of the stool pigeons every radical organization needs as a conduit of carefully selected information to the opposition, and the result was immediate. The day after we paid the deposit for the chartered buses, the department-store management called us and gave in to all our demands; overnight, they opened up nearly 200 jobs for blacks on both the sales and executive levels, and the remaining holdout stores quickly followed their lead. We'd won completely, and through a tactic that, if implemented, would be perfectly legal and irresistible. Thousands of people would have been "shopping" and the police would have been powerless to interfere. What's more, the whole thing would have been damned good fun, an exciting outing and a release from the drab monotony of ghetto life. So this simple tactic encompassed all the elements of good organization -- imagination, legality, excitement and, above all, effectiveness.

PLAYBOY: And coercion.

ALINSKY: No, not coercion -- popular pressure in the democratic tradition. People don't get opportunity or freedom or equality or dignity as an act of charity; they have to fight for it, force it out of the establishment. This liberal cliche about reconciliation of opposing forces is a load of crap. Reconciliation means just one thing: When one side gets enough power, then the other side gets reconciled to it. That's where you need organization -- first to compel concessions and then to make sure the other side delivers. If you're too delicate to exert the necessary pressures on the power structure, then you might as well get out of the ball park. This was the fatal mistake the white liberals made, relying on altruism as an instrument of social change. That's just self-delusion. No issue can be negotiated unless you first have the clout to compel negotiation.

PLAYBOY: This emphasis on conflict and power led Philip M. Hauser, former chairman of the University of Chicago's Department of Sociology, to say at the time of your Woodlawn struggle that any black who follows you "may be the victim of a cruel, even if unintended, hoax ... [because] the methods by which [Alinsky] organized TWO may actually have impeded the achievement of consensus and thus delayed the attaining of Woodlawn's objectives." How would you respond to him?

ALINSKY: I think the record of Woodlawn's evolution refutes it more convincingly than I could with words. In fact, I strongly doubt Hauser would say the same thing today; the university is now proud of TWO and fully reconciled to its goals. But apart from the specific criticism, this general fear of conflict and emphasis on consensus and accommodation is typical academic drivel. How do you ever arrive at consensus before you have conflict? In fact, of course, conflict is the vital core of an open society; if you were going to express democracy in a musical score, your major theme would be the harmony of dissonance. All change means movement, movement means friction and friction means heat. You'll find consensus only in a totalitarian state, Communist or fascist.

My opposition to consensus politics, however, doesn't mean I'm opposed to compromise; just the opposite. In the world as it is, no victory is ever absolute; but in the world as it is, the right things also invariably get done for the wrong reasons. We didn't win in Woodlawn because the establishment suddenly experienced a moral revelation and threw open its arms to blacks; we won because we backed them into a corner and kept them there until they decided it would be less expensive and less dangerous to surrender to our demands than to continue the fight. I remember that during the height of our Woodlawn effort, I attended a luncheon with a number of presidents of major corporations who wanted to "know their enemy." One of them said to me, "Saul, you seem like a nice guy personally, but why do you see everything only in terms of power and conflict rather than from the point of view of good will and reason and cooperation?" I told him, "Look, when you and your corporation approach competing corporations in terms of good will, reason and cooperation instead of going for the jugular, then I'll follow your lead." There was a long silence at the table, and the subject was dropped.

Interview with Saul Alinsky, Part Eleven

More Tactics, More Targets

PLAYBOY: Can't your conflict tactics exacerbate a dispute to a point where it's no longer susceptible to a compromise solution?

ALINSKY: No, we gauge our tactics very carefully in that respect. Not only are all of our most effective tactics completely nonviolent but very often the mere threat of them is enough to bring the enemy to his knees. Let me give you another example. In 1964, an election year, the Daley machine was starting to back out of some of its earlier commitments to TWO in the belief that the steam had gone out of the movement and we no longer constituted a potent political threat. We had to prove Daley was wrong, and fast, particularly since we couldn't support Goldwater, which boxed us in politically. So we decided to move away from the traditional political arena and strike at Daley personally. The most effective way to do this wasn't to publicly denounce or picket him, but to create a situation in which he would become a figure of nationwide ridicule.

Now, O'Hare Airport in Chicago, the busiest airport in the world, is Mayor Daley's pride and joy, both his personal toy and the visible symbol of his city's status and importance. If the least little thing went wrong at O'Hare and Daley heard about it, he was furious and would burn up the phone lines to his commissioners until the situation was corrected. So we knew that was the place to get at him. But how? Even if we massed huge numbers of pickets, they'd be virtually lost in the thousands of passengers swarming through O'Hare's terminals. So we devised a new tactic. Picture yourself for a moment on a typical jet flight. The stewardess has served you your drinks and lunch or dinner, and afterwards the odds are you'll feel like going to the john. But this is usually awkward because your seat and those of the people sitting next to you are blocked by trays, so you wait until they're removed. But by then the people closest to the lavatories have got up and the OCCUPIED signs are on. So you wait a few more minutes and, more often than not, by the time the johns are vacant, the FASTEN SEAT BELTS signs are on, so you decide to wait until landing and then use one of the terminal restrooms. You can see this process in action if you watch the passenger gate at any landing airplane. It looks like almost half the debarking passengers make a beeline for the lavatories.

Here's where we came in. Some of our people went out to the airport and made a comprehensive intelligence study of how many sit-down pay toilets and stand-up urinals there were in the whole O'Hare complex and how many men and women we'd need for the country's first "shit-in." It turned out we'd require about 2500 people, which was no problem for TWO. For the sit-down toilets, our people would just put in their dimes and prepare to wait it out; we arranged for them to bring box lunches and reading material along to help pass the time. What were desperate passengers going to do -- knock the cubicle door down and demand evidence of legitimate occupancy? This meant that the ladies' lavatories could be completely occupied; in the men's, we'd take care of the pay toilets and then have floating groups moving from one urinal to another, positioning themselves four or five deep and standing there for five minutes before being relieved by a co-conspirator, at which time they would pass on to another rest room. Once again, what's some poor sap at the end of the line going to say: "Hey, pal, you're taking too long to piss"?

Now, imagine for a second the catastrophic consequences of this tactic. Constipated and bladder-bloated passengers would mill about the corridors in anguish and desperation, longing for a place to relieve themselves. O'Hare would become a shambles! You can imagine the national and international ridicule and laughter the story would create. It would probably make the front page of the London Times. And who would be more mortified than Mayor Daley?

PLAYBOY: Why did your shit-in never take place?

ALINSKY: What happened was that once again we leaked the news -- excuse me, a Freudian slip -- to an informer for the city administration, and the reaction was instantaneous. The next day, the leaders of TWO were called down to City Hall for a conference with Daley's aides, and informed that they certainly had every intention in the world of carrying out their commitments and they could never understand how anyone got the idea that Mayor Daley would ever break a promise. There were warm handshakes all around, the city lived up to its word, and that was the end of our shit-in. Most of Woodlawn's members don't know how close they came to making history.

PLAYBOY: No one could accuse you of orthodoxy in your tactics.

ALINSKY: Well, quite seriously, the essence of successful tactics is originality. For one thing, it keeps your people from getting bored; any tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag itself. No matter how burning the injustice and how militant your supporters, people will get turned off by repetitious and conventional tactics. Your opposition also learns what to expect and how to neutralize you unless you're constantly devising new strategies. I knew the day of the sit-in had ended when an executive of a major corporation with important military contracts showed me the blueprints for its lavish new headquarters. "And here," he said, pointing out a spacious room, "is our sit-in hall. We've got plenty of comfortable chairs, two coffee machines and lots of magazines and newspapers. We'll just usher them in and let them stay as long as they want." No, if you're going to get anywhere, you've got to be constantly inventing new and better tactics. When we couldn't get adequate garbage collection in one black community -- because the city said it didn't have the money -- we cooperated with the city by collecting all our garbage into trucks and dumping it onto the lawn of the area's alderman. Regular garbage pickup started within 48 hours.

On another occasion, when Daley was dragging his heels on building violations and health procedures, we threatened to unload a thousand live rats on the steps of city hall. Sort of a share-the-rats program, a form of integration. Daley got the message, and we got what we wanted. Such tactics didn't win us any popularity contests, but they worked and, as a result, the living conditions of Woodlawn residents improved considerably. Woodlawn is the one black area of Chicago that has never exploded into racial violence, even during the widespread uprisings following Martin Luther King's assassination. The reason isn't that their lives are idyllic, but simply that the people finally have a sense of power and achievement, a feeling that this community is theirs and they're going somewhere with it, however slow and arduous the progress. People burn down their prisons, not their homes.

Interview with Saul Alinsky, Part Twelve

The Struggle with Eastman Kodak PLAYBOY: What was your next organizational target after Woodlawn?

ALINSKY: I kept my fingers in a number of pies throughout the Sixties, organizing community-action groups in the black slums of Kansas City and Buffalo, and sponsoring and funding the Community Service Organization of Mexican-Americans in California, which was led by our West Coast organizer at the time, Fred Ross. The staff we organized and trained then included Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta. But my next major battle occurred in Rochester, New York, the home of Eastman Kodak -- or maybe I should say Eastman Kodak, the home of Rochester, New York. Rochester is a classic company town, owned lock, stock and barrel by Kodak; it's a Southern plantation transplanted to the North, and Kodak's self-righteous paternalism makes benevolent feudalism look like participatory democracy. I call it Smugtown, U.S.A. But in mid-1964 that smugness was jolted by a bloody race riot that resulted in widespread burnings, injuries and deaths. The city's black minority, casually exploited by Kodak, finally exploded in a way that almost destroyed the city, and the National Guard had to be called in to suppress the uprising.

In the aftermath of the riots, the Rochester Area Council of Churches, a predominantly white body of liberal clergymen, invited us in to organize the black community and agreed to pay all our expenses. We said they didn't speak for the blacks and we wouldn't come in unless we were invited in by the black community itself. At first, there seemed little interest in the ghetto, but once again the old reliable establishment came to the rescue and, by overreacting, cut its own throat. The minute the invitation was made public, the town's power structure exploded in paroxysms of rage. The mayor joined the city's two newspapers, both part of the conservative Gannett chain, in denouncing me as a subversive hatemonger; radio station WHAM delivered one-minute editorial tirades against me and told the ministers who'd invited me that from now on they'd have to pay for their previously free Sunday-morning air time. A settlement house that had pledged its support to us was promptly informed by the Community Chest that its funds would be cut off if it went ahead; the board retracted its support, with several members resigning. The establishment acted as if the Golden Horde of Genghis Khan was camped on its doorstep.

If you listened to the public comments, you'd have thought I spent my spare time feeding poisoned Milk-Bones to seeing-eye dogs. It was the nicest thing they could have done for me, of course. Overnight, the black community broke out of its apathy and started clamoring for us to come in; as one black told me later, "I just wanted to see somebody who could freak those mothers out like that." Black civil rights leaders, local block organizations and ministers plus 13,000 individuals signed petitions asking me to come in, and with that kind of support I knew we were rolling. I assigned my associate, Ed Chambers, as chief organizer in Rochester, and prepared to visit the city myself once his efforts were under way.

PLAYBOY: Was your reception as hostile as your advance publicity?

ALINSKY: Oh, yeah, I wasn't disappointed. I think they would have quarantined me at the airport if they could have. When I got off the plane, a bunch of local reporters were waiting for me, keeping the same distance as tourists in a leper colony. I remember one of them asking me what right I had to start "meddling" in the black community after everything Kodak had done for "them" and I replied: "Maybe I'm uninformed, but as far as I know the only thing Kodak has done on the race issue in America is to introduce color film." My relationship with Kodak was to remain on that plane.

PLAYBOY: How did you organize Rochester's black community?

ALINSKY: With the assistance of a dynamic local black leader, the Reverend Franklin Florence, who'd been close to Malcolm X, we formed a community organization called FIGHT -- an acronym for Freedom, Integration, God, Honor, Today. We also established the Friends of FIGHT, an associated group of some 400 dues-paying white liberals, which provided us with funds, moral support, legal advice and instructors for our community training projects. We had a wide range of demands, of which the key one was that Kodak recognize the representatives of the black community who were designated as such by the people and not insist on dealing through its own showcase "Negro" executive flunky with a Ph.D. Kodak naturally refused to discuss such outrageous demands with us, contending that FIGHT had no legitimacy as a community spokesman and that the company would never accept it as such.

Well, that meant war, and we dug in for the fight, which we knew wouldn't be an overnight one. We realized picketing or boycotts wouldn't work, so we began to consider some far-out tactics along the lines of our O'Hare shit-in. At one point we heard that Queen Elizabeth owned some Kodak stock, and we considered chartering an airplane for a hundred of our people and throwing a picket line around Buckingham Palace on the grounds that the changing of the guard was a conspiracy to encourage picture taking. This would have been a good, attention-getting device, outrageous enough to make people laugh, but with an undertone serious enough to make them think.

Another idea I had that almost came to fruition was directed at the Rochester Philharmonic, which was the establishment's -- and Kodak's -- cultural jewel. I suggested we pick a night when the music would be relatively quiet and buy 100 seats. The 100 blacks scheduled to attend the concert would then be treated to a preshow banquet in the community consisting of nothing but huge portions of baked beans. Can you imagine the inevitable consequences within the symphony hall? The concert would be over before the first movement -- another Freudian slip -- and Rochester would be immortalized as the site of the world's first fart-in.

PLAYBOY: Aren't such tactics a bit juvenile and frivolous?

ALINSKY: I'd call them absurd rather than juvenile. But isn't much of life kind of a theater of the absurd? As far as being frivolous is concerned, I say if a tactic works, it's not frivolous. Let's take a closer look at this particular tactic and see what purposes it serves -- apart from being fun. First of all, the fart-in would be completely outside the city fathers' experience. Demonstrations, confrontations and picketings they'd learned to cope with, but never in their wildest dreams could they envision a flatulent blitzkrieg on their sacred symphony orchestra. It would throw them into complete disarray. Second, the action would make a mockery of the law, because although you could be arrested for throwing a stink bomb, there's no law on the books against natural bodily functions. Can you imagine a guy being tried in court on charges of first-degree farting? The cops would be paralyzed. Third, when the news got around, everybody who heard it would break out laughing, and the Rochester Philharmonic and the establishment it represents would be rendered totally ridiculous. A fourth benefit of the tactic is that it's psychically as well as physically satisfying to the participants. What oppressed person doesn't want, literally or figuratively, to shit on his oppressors? Here was the closest chance they'd have. Such tactics aren't just cute; they can be useful in driving your opponent up the wall. Very often the most ridiculous tactic can prove the most effective.

PLAYBOY: In any case, you never held your fart-in. So what finally broke Kodak's resistance?

ALINSKY: Simple self-interest -- the knowledge that the price of continuing to fight us was greater than reaching a compromise. It was one of the longest and toughest battles I've been in, though. After endless months of frustration, we finally decided we'd try to embarrass Kodak outside its fortress of Rochester, and disrupt the annual stockholders' convention in Flemington, New Jersey. Though we didn't know it at the time -- all we had in mind was a little troublemaking -- this was the seed from which a vitally important tactic was to spring. I addressed the General Assembly of the Unitarian-Universalist Association and asked them for their proxies on whatever Kodak stock they held in order to gain entree to the stockholders' meeting. The Unitarians voted to use the proxies for their entire Kodak stock to support FIGHT -- 5620 shares valued at over $700,000.

The wire services carried the story and news of the incident rapidly spread across the country. Individuals began sending in their proxies, and other church groups indicated they were prepared to follow the Unitarians' lead. By the purest accident, we'd stumbled onto a tactical gold mine. Politicians who saw major church denominations assigning us their proxies could envision them assigning us their votes as well; the church groups have vast constituencies in their congregations. Suddenly senators and representatives who hadn't returned our phone calls were ringing up and lending a sympathetic ear to my request for a senatorial investigation of Kodak's hiring practices.

As the proxies rolled in, the pressure began to build on Kodak -- and on other corporations as well. Executives of the top companies began seeking me out and trying to learn my intentions. I'd never seen the establishment so uptight before, and this convinced me that we had happened onto the cord that might open the golden curtain shielding the private sector from its public responsibilities. It obviously also convinced Kodak, because they soon caved in and recognized FIGHT as the official representative of the Rochester black community. Kodak has since begun hiring more blacks and training unskilled black workers, as well as inducing the city administration to deliver major concessions on education, housing, municipal services and urban renewal. It was our proxy tactic that made all this possible. It scared Kodak, and it scared Wall Street. It's our job now to relieve their tensions by fulfilling their fears.

PLAYBOY: What do you mean? Surely you don't expect to gain enough proxies to take control of any major corporation.

ALINSKY: No, despite all the crap about "people's capitalism," the dominant controlling stock in all major corporations is vested in the hands of a few people we could never get to. We're not even concerned about electing four or five board members to a 25-member board, which in certain cases would be theoretically feasible. They'd only be outvoted by management right down the line. We want to use the proxies as a means of social and political pressure against the megacorporations, and as a vehicle for exposing their hypocrisy and deceit.

The proxy tactic is also an invaluable means of gaining middle-class participation in radical causes. Instead of chasing Dow Chemical recruiters off campus, for example, student activists could organize and demand that the university administration turn over the Dow proxies in its portfolio to them. They'd refuse, but it would be a solid organizational issue, and one or two might even be forced to give in. By assigning their proxies, liberals can also continue attending cocktail parties while assuaging their troubled social consciences.

Proxies can become a springboard to other issues in organizing the middle class. Proxy participation on a large scale could ultimately mean the democratization of corporate America, and could result in the changing of these corporations' overseas operations, which would precipitate important shifts in our foreign policy. There's really no limit to the proxy potential. Pat Moynihan told me in Washington when he was still Nixon's advisor that "proxies for people would mean revolution -- they'll never let you get away with it." It will mean revolution, peaceful revolution, and we will get away with it in the years to come.

Interview with Saul Alinsky, Concluded

Final Thoughts

PLAYBOY: You seem optimistic. But most radicals and some liberals have expressed fear that we're heading into a new era of repression and privacy invasion. Are their fears exaggerated, or is there a real danger of America becoming a police state?

ALINSKY: Of course there's that danger, as this whole national fetish for law and order indicates. But the thing to do isn't to succumb to despair and just sit in a corner wailing, but to go out and fight those fascist trends and build a mass constituency that will support progressive causes. Otherwise all your moaning about a police state will just be a self-fulfilling prophecy. That's one of the reasons I'm directing all my efforts today to organizing the middle class, because that's the arena where the future of this country will be decided. And I'm convinced that once the middle class recognizes its real enemy -- the megacorporations that control the country and pull the strings on puppets like Nixon and Connally -- it will mobilize as one of the most effective instruments for social change this country has ever known. And once mobilized, it will be natural for it to seek out allies among the other disenfranchised -- blacks, chicanos, poor whites.

It's to that cause I plan to devote the remaining years of my life. It won't be easy, but we can win. No matter how bad things may look at a given time, you can't ever give up. We're living in one of the most exciting periods of human history, when new hopes and dreams are crystallizing even as the old certainties and values are dissolving. It's a time of great danger, but also of tremendous potential. My own hopes and dreams still burn as brightly in 1972 as they did in 1942. A couple of years ago I sat down to write a new introduction to Reveille for Radicals, which was first published in 1946, and I started to write: "As I look back upon my youth. . . ." But the words stuck, because I don't really feel a day older. I guess having been out in the front lines of conflict for most of my life, I just haven't had the time to grow older. Anyway, death usually comes suddenly and unexpectedly to people in my line of work, so I don't worry about it. I'm just starting my 60s now and I suppose one of these days I'll cop it -- one way or another -- but until then I'll keep on working and fighting and having myself a hell of a good time.

PLAYBOY: Do you think much about death?

ALINSKY: No, not anymore. There was a period when I did, but then suddenly it came to me, not as an intellectual abstraction. but as a deep gut revelation, that someday I was going to die. That might sound silly, because it's so obvious, but there are very few people under 40 who realize that there is really a final cutoff point to their existence, that no matter what they do their light is someday going to be snuffed out. But once you accept your own mortality on the deepest level, your life can take on a whole new meaning. If you've learned anything about life, you won't care any more about how much money you've got or what people think of you, or whether you're successful or unsuccessful, important or insignificant. You just care about living every day to the full, drinking in every new experience and sensation as eagerly as a child, and with the same sense of wonder.

PLAYBOY: Having accepted your own mortality, do you believe in any kind of afterlife?

ALINSKY: Sometimes it seems to me that the question people should ask is not "Is there life after death?" but "Is there life after birth?" I don't know whether there's anything after this or not. I haven't seen the evidence one way or the other and I don't think anybody else has either. But I do know that man's obsession with the question comes out of his stubborn refusal to face up to his own mortality. Let's say that if there is an afterlife, and I have anything to say about it, I will unreservedly choose to go to hell.

PLAYBOY: Why?

ALINSKY: Hell would be heaven for me. All my life I've been with the have-nots. Over here, if you're a have-not, you're short of dough. If you're a have-not in hell, you're short of virtue. Once I get into hell, I'll start organizing the have-nots over there.

PLAYBOY: Why them?

ALINSKY: They're my kind of people.

Saul Alinsky died a few months later, on June 12, 1972.

Filing a sexual harassment complaint

2008-07-23T11:56:00.000-07:00

I have decided to file a complaint. My letter will describe the incident and demand that there be sensitivity training prior to the hiring process and, furthermore, if there are complaints made, formal mandatory classes into harassment and gender equity and suspension until they are fully completed.

Now my question to the men out there: I DO realize that these policies arely do exist at many institutions. And many of my own male-friends go through them and, to be be honest, they say they are a bitch to go through and they already know what to do and what not to do. And they do fine when passing through the motions of these "sensitivity trainings". My question is do these work at all? Do you llike..think twice about the words that come out of your mouth? Or do you just go through the motions, pass it, and resume your everyday behaviour.

NOT to say that your everyday behaviour is sexist, etc. But men are socialized to, some degree, to be men- do stereotypical "man" things. Like the commenter said from the last post, when men get together it is a whole other story, but when they are acting alone they rarely act so rudely. And it is true, for the most part in my experience. Men hoot and holler in groups but when they are alone they are quite respectful and politely compliment me.

But group-mentality/ the way you are socialized to behave in society or in front of others... sometimes it is deplorable. and I'm curious- what does it take to get you men, who can admit they can sometimes act shamefully towards the other gender, to stop doing that? Does sensitivity training really work or do we have to re-socialize men altogether?

Off of the UT website (emphasis added)

Harassment is any unwanted physical or verbal conduct that offends or humiliates you. It is a type of discrimination that can take many forms including unwelcome remarks, jokes or written displays about race, religion, disability, age, sexual orientation, as well as threats, intimidation or unwanted physical conduct.

Harassment can come from an advisor, faculty, staff or other students. This conduct can interfere with a student's ability to do research and complete the graduate degree. Harassment by an advisor can be particularly traumatizing for graduate students who are most vulnerable and face a power differential in which they rely solely on one individual for publications, funding, references and their degree.

You are not alone if you are facing this. For confidential action or support, please contact the GSU's Resource Co-ordinator, Rose Da Costa at rose.dacosta@utoronto.ca / 978-2391 or GSU Fieldworker, Charlotte Reeve at charlotte.reeve@utoronto.ca / 978-8464.

And by the way, cat calling and all the rest of it- it IS emotionally distressing. Dont' think that it doesn't affect us. When I have to runthrough the city with worry in my head, ensuring that I don't pass by a group of men, or feel my heart race whenever I anticipate a comment being made it has an effect on my day. I have to take taht extra moment to ignore it, forget about it before I get to my work. Men don't have to worry about that. You dont' know what a privilege it is to walk down the street without worry, no matter what tiem of day or who is around until you don't have it.

Men are scum

2008-07-22T20:16:00.000-07:00

I don't usually use this blog to vent about such issues, but men are scum. plain and simple.

Cat calling has reached a new level.

Now I have been subject to some pretty horrid experiences in my life but today was beyond demeaning and annoying.

I was walking to school this morning on campus and a group of campus groundskeepers sitting on a bench whistled at me. I walked briskly and avoided all eye contact and got out of eye-line of them. I walked a bit further and was approached by another groundskeeper who looked me up and down and then said, "looking good" in a slimy creepy voice.

I then took the road less travelled, quite literally, to avoid anybody possible. Another groundskeeper approached! And he had his radio in-hand and spoke into it as he passed by saying, "yeah... things are definitely looking hot today". And THEN proceeded to make "smoochie" noises at me.

They were using their radios to practically stalk me across campus so they could objectfiy me!

Seriously now.. I am beyond sick of this kind of behaviour from men. Don't you know that behaviour like that repulses women? It makes us feel sick to our stomachs? You are doing us no favour. And do you know that you give your entire gender a bad rep when you act so disgustingly?

Do you realize that I have to go out of my way on my way home to avoid any alleyway or any street that has men idling? Why do *I* have to be inconvenienced and change my route home because you are so fucking disrespectful to women?

Health care getting less free

2008-07-17T06:45:00.000-07:00

Many people think that Canada has free healthcare. Yes and no. Canada has universal healthcare which means we, technically, don't deny anybody the right to basic health services- but we sure do pay for it. And a recent report shows that in the last 25 years we've been paying more for it.

Our taxes are supposedly paying the cost to run this universal healthcare system, but the government has been offloading this reposnsibility for years. What does this amount to at the end of the day? "Canadians spent $452 per capita on health care in 2007, compared to $222 in 1981, in real terms" and, more importantly, it means people having less ability to maintain their health.

This problem is compounded by precarious work employment that reduces workers' ability to bargain for benefits. Instead of great health plans, workers are taken in by corporate stocks and assets in the company in which they work. In other words, workers are invested in the success of the company they work for instead of invested in the health of themselves and their family. Unionization, which has fought to secure rights and benefits for workers, is on the way out. The de-unionization is a problem caused by a few factors: we are seeing the end of the manufacturing era in the first world; we are seeing an embracing of the neoliberal "free market" society; and, due to the latter and to some degree transformed because of the former, we have a sudden stigmatization of what it means to be a union-worker. This all culminates into bad news for the regular Joe, which is upwards of 90% of us. Very few of us live off the interest of the millions of dollars in our bank account. We must work for our subsistence and shelter. and as we are paying more and more out of our pockets for the basics, like healthcare, our standard of living diminishes.

Let's fight for our rights, people. Bring back a Healthcare system that actually takes care of our health.

Outsourcing women’s wombs: Surrogacy in the third world

2008-07-10T13:39:00.000-07:00

I’m watching Oprah right now. I try not to make it a habit but I only have access to channel 9 and I like to watch TV when I prepare my lunch.

The topic is surrogacy. She is interviewing this white American couple who has been trying for three years to get pregnant. Oprah asks them the standard questions about the “alternatives”. White woman explains how she has tried and tried and it was getting expensive, they were getting demoralized blahblah. And she says, “we both come from big families [her and her husband] and we always expected we would have our own big family as well. We considered surrogacy but it was so expensive in the states….” Note that she does not address Oprah’s suggestion of adoption [another ideology-stricken episode where an adopted child “isn’t really your own].

(meh..as a woman I’d like to say that I would adopt, but I feel like we have to address why we feel that way and recognize that there is a social construction of what makes you a parent to a child)

Anyhow, so this white woman goes to India for her surrogacy. The price differential is significant. It costs about $80 000 in the united states compared to $12 000 (6000 of which is given to the Indian woman carrying the child).

Now I haven’t decided how I feel about this yet. I don’t want to condemn this before I research this a little more and understand why this practice offends me as much as it does on first glance. I feel like we’re outsourcing everything to developing countries because it is simply cheaper. Labour is cheaper. Now, quite literally, labour as in childbirth can be commodified.. women’s womb’s can be bought. I don’t knomw..like I don’t’ question this practice at all in the first world. Another woman in the Americas wants to have a surrogate from the Americas I don’t’ blink an eye. Fine- they are coming to an agreement. But say the surrogate is in INDIA, or any developing country… I don’t’ know. That rubs me the wrong way- these women are earning 6000$ for the rental of their womb..which is sort of an amazing amount in India. $6000 is something they won’t be able to make in a lifetime- and I am also keeping in consideration that the WOMAN is making this money (which is a pretty powerful distribution).

When Oprah confronts the white woman about what people will think she says, “who are they to judge..they don’t know what I’ve gone through not being able to have a child. I’m in pain because I don’t- Sangita (the Indian woman) can’t provide for her family because she is poor)- two people came together for a mutually beneficial agreement.”
At first it was a little bleeding heart statement- yes, it is painful to not be able to have your own children..I can get that. But really, should we be able to get what we want using our purchasing power or should we just deal with it? Like.. people in the first world.. we are so spoiled with everything we have and maybe the things we can’t have..we should just deal with it.

With respect to the money that goes to the Indian woman..it’s tremendous. Apparently women can have homes under their own names, the money is likely to go to benefit the woman and the way she decides to allocate it within her family. The money is important. So there is no doubt that this is helping Indian woman and this is beneficial to them… but .. I just don’t like it.

These are women’s bodies we’re buying, not just renting. The effects of having a child and giving it up is lifelong- even if it is not genetically theirs. At first I likened it a bit to prostitution. But I kind of believe in prostitution- not that it should exist, but if it IS to exist we have to decriminalize it and make it safe for women in the sex trade. I believe that if this were an equitable world women would not make the choice to be in the sex trade, but because it isn’t, women’s bodies are sold. Same thing about surrogacy. I think that if this were an economically equitable world women would not choose this for themselves.. but because they desperately need the money they do it.
I feel sour towards the ability to buy a woman’s body. In any shape or form.

What do you think? Is this exploitation? Even if it is- is it necessarily a bad thing?

David Eby will run for Vision Vancouver- my almost hero

2008-07-09T20:49:00.000-07:00

David Eby (Pivot Legal Society) will officially announce tomorrow that he will be running for council with Vision Vancouver's backing.

Tremendous considering David Eby is a local hero.
I just wish he had decided to run with COPE. (In my view he will win no matter what party is backing him- granted he'll need a first year to get more name recognition amongst those who aren't awesome enough to know the work he does)

But seeing where COPE is at now I can see why he did it.

Political Opportunity theory, a social movement theory that predicts why social action/change occurs, states that social movement actors and organizations find "windows of opportunity" in an environment or setting to make a political impact/ make political gains for a movement (see Kreisi 2007).
Couple that with Rosenthal (2000) "…the concessions that have been granted on the local and national level are not the result of any single form of pressure, but the result of what I have called "the good cop/bad cop" dynamic in which concessions are granted to a more "deserving" group to coopt, discredit, or otherwise undermine more militant actions and radical demands of "undeserving" groups" (124).

Now this works a tad differently given that Vision and COPE are the political groups and NOT the social movement groups (grassroots and otherwise) that usually lobby the government for social change. but really, the same rules apply.

COPE is being seen as "bad cop" right now and many (both in political and non-political employ) are painting the picture of COPE's unprofessionalism and general lack of cohesion. Doesn't matter whether or not that is true, because right now Vision Vancouver is doing so much of a better job being the viable image of the left (even though, in my opinion, they are not truly left).

Anyhow, David Eby. Vote for him this round. maybe he'll run as an independent one day.

he still rocks my world.

Centre for Social Justice retreat Aug 21-24

2008-07-07T13:32:00.000-07:00

The Centre for Social Justice in Toronto is holding a summer retreat for advocates and activists. I will be there. I hope to see you there.

The 2008 Social Justice Summer Retreat will be organized in partnership with the Ontario Coalition for Social Justice. It will be held from August 21-24 at Camp Arowhon in beautiful Algonquin Park - join us as we celebrate our 11th year!
The theme of this year's Retreat is 'From Poverty to Power'

11th Annual Social Justice Summer Retreat: From Poverty to Power
The theme for the 2008 Retreat is designed to capitalize on the Ontario Government’s commitment to develop a poverty reduction plan. A recent study by Statistics Canada confirms a widening gap between rich and poor over the last 25 years. The loss of good manufacturing jobs will make the situation worse. Millions of Canadians are working poor and insecure, and working longer for less. We want to encourage the whole social justice community to participate in the consultative process – so the voices of labour, students, aboriginal people, anti-poverty groups and those confronting poverty are heard loud and clear. We also need to develop strategies to engage the wider public in the process – so we can move the issue from the margins to the mainstream, and show that it will not fade away. This year’s programming will cover how we can build a movement that will hold this government accountable to deliver a significant reduction in poverty over the next 10 years, or elect a government that will deliver on that target. We will examine what a progressive poverty reduction plan would require so as to reflect the interests of working people and those who cannot find work – recognizing that everyone in Ontario has the right to live with dignity and respect. And we'll explore what other countries are doing -- noting that the countries with the lowest poverty rates offer free university education, strong trade unions, affordable housing, generous income supports and the most successful economies in the world. At the same time, we'll review the growing problem of poverty and hunger in the Southern hemisphere, and the global efforts to "make poverty history".

http://www.socialjustice.org/index.php?page=summer-retreat

What is the Social Justice Summer Retreat?
This annual event brings together people from a variety of social movements – activists from all walks of life. You, friends and family are invited to join us for a wonderful time of relaxation and renewal.

Who will be there?
Those that protest for global justice and against poverty or those fighting for safe drinking water, decent jobs, and human rights – everyone trying to make a difference, be they from inside organizations, inside politics, inside or outside the system. We welcome activists from all walks of life: everyone from the First Nations, labour, the faith community, environmentalists, low income groups, equity seeking groups or youth.

If you self-identify as someone trying to make our world a better place, please join us.
For those with children, childcare is provided for children aged 3+ during hours when there is retreat programming. Activities are also arranged for young teenagers.

What is the cost?
Registration includes accommodations in cabins, all your meals, and full access to camp facilities.
Early Bird Registration (Before July 20) - $200Regular Registration - $220Children 5-12 years - $95Children 2-4 years - $65Children 0-2 years - Free
Transportation from downtown Toronto (round trip via coach bus) - $46/passenger

3 handsome possibilities

2008-06-18T14:26:00.000-07:00

Fabula (Francis Bula) has been doing an “addictively” sensational job covering the municipal elections. Some comments:

I’ve come up with 3 handsome possibilities for November:

Possibility of a Vision-COPE alliance?
I like the sounds of that actually. I would vote for Vision’s playboy-juice man if he were endorsed by my favourite oppositional Santa Claus-looking councilor, David Cadman. As previously discussed, Vision and COPE don’t’ necessarily have to duke it out if both of them can agree to be chummy. As Fabula stated, Gregor Robertson isn’t one of the “traitors” that split COPE and therefore is baggageless.
And there are also talks of David Eby and Andrea Reimer running. I assume Andrea Reimer will be aligned with Vision… David Eby? Where would he be? I think he should be aligned with COPE because everybody would vote for David Eby just because he’s a freaking hero.

COPE runs David Cadman
I don’t know if it is definitive if Cadman is definitely not running. I think not. I think if Vision did something to really piss off COPE there would be a possibility that Cadman would run. As I said, I do not like the idea of COPE not running a candidate just because I’m afraid COPE will be diminished as a party. As I said on the babble board that called me sexist, “COPE can’t afford to be Vision’s bitch this election.”
I think if Cadman and Robertson can’t come to a friendly agreement and build some sort of alliance then Cadman has to run to keep COPE alive and well. COPE will inevitably lose, and Cadman will then lose his seat (which I don’t think he’s prepared to do) but at least COPE will still be an official party in the minds of citizens. I think people will eventually forget about COPE if COPE does not make a strong stance, or strong appearance this election.

Ladner wins
Now if COPE runs Cadman they might split the left vote and Ladner will win. But I don’t think Vision is too scared of that happening and I do not think they really should be too scared of that happening. Vision pretty much stands alone this election as a strong team. I myself am making the stance now that I will vote for Ladner. Unless Vision does something absolutely amazing, I’d like to see Ladner being called “your worship” come November. People still don’t get why I like Ladner… I just do.

Juice man squeezes out first ballot victory: Gregor Robertson wins Vision nomination

2008-06-15T21:00:00.000-07:00

So Gregor Robertson wins on the first ballot. Easily. I must say, I am surprised.
No surprise De Genova didn't have a chance though.

But I'm surprised there was a sorry turnout for Louie. I still think Louie would have been the better candidate against Ladner. Now, come election in November you have pretty much the same people running against eachother. Robertson has been called, "Peter Ladner's younger, taller, more tanned brother". Pretty much the same politics, just different parties.

I still believe Ladner will take it in November. He's got more experience and he's much more competent than our little playboy-juice man Gregor.

But how about the news of a Louie campaigner coming out to tell Francis Bula the they lost. Talk about unprofessional. That campaigner is going to be in trouble, no doubt. You don't admit defeat until it is official. Especially to media.

You can read more from Fr ancis Bula:

[Robertson] defeated two-term city councillor Raymond Louie and park-board commissioner Allan De Genova. The vote drew a record number of voters, almost 7,000 out of 13,000 members, which is almost unheard of for a civic nomination race. He won easily on the first ballot with over 3,400 votes out of 6,771.

(By the way, I wanted to find a picture of Gregor with his juice- but do you realize that there is not a single picture online of him and his Happy Planet juice? No endorsements for his OWN juice? Strange. There IS, however this picture... what the hell is it?)

Vision Vancouver prediction

2008-06-15T09:50:00.000-07:00

Raymond Louie

look at all those chinese people rallying behind him.

solid.

Discrimination in Housing

2008-06-14T10:44:00.001-07:00

Many people don't realize that a lot of people are homeless because of discriminatory housing policies. When finding my own place to live I faced discrimination. In some buildings a young student can be seen as bad because we "party all the time" and are irresponsible. In some houses they WANT a young student so they can mesh with the other roomates in the house.

But being a student really is the least of a persons problems because it is a short moment of one's life. So imagine NOT being able to secure housing because you were an immigrant, you didnt' speak English, you were black, gay, in a wheelchair, or lord knows.. not as good lookin as the other people wanting the place.

That is discrimination, my friend and it is illegal. Landlords or housing providors are not allowed to discriminate on any of those basis even though you feel they would be a better tenant/roomate due to some preferences. It is a difficult debate because we have been brainwashed to believe in PRIVATE PROPERTY and that our property is ours to deny other people entrance.

The US is really good at doing testers- having Black people answer an ad for an apartment, the landlord say "it's taken" and then have a White person answer the same ad and said that "it is still available". Canada does not do such testing. We like to assume we are more tolerant, we are less racist than the United States, but Canada just conceals it better. I DO believe that US has more extremes in racism, but at least it is all out there. In Canada we have structural racism, hidden racism, concealed in such a way that we can ignore that there is still a huge income gap between whites and non whites doiing the same work, or ethnic ghettos in our housing system.

Housing is NOT like the insurance sector. You cannot judge someone based on perceived risk. So when I was posting to sublet my apartment, I was incredibly pleased to see on Craigslist a new policy on Equal Opportunity Housing. I'm really proud of Craigslist for taking this on:

http://www.craigslist.org/about/FHA.html

When making any posting on craigslist, you must comply with section 3604(c) of the Federal Fair Housing Act. This law generally prohibits stating, in any notice or ad for the sale or rental of a dwelling, a discriminatory preference based on any of the following protected categories:

Race or Color
National Origin
Religion
Sex
Familial Status (more)
Handicap / Disability (more)

The Fair Housing Act provides additional protections, and limited exceptions, that are explained in publications from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development ("HUD") and the Department of Justice.
HUD has issued guidance on advertising, including for roommates.
State and local laws often prohibit discrimination based on other factors (e.g. sexual orientation, age, marital status, or source of income).
You may report housing discrimination to HUD at 1-800-669-9777, or to a fair housing advocate near you.
If you encounter a housing posting on craigslist that you believe violates the Fair Housing laws, please flag the posting as "prohibited".
In addition to penalties that may be applied by regulatory agencies, attempts to post discriminatory ads may be blocked and/or subjected to other remedial measures.

Spacing Magazine competition

2008-06-14T10:37:00.000-07:00

One of the unfortunate issues is the lack of youth involved in the political system. Call me crazy, but y'all babyboomers are gonna be dead one day and there isn't going to be anybody competent to take over because youth have been reduced to working for minimum wage at Starbucks (with the added bonus of getting free coffee and a caffiene addiction to Starbucks coffee for the rest of their lives).

So when an opportunity comes along to engage youth- we better take it. Spacing Mgazine's coordinator, Matt Hague, wanted to let me know they are having an urban design competition. Check it out:

DEADLINE: Monday, September 22, 2008WEB SITE: http://spacing.ca/thinktorontoFACEBOOK: http://spacing.ca/thinktoronto-facebook/PDF of POSTER: http://spacing.ca/thinktoronto/poster/thinktoronto-poster-schools.pdf
- - - - - - - - -
thinkTORONTO invites people — 35 years old or younger — with creativeideas on how to improve Toronto’s public spaces. The competition thatwill help celebrate the magazine’s 5th anniversary in December 2008.Architects, urban planners, landscape architects, designers, artistsof all disciplines, students, and the urban curious are allencouraged to submit their plans to tweak, improve, or redesignstreetscape elements and specific areas of Toronto.
thinkTORONTO seeks ideas from the next generation of city builderswho want to challenge how we view Toronto’s public realm. Thecompetition gives participants a platform to explore and experimentwith Toronto’s urban landscape and generate a dialogue amongTorontonians about creative and sustainable solutions in our sharedcommon spaces.
- - - - - - - - -
ABOUT SPACING MAGAZINESpacing focuses on the joys, obstacles, and politics of Toronto'surban landscape. Since the launch of the magazine in 2003, Spacinghas been hailed as an innovative publication that swings way aboveits weight. Spacing has changed the way the local media reports onpublic space issues and its editors and contributors are consideredamong the next leaders of Toronto. In both 2007 and 2008, Spacing wasnamed Canadian Small Magazine of the Year by the Canadian Society ofMagazine Editors; Spacing publisher Matthew Blackett was given aUrban Leadership Award by the Canadian Urban Institute in 2007; in2006 the magazine took home a gold medal in the National MagazineAward for Best Editorial Package, and in 2008 captured a silver medalin the same category. The magazine's blogs have been consistentlyvoted by numerous local publications as one of the city's best onlinemedia outlets.

-Erica Blair, Toronto

CCAP DTES and Concord Pacific?

2008-06-12T16:23:00.000-07:00

Carnegie Community Action Project (CCAP) a very worthy organization has forwarded this for dissemination:

C A R N E G I E C O M M U N I T Y A C T I O N P R O J E C T Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
For Immediate ReleaseFriday, June 13, 2008
Downtown Eastside Welcome Wagon to Visit Concord Pacific.
"There's still time for you to be a good neighbour, Terry."
This is the message that Downtown Eastside residents and their supporters will bring to the CEO of Concord Pacific at his office today. In the last few weeks, members of the Carnegie Community Action Project (CCAP), tried to get an appointment with Terry Hui, but didn't succeed. They want the owner to reconsider his application for 1/2 million dollar condos at 58 West Hastings and instead turn over the property for social housing. The group wants the site named after Darrel Mikasko, the homeless man who couldn't get into a shelter and died in a fire trying to stay warm.
"Concord made billions off the Expo lands and can afford to give a little back, especially in our neighbourhood where people are going to be pushed out because of new condo development," said Robert Bonner of CCAP.
Joe Le Blanc, a resident of Vet's Manor said Concord is "putting their condos between the Portland Social Housing Project and the Grand Union Hotel, between despair and hope. We need more hope and that means more social housing."
"It would be nice for developers to give back to the community they are making so much money off of us", said Phoenix Winter, another CCAP member from the community, who is referring to Concord's condos on Powell Street now under construction.
The welcome wagon troupe will bring in some special gifts in a basket to Terry Hui that they hope will inspire him to consider donating his land to Downtown Eastside residents in need. Among the gifts, will be a Hope in the Shadows book, 200 letters calling for social housing on the site, tickets to the premier of the film "The Way Home" about homelessness and a sample of critters that plague the Downtown Eastside.

Time: Friday, June 13 at 1:00 p.m.
Place: 1095 West Pender Street, Vancouver - meet outside front doors
Contacts: Wendy Pedersen 604-839-0379; Jean Swanson 604-729-2380

Get over your male whiteness: On political correctness

2008-06-12T12:06:00.000-07:00

I was recently invited to put my opinion down on rabble.ca, a national progressive political website. In true VancouverManifesto style I have been prohibited to post due to my language being interpreted as racist, amongst other things.

When did we become SO hypersensitive and SO politically correct? Political correctness is just an attempt to "make pretty" real issues. Political correctness is an ideology in itself- an assumption that you are doing justice and correcting wrongs by stepping around the raw words that have been used in a derogatory way in the past towards marginalized groups. Pretending that constructions of race, gender and other ideologies do not exist do not do justice to those who were/are marginalized- it conceals the fact that racISM and sexISM DO exist. Not recognizing that there is difference and that people perceive eachother with such difference (whether we like it or not) also does not do justice.

PC is just a way to "make us all equal". I do believe in equality in humanity, that every person should be treated with equal respect. But I also believe that history has not treated us in such a way. "There is nothing so unequal as treating unequal people equally." PC terms attempt to erase that groups have been terribly wronged and pretend that we all just need to clean the slate and start off fresh. Wrong. We need to recognize that there IS imbalance, history has CREATED inequity, and we need to FACE it head on and redress what we have done.

Anyways, that rant was bit beyond the scope of what I take issue with, but I am unhappy that people are so touchy and I find it offensive that people are SUCH on the defensive that they assume the worst.

Go ahead and see for yourself:
http://www.rabble.ca/babble/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic&f=7&t=002026

Good lord. White hetero males can't catch a break. It's good that I am none of the above...

you can disagree with me, but don't censor me.

LADNER wins!

2008-06-08T19:31:00.000-07:00

Ladner wins by 80 votes!
I have often been attacked for my Ladner love, but I'd like to think that this blog contributed to my boyfriend's win.

http://thevancouvermanifesto.blogspot.com/2008/03/peter-ladner-i-like-you-so-run-as.html

Blog by Francis Bula:
I don't have time to do any more, so here's my story as it will appear, more or less, in the paper tomorrow. Have to run to dinner with my family now -- yes, I DO have a life. document.write(parent.prscreen)

In a stunning turn of political events, challenger Peter Ladner has taken the mayoral nomination away from sitting Mayor Sam Sullivan.The results produced screams in the room, after a day where the voting among Non-Partisan Association members had been so close that no one was willing to make a prediction.The vote results were 1066 to 986. Park-board candidates who had supported the mayor also won among the four who were chosen out of seven candidates.

Both men were gracious to the other in their speeches."I wish I could do this without having to deliver this blow to Sam Sullivan. He has worked harder than any mayor in the city," said Ladner, a two-term councillor who made his run for the nomination without the support of another sitting councillor. "I will have no hesitation in supporting the legacy that Sam has left us."
Sullivan, acknowledging that the members had clearly indicated they wanted new leadership, also said he will support Ladner to create a united team to fight the opposition in the fall campaign."They are well-financed and well-organized," he said. "They will try to look united. I want to put the interests of the city first.

"The battle pitted Ladner, an avid runner and cyclist from an establishment Vancouver family, against the mayor, who grew up in the east side and became a quadriplegic after a ski accident.Ladner had argued that he was running for the mayoral nomination because the party had been driven to an all-time low in popularity under Sullivan's leadership. "

All the polls have said the voters want a change in the mayor's office," he said earlier in the day. "If we don't deliver that change, Vision and COPE happily will."Sullivan had argued that he has won many elections by coming from behind and he pointed to his success as the "chief fundraiser" for the city, with 3,000 units of social housing committed by the provincial government and millions of dollars in money from anti-drug and mental health programs from the federal government. Ladner started his challenge late, only announcing in March that he was going to compete for the mayoral nomination. He was also handicapped by a late start fundraising, which Sullivan had been doing almost since the day he was elected in 2005, and people's unwillingness to go come out publicly against a sitting mayor.

Turnout throughout the day was slightly lighter than for the epic Christy Clark-Sam Sullivan nomination battle in 2005, when 2,300 of the party's then 4,600 members turned out to vote.During the morning, voters were mainly Caucasian but in the afternoon, large numbers of Indo-Canadian and Chinese voters started to appear and streamed in steadily until 4 p.m.The main excitement of the day came when an Anti-Poverty Committee protester walked into the hotel alone, picked up a pitcher of Coke and dumped it on the mayor's head, saying "Here's to Civil City," according to observers.Sullivan's campaign co-chair, Stephen Rogers, hung on to her until police, who had been swarming through the hotel because of a planned APC protest, arrived.Most voters were extremely reluctant to say how they were voting, but a few did.
Hendrik Hoekema, an east-side resident, said he came out to vote for Ladner because he's known him for 30 years and "I think he'd make a much better mayor."Former mayor Philip Owen's son, Chris, came by to vote for Ladner.Sarup Mann, on the other hand, voted for Sullivan because he likes his policies around EcoDensity and tax cuts for small businesses. Mann, who came with his whole family, runs a small telecommunications business."It's important to keep our community feeling and we need small businesses. For a lot of the small businesses, the tax is really affecting them," said Mann, who also described himself as a very active federal Liberal organizer.

Ladner's team stayed focused and worked on getting voters out in any way possible throughout the day, They had 14 drivers and phoned people repeatedly throughout the day, with their campaign using political software that has also been used by U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama's campaign.At the end of the day, Ladner supporter Reg Tupper came running down the hall towards the voting room, pushing elderly Iva Bricel in her wheelchair -- part of the last push in the Ladner campaign.

Sullivan had promised that he would hold a caucus meeting Monday morning to bring everyone together to talk about how to go forward from the vote.Ladner says it all has to be worked out yet how he will manage to run a campaign for the party, while the mayor continues to hold office and get the help of political assistants.Vision Vancouver candidates, who will be finding out next Sunday who will win their three-way mayoral race, said Ladner's win means that the election will now be focused on issues rather than personalities, which they welcomed.

Neither Gregor Robertson or Raymond Louie would speculate on how Ladner's win might affect their own chances within their party. Many political observers have assumed that Robertson's appeal will be somewhat diminished if he has to run against a man who, like him, is someone who draws from both sides of the political centre, is known for promoting green initiatives, and has run a small business.

Wheelchair accessible: Vancouver 1, Toronto zero

2008-06-08T18:22:00.000-07:00

Earlier this month the Sam Sullivan had a perfect photo op for Translink’s 100% wheelchair accessible system. I don’t know that we can credit Sam Sullivan for this breakthrough in Vancouver, but I have to admit that the city is making amazing progress with respect to making physical spaces accessible to people.

Mayor Sam Sullivan said being able to get around with ease and freedom is a luxury most people don’t know they have.
“It’s amazing to (now) be able to go into any bus in the city,” he said.
“I love the new buses,” McCain added. “I love the fact that you can back in and don’t have to lock your chair. You don’t need any help.”
“(This) will get more people on the transit system.”

What I liked about his quote is that it demonstrated that the busses are accessible physically and mentally. To be disabled sucks. Other than having the bonus of getting one of those sweet motored wheelchairs and with the potential of having wheelchair races (Seinfeld- George’s fake disability), not having mobility sucks. And with the new busses “you don’t need any help.” That like.. almost brings a tear to my eye how beautiful that is. Honestly. Like, how unempowering is it to need assistance ALL the time? It’s finally nice for a change that people who need the lift can get on like everyone else. Now I’m not going to admit that I won’t get irritated when I’m in a hurry- admit it, those lifts take a shit load of time. When I’m in a hurry it’s all the wheelchairs and baby strollers who want to come onto MY bus (whoa, that was a lot of hate in one sentence- but you have to admit that DOES go through your mind every now and then). Anyhow, point is, kudos.

And to all the haters of the new bus system- let me just let you know that they only really have a couple seats short of the old busses. Everyone complains that they have fewer seats- but I totally did the seat count on the cushy blue busses and the orange busses. It just seems smaller because the seats are a lot leaner.

Anyway, this sparked my interest also because of something I read in a Toronto indie-newsflash.

Toronto, a city that pales in comparison in accessibility needs to learn a thing or two about Vancouver. Now it isn’t their fault on a lot of fronts because the city was built a lot earlier and planners and architects certainly weren’t thinking about gimps back then. Most of the houses are old New York style walk ups (something some Vancouverites wanted –relaxing the building codes to make buildings cheaper- something I’m not a fan of). If we want to BE an inclusive city, we have to DESIGN it that way as well. So when I heard this anecdote I was freaked out by how insulting this restaurant was to this patron in a wheelchair:

To the Owner of the Everest Restaurant & Lounge...

My name is Aaron Shelbourne ….

I have been to your restaurant many times. One month ago, I went to your restaurant with a friend. We had a nice meal, and at one point I had to use the washroom. It was not wheelchair accessible and I nicked the door with my wheelchair on the way out. After I had finished my meal and left the restaurant, your manager, Ms. Karma Sanchok, ran out and told my friend that we were not welcome back at Everest. She said that the restaurant was newly renovated and wheelchairs aren’t welcome because they cause damage.

Your reaction to the ‘damage’ that I allegedly caused is discriminatory and totally unacceptable for a number of reasons. First, rather than speaking to me directly, you spoke to my friend and did not make eye contact with me. Rather than expressing your concerns to me, you ignored me. This behavior on your part was unacceptable because I am a person and I make my own decisions and deserve to be treated as such.

Further, your behavior is discriminatory because you overreacted to the ‘damage’ that I allegedly caused. Your restaurant provides a public service. You can not keep people away because you would rather not incur the normal wear and tear that goes along with assistive devices such as wheelchairs, walkers or canes. An appropriate response on your part would have been to recognize and acknowledge that your restaurant bathrooms failed to accommodate my needs, rather than blame me. If you were so concerned about possible damage to your restaurant, you should have thought to include wider bathroom doors and steel doorframes when you recently renovated your restaurant. A public service such as yours must adapt to the needs of people who use wheelchairs, rather than ask people who use wheelchairs to accept the barriers that able-bodied people create.

[…]

Sincerely,
Aaron Shelbourne

-abridged letter

Everest, a trendy type place on Queen West is restaurant I have been to, by the way, and I am not impressed with their service OR food. Anyways, to end, Vancouver 1, Toronto zero.

Starbucks is taking over Toronto too

2008-06-07T18:26:00.000-07:00

The Toronto Star published something very interesting today.

It is a story about Starbucks. I think Vancouverites take our coffee shops for granted. Satrbucks doesn't often make the headlines. In Vancouver we sort of assume it will happen. Death, taxes, Starbucks. All in the same. But Toronto has a critical eye on some of the Starbucks that have gone in their downtown in the last few decades.

If you’ve ever been to Toronto you know that they have as many Tim Horton’s as we do Starbucks. I can understand the appeal. It’s cheap, open 24 hours and is a one stop shop for a snack, meal and/or coffee.

But Toronto isn’t exactly a café-culture town. It’s really a pub town, people streaming up and down the streets of Bloor, College, Queen and Richmond in their respective neighbourhood watering holes. But perhaps Toronto is trying to get some of the café culture acclaim that Vancouver and Montreal so enviously master.

There’s a bit of a history at the Starbucks in Toronto. In 1996 it opened a block away from Dooney’s Café (who was slated to close before Starbucks agreed to sublet* the property back to Graziano Marchese, Dooney’s Café owner), famous literary hang-out of some of the best lefty writers (most of whom come from Vancouver, actually). On the same intersection today (around Bloor and Bathurst) is a Second Cup and an Aroma Espresso (a smaller coffee shop but bourgeouis nevertheless. Starbucks then opened a location near Drake Hotel, known as a bohemian art and culture mecca in a revitalized art gallery district. Now Starbucks announced its new location at Queen and Bathurst, a bit of a dodgy area but a few steps away from the best yuppie gentrifiers in the city in the King West area. The beggars, looking especially sickly, still walk about in the area.

We have to remember that Starbucks, like any efficiently capitalistic big business calculates where they open. Businesses open up shop on projected earnings (i.e. income level in area, street traffic, other businesses in the area that will encourage or hinder its presence etc). So Starbucks knows a thing or two about Queen and Bathurst. It knows that the income level is going up. It knows the area is yuppifying. It knows that it has the range and concentration of amenity in the area to attract street traffic. So, move over Richard Florida and your “Creative Class” thesis. Screw the gay-index and the bohemian-index. Lets get us a Starbucks-index.

*Sublet, meaning that the land is still held by Starbucks and profits still goes to Starbucks. You just can’t win….

-Guest post submitted by Erica Blair

Housing Unaffordability

2008-06-04T11:43:00.000-07:00

Care of Michael Shapcott- A housing activist located in Toronto:

A staggering one-in-four Canadian households are in the housing affordability danger zone – paying 30% or more of their income on housing. Even more troubling, the poorest Canadian households – renters – face the worst affordability problems.
New data released today by Statistics Canada confirms that the cost of housing – rental and ownership – has been rising faster than the rate of inflation, and has been rising faster than household incomes. Full report HERE.

That translates into a nation-wide affordable housing crisis for renters and owners, which the StatsCan numbers confirm has grown worse in the five years leading up to the 2006 Census. Behind the figures is the terrible reality that millions of Canadians don’t have enough money to pay their rent, or mortgage payments, and also cover other necessities such as growing energy costs, medicine, food, transportation, clothing and other basics.

Renters feel sharpest pain
In most parts of Canada, renters have households incomes that are about half (or less) of the income of owners. The affordability crisis is biting deepest among tenants, with more than 40% of all renters trapped in the affordability squeeze. This means that the lowest-income Canadians are facing the worst affordability problems.

Growing pain for owners
More Canadian households have moved into ownership in recent years. But the latest StatsCan numbers report that affordability problems are growing faster among owners than renters. The most recent ownership affordability report from RBC Economics (March 2008) reports: “Nation-wide housing affordability deteriorated in every consecutive quarter throughout 2007 to end up at its most unaffordable level since the housing bubble peaked in 1990.” So, the ownership market is offering no relief for tenants ensnared in their own affordability woes, and has trapped a number of new owners between rapidly rising costs and stagnant incomes.

-Michael Shapcott

What does this mean for Vancouver?
Housing bubble wise we always assume that Vancouver is safe because it is so damn nice. I tend to agree. But I do realize I might be a little naive with respect to the rampant speculation.

Time and time again we have discussed how EcoDensity will not solve our affordability problem. Brent Toderian said, at best, the supply could ease the affordability problem for now. But then what? Are we to ignore that market-housing is NOT a system that will work for 25% (and rising) of our population?

Ladner and Sullivan debate

2008-05-31T13:58:00.001-07:00

News from David Eby's blog has got me all hot and bothered. Ladner-love full speed ahead in municipal debate:

In any event, the two NPA mayoral candidates will be debating on the CBC Early Edition show next Wednesday morning between 7 and 8 a.m.Over on the Vision side, they'll be holding another debate, one in which the three candidates will hopefully get a bit edgier with each other, at the SFU Harbour Centre Fletcher Theatre on Thursday, June 5 at 7:30 p.m.

I'm likely the only person in the world who identifies with the left but still is in love with Ladner. My originality precedes me.

In other Peter Ladner news, he now has a sworn enemy-blog style. http://thepeterladnerprinciple.blogspot.com/ is a smear campaign all about Ladner-hate. This confuses me- how can somebody hate Ladner so much using every entry as a chance to denouce such a charming man? I think he's secretly a Sullivan-man giving my boyfriend, Ladner, a bad name.

Shame.

The New Roof on BC Place Stadium – will it blow up in our face?

2008-05-30T13:30:00.000-07:00

Guest post by Mitch:

When I was young, my dad took me to my very first Football Game, a Grey Cup Game in fact (I think it was Edmonton vs. Toronto – but that’s neither here nor there). This game was at BC Place, recently completed. I remember the moment well as I thought that this was the biggest building in the world. It probably looked that way to a 5-year-old boy who stood no more than 3 feet high.

I still look on BC Place with fondness and despite its age, I have to applaud the idea of reconfiguring the stadium to being a retractable roof, and despite the significant costs associated with the venture, I think it’s going to be a fantastic continuation of the Vancouver skyline. The day after the roof blew out last year, I remember thinking that the sky looked somewhat barren without the distinctive white dome presiding over the downtown core.

Now, where I have problems with the new roof is associated with the timing of its replacement. I understand the circumstances (i.e., a certain world event known as the Olympics!), but the decision should have been made sooner – like 5 minutes after the blow out sooner.

Instead of a new, fantastic, beautiful roof all decked out for the Winter 2010 Olympics, we will be stuck with the marshmallow roof, which has a probability (albeit small) of, quite literally, blowing up in our faces (I just hope they can figure out the whole Olympic Flame being inside issue!). I certainly wish the government had made a commitment earlier in the process to replace the roof in advance of 2010! But alas, I’m hopeful things go as planned and in the future, we manage to avoid the problems faced by Montreal’s Olympic Stadium retractable roof (think falling ice and catastrophic collapse!).

I know that many people are against keeping BC Place at all. I cannot count the number of times I have heard people suggest that BC Place should be torn down and replaced with condos. I think I even heard that the Condo King, our own Bob Rennie, has valued the land at somewhere around 400 Million Dollars. Geographically speaking, it would be another extension to Yaletown, or perhaps it’s own new community (and I’m not necessarily saying that as a bad thing!).

The unfortunate outcome of this all is the presumed death sentence to the idea of a new stadium down in Gastown which I supported. Now, obviously, it is no longer required – particularly if the Whitecaps are going after that Major League Soccer team (I would love nothing more than a proper Vancouver FC!)

That being said, I’m heartened that BC Place is staying where it is.

Call it reflective nostalgia…

NEXT UP:

Northeast False Creek – Vancouver’s New Cultural Centre? Good or bad?

Read more about Mitch

Mitch: A rebut

2008-05-29T08:55:00.000-07:00

Mitch has begun writing for The Vancouver Manifesto and I already disagree with some points in his first post.

First and foremost, that is SOME disclosure: “I will say that I am a supporter of the Federal Liberal Party, and I am also a supporter of the Provincial Liberals”

I’m a little disappointed that my new writer has come out of the closet but, to be fair, while I’ll vote NDP through and through I don’t necessarily feel like the NDPs are saints either. They the lesser of three evils, really. Likewise, Obama is the lesser of two- let us not have any illusions that the so called “left” in our political system is left enough to change the system. The left that we have to choose from is always highly moderated. There isn’t really a left that any true progressive can really feel proud of.

Now let’s looks at the rest of this list:

• We need bars that stay open later with patios that do not close at 11
True, but let us be careful that we keep the range of activities that do NOT include drinking open. Excluding my two can-do-no-wrong cities (San Francisco and Montreal), places that have a lot of bars open late also have nothing much else to do. Which creates a city of drunks. I think activities, amenities themselves need to be more available and accessible at all hours, not only bars.

• We need to utilize our waterways more effectively for both transit and goods movement
Mitch, feel free to elaborate. Vancouver is a port city. We’re good at being a port, no?

• We need 24 hour bus service in the whole region especially south of the Fraser river.
24 hour bus, but limited service. It is true, Vancouver’s density just isn’t great enough for critical mass on public transit. Unfortunately it is sometimes a chicken or egg argument. If we build it will they come? Or do they need to come before we build? Transportation is expensive. It needs to be an appropriate transit for the amount of people there. For example, I am wholly against a rapid transit line going to UBC. Yes it is a busy street and YES we will need it eventually. But to have a heavy expensive project that will gut up the busiest street outside of downtown is ridiculous. We have other transit needs, why screw with a system that already works when there are so many other weaknesses in other areas? Just bust more B-lines along the way. As a person who has both been squished and harassed on the B-line, I still think it is the best system out there for the Broadway corridor

• We need some form of affordable housing for those of us who are trying to buy our first places.
To mirror ursa minor, “then why the hell are you damning yourself by supporting the Liberals?
We need affordable housing period. And to be frank, I’m glad that regular people are feeling the squeeze. It is about time that the middle class feel the squeeze and realize that it is not only a poor man’s problem. Our housing unaffordability is everyone’s problem and as incomes polarize and they fail to rise with the cost of living all of us get damned with the housing question. We’ve got a terrible lack of people who are fighting for affordable housing but as more middle class professionals find themselves marginalized from the housing market there is a possibility for greater mobilization.

• We need more support for growth and development of the downtown east side
I’m highly suspect of what this statement is trying or not trying to say. Growth and development real estate wise (EcoDensity style), socio-economically or both? We have to be very careful with what we do with the DTES. ANY development and gentrification will occur. No doubt we are seeing that now. I would even say any development on the FRINGE of DTES and we get gentrification. We have to be careful about changing the form and character of the area. There needs to be rehabilitation, not necessarily development. There needs to be density, not necessarily growth. We have to approach the DTES delicately.

So thank you for your contributions, Mitch. But we don’t necessarily agree. Healthy debate makes for better political decisions. TheVancouverManifesto will be posting more of Mitch soon.

Mitch writes for The Vancouver Manifesto

2008-05-26T18:45:00.000-07:00

We have a new contributor to TheVancouverManifesto. Read more about the regular contributors here

First post by Mitch:

Another Vancouver Manifesto

Well, I’ve decided to take the plunge. That’s right, I’ve decided to join my fellow planner, my fellow Vancouver, and fellow blogger in writing for The Vancouver Manifesto. So, who am I you may ask?

Well, it’s simple really. I’m a highly opinionated, 5th Generation Vancouverite, urban planner and particularly, an urban critic. I’ve personally lived in Vancouver for about 16 years, with a couple years off for graduate school back east, and 1 year of travelling and surfing ‘Down Under’. But the west was calling me home and I have made my home on the West Side of Vancouver since. I have travelled through parts of Europe, Costa Rica, Australia, Indonesia, and Japan, and am proud to say I’ve now surfed in 5 different countries (15 more to go!). I have also been blogging now for upwards of 5 years…

I am employed in the planning industry and know many of the key players in the industry. My specific interests include things such as sustainability and green infrastructure (think district energy systems and integrated energy plans). I have experience with transportation and transit planning, creating public spaces that work, and both Greenfield and Brownfield redevelopment projects. One of my many passions related to planning is the idea of planning communities and cities to protect them from the effects of natural hazards – think earthquakes here in Vancouver (and remember how tragic the events we have seen in China recently are)…

Perhaps that will be a post for another day…

I’ve been known to get on my soapbox about things that make me angry (EcoDensity as the solution to all Vancouver’s problems for example). I have also been known to espouse (some say badger) people about the things I find fascinating and great about this city (the beaches, the neighbourhoods, and the lack of freeways!)

I love what I do, BUT I am not a blind apologist for the things that could be better in Vancouver. Nor will I make excuses for stupid decisions of the politicians. I do believe that this City is great and I think it can get much much better.

• We need bars that stay open later with patios that do not close at 11;
• We need to utilize our waterways more effectively for both transit and goods movement
• We need 24 hour bus service in the whole region especially south of the Fraser river.
• We need some form of affordable housing for those of us who are trying to buy our first places.
• We need more support for growth and development of the downtown east side
• And many many more thoughts that run through my head on a regular basis…

In the interests if fair disclosure I will say that I am a supporter of the Federal Liberal Party, and I am also a supporter of the Provincial Liberals. While I do not necessarily agree with everything either party supports or brings forward, I believe that presently, both parties are the best options. Municipally – well that is another story altogether. I liked Larry Campbell, I do NOT like our current mayor or Council, and few of the candidates really excite me or inspire the passions required to move this city into the next decade post Olympics.

As I write for The Vancouver Manifesto, it should be said that I make NO apologies for my oppositions and thoughts or beliefs. I can be swayed, but only with intelligent discussion – calling me an idiot is not going to get me to change my mind.

The New Roof on BC Place Stadium – will it blow up in our face?

Or

Planners: living where they plan?

Richard Florida is comin' to town

2008-05-13T13:27:00.000-07:00

On May31- June8 UBC in Vancouver will be hosting Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences conference. Most presenters will be of the academic variety and will no doubt be spewing jargon left and right (stuff I personally love), but it is worth a look.

One of the saddest aspects of our society is our level of civic engagement. Time and time again it is the same crazies that come out to the type of lectures that inform our policy. It is so important that citizens are there to represent the peoples' voice. Policy doesn't come from nowhere- there are academics and experts whose research informs political actors. A lot of research is good and a lot of research is bad. But most importantly, a lot of good research is misinterpreted and used as justification for neoliberal policy. Subsequently, bad research and misinterpretation of good research is used to justify policy documents such as Project Civil City that takes a clear 'broken windows theory' approach (a theory that makes lay-sense, but is all correlational with no real proof or statistical evidence that physical maintenance and image of a city afffects crime rates etc).

One of the "stars" on the program is Richard Florida, one of my favourite "scholars" I enjoy critquing. No doubt he will go on his spiel again about how social capital and place is more important than ever for the young, bohemian and/or gay. His research is hotly debated. Many critical theorists are in hate with Florida for his cheap sell of correlational research. Some cautiously agree with his thesis, but most agree it is just dirty research. This is stuff you just have to see for yourself people- and expect his speech to be charismatic, one of the important ingredients for good rhetoric (but not necessarily truth).

What UBC is calling "community passes" are made available on the day of for day sessions. So if you aren't a "delegate" or "academic" or invited guest you can take advantage of the $15 community pass to see these talks. These conferences are highly enjoyable, pretentious, and full of food. So go and schmooze with people you don't care about and be a critical citizen so you can be an advocate for yourself and your community.

The City of Vancouver is my #1 fan

2008-05-06T11:33:00.000-07:00

I haven't been posting much because I've been busy doing some business out of town. Thus my numbers are dwindling (not to say there were many in the first place). One of the best things about having a website is the sort of thrill you get when your page gets a lot of hits. It's pretty neat.

So ever since I have been writing about EcoDensity, The City of Vancouver has been constantly showing on my counter. On a week when I've posted an EcoDensity thing I get about 70 hits a day from The City of Vancouver which sometimes looks like this vancouver.ca (199.175.219.1).

I know Brent Toderian is a blog-slut and likes to see what has been written about him and EcoDensity. So myabe he's the one who has been spreading my site. That's acceptable .. I guess blogs are a good way to see what's going on in public opinion. I'm a little on the fence, however about City Councillors looking at my blog..I dunno. I got this email from Suzanne Anton:

Anton, Suzanne to me
show details 2 May (4 days ago)
Reply
Hi Samantha - are you the Vancouver Manifesto Writer? Because I would love to have coffee with you and talk about EcoDensity. It's a good product - and I'd like to be able to tell you why.
Looking forward to hearing from you Suzanne Anton 604-873-7248

Why she would email me after some of the things I've said about her, I don't know. And I'm not QUITE sure where she gets the idea that I think EcoDensity is a BAD thing. I'm critical, but let's get it straight, TheVancouverManifesto is not against densifying Vancouver. I AM, however incredibly suspicious about some of these "action items" and I am suspicious as to whether or not EcoDensity will actually achieve its intended goals. TheVancouverManifesto does not need to go on a date with Suzanne Anton to be convinced that density is good. I like dense cities and Vancouver is not nearly dense enough- but they better get it right.

Anyhow, if any other blogger got this awesome message from Suzanne Anton or any other councillor I want to hear the story of your coffee date. Oh, and if other city councillors are listening, I would like a date with Peter Ladner.

Vote for me: As if voting matters in electoral politics

2008-05-02T00:26:00.000-07:00

TheVancouverManifesto is on VoterMedia.org: Media for voters, funded by voters. This is a pretty recent invention aimed at democratizing media in a few ways (put the emphasis on the right syllAbles and you'll get it). By viewing a wider range of media (i.e. instead of reading the same newspapers that are all owned by CanWest, or the shit from the "free daily" that depressed middle-aged women hand off to you at the skytrain and UBC) the voter can make a more informed decision thereby electing better leaders and better public policy.

That's all well and good, but let us bring back the discussion of electoral politics. We've got a first-pass-the-post single winner voting system that skews any sort of "voice of the people". Let's get this straight, swaths of voters "don't count" in electoral politics. Electoral politics is also why the Green party can have a ton of votes but, because they are spread out amongst different electoral boundaries, they never win a seat. Electoral politics is unfair because it ignores millions of voters and forces political parties and voters alike to play strategically. I used to generally vote Liberal just for fear of a conservative win. The only reason I now vote NDP is because the money they give to the party with each vote. Still, when there is a chance the conservatives might take it, my only option is to sitll vote Lib.

Let's think about homelessness as an electorate issue. Right now we have a shrinking middle class and income polarization. TheVancouverManifesto feels strongly that this trend will not change. Neoliberalism is violently taking over and it is no coincidence that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. As per Wallerstein's World Systems Theory, development and underdevelopment are two sides of the same coin. So as poverty grows (and the homeless count is confirming that poverty is growing), we have more people at the bottom rung. It is a well-known fact taht poor people are less likely to vote due to various combinations of disempowerment and situations that force them to be transient (not to mention the lack of a permanent address which is sooo important for easy access to the vote). And really, the poor have fewer networking skills and less ability to network thus not being able to be strategic, in any way, politically. So as TheVancouverManifesto sees it, we are coming towards a point in society where we will pretty much have a dictatorship as masses will have no voice in public policy. The people have ONE advantage: power of numbers. When you take away the power of numbers and make it meaningless within electoral politics, you take away the power of the people.

So if you really want to have a fair democracy, check out Fair Vote Canada, fighting for proportional representation, amongst other things.

All the same you should vote for TheVancouverManifesto and a number of the other very capable blogs at Vancouver VoterMedia Ranking.
=)

Collaboration for Change: On Mental Health, Addiction and Homelessness

2008-04-29T19:17:00.000-07:00

Remember Project Civil City- the best homeless hating document created? It's been a long time since it has poked it's ugly little head out. Sam Sullivan is bringing it back. with a vengeance. and if you ask me, it's just to take your eye off of the failure that is EcoDensity (*ahem* Brent Toderian saying that a completely new draft is needed and ALL the actions require change).

Sullivan has introduced "Collaboration for Change: On Mental Health, Addiction and Homelessness," a "collaborative" program to improve the provision of holistic programming targeting the overwhelming amount of crazies and druggies on Vancouver streets. Yes, there WILL be a consequence when you close down mental institutions and rehabilitation centres. Not to mention an overwhelming amount of ignorance towards the term "harm reduction" when we talk about haters of Insite and other programming that NIMBY's like to squak about. Funny enough, most of the public heard about the new project in the news, probably from here. Or you mayhave heard earlier this month from City of Vancouver press releases. TheVancouverManifesto, however, learned of this little scheme brewing up a few months ago. How, you ask? Sam Sullivan likes to "hang around rich people because rich people get things done" (care of the creepily honest performance in Citizen Sam). And while in the works Sullivan did some scmhoozing in the medical community to get support from doctors and professional-folk. How do I know this? I know many a doctor. And I WISH I had been listening more carefully when they talked about it because I remember there was actually some scandal amongst the medical community about soliciting support for Sullivan. Anyhow, I'm almost positive something dirty went on there.

but beyond that, read David Eby's post on how Pivot was shut out of the roundtable discussions. Because... Pivot, who works with the homeless and working poor daily, know absolutely nothing about homeless people with mental illness or addictions and have nothing to contribute to this collaborative initiative, right?

Damn..it worked- thinking about the stupidity of Sullivan to shut Pivot out has made me forget about EcoDensity.

Daily photo project

2008-04-25T01:38:00.000-07:00

It's been one of those days where you begin with one link and before you know it you've followed a link-trail that brings you into a fascinating world that is completely different from where you started and entirely foreign to anything you began thinking about. You tube is amazing, by the way.

It started off with this link:
(notice the youtube image embedded within the Simpson's video- genius)

And then I found out it was a parody of Noah Kalina:

The video is kind of creepy and oddly.. attractive. You can't stop looking.

I THEN found out that, although it was a completely independent idea, there were a bunch of people doing this, namely Jonathan Keller who has been doing this since he was 22 years old and, up to date, has taken a picture of himself everyday for about 10 years.

Keller's video is different, and he lines up his eyes as a focal point. It's easier to watch than the Simpson's parody and Kalina's because you are always focussing on his eyes, but it's less poetic, perhaps due to the music.

Jonathan Keller an artist and his other work can be found here. I was so fascinated by this project that I read every single one of his FAQs and spent nearly an hour reading up on the project. I highly suggest you take a moment to read them. He's quite charming and funny. (Keller's website is kind of painfully designed and difficult to navigate. You're eyes will hurt after awhile of looking at it.)

The Daily Photo Project is basically a project where they take a photo of themselves everyday. Both artists use a standard digital camera with a viewing screen so they can get the approximate same position. Both are interested in the aging process and those minute everyday differences. It's almost like one of those flip books.

Both mention that they will do this until the day they die. Keller states that the project will not be complete until he dies- until his everyday is no more. The irony is not lost on him- he will never get to see his project complete, or even be able to complete the project himself.

I'm fascinated by this project. When I saw the first picture I was thinking, "huh.. just a normal guy." But as the video progressed I really focussed in and it was almost intoxicating. And then, interestingly enough, I found myself really attracted to him (both Keller and Kalina). At the end I thought to myself, "huh..this is a really good looking guy." I've dissected what I experienced.

You know when you first meet somebody and they aren't all that attractive and you're just indifferent? And then you get to know them, spend a lot of time with them and you begin to think that they are nice lookin' people? Even my friends- I can't admit any of my friends are unnattractive because I know them and they are just awesome people. Over time, when you know somebody, looks become less at the forefront of how you see them. If that makes any sense. I think the same thing happened here. Even though I don't know these guys, I felt like I knew them because I was watching them, photos of them over years.. and it felt kind of like I was taken on that journey with them and I have known them for that long. It's a strange sensation. Watch the videos and tell me what you think.

It is an incredible project nonetheless.

David Eby et al. rocks my world.

2008-04-21T00:00:00.000-07:00

David Eby et al. rocks my world.

On April 13th, the Pivot Legal Society, the Carnegie Community Action Project and the Impact of the Olympics on Community Coalition (IOCC), filed an official complaint to the United Nations’ Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, citing that Canada, the Province of British Columbia, and the City of Vancouver are in violation of Article 11(1) of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), of which Canada is a signatory. There’s no place like home. In a developed, industrious country such as Canada, there’s no place for homelessness.

Documentation and details of official complaint can be found on the noplacelikehomevancouver.org website. THIS is why these small organizations need our donations and support. A little seed money goes a long way for non-profits and community groups.

Vancouver has some of the best housing activists (maybe because we have the worst problems). but I'm in love with all of them, which I will call "Eby et al." for short.
Coalition of Pivot, IOCC and CCAP are coming together to launch a formal complaint against the disgrace that is the DTES.

"But i'm not poor, or a druggie, or Native, or ______fill in the blank with your own stereotype____"

Well the problem you SEE is the tip of the iceburg, my friends. As unaffordability rises it's your ass on the street. The civility of our society is reflective of how we treat our citizens who are most at-risk (somebody awesome said that....anybody got a name?) The current disgusting state of non-market housing is everybody's problem. And if you really think your financially secure enough to be outta the hole than read this.

GroundSwell

2008-04-12T14:21:00.000-07:00

Friends, please take a look at The Vanity Press: Why the American left needs intellectuals
Good preface on a multi-post series.
Try to throw yourself into the discussion. It's a thought provoking post.

I'm busy starting up The Toronto Manifesto right now, but check back on a series I'll be writing about class consciousness.

Good art stirs emotion: Vargas' starving dog

2008-04-10T13:35:00.000-07:00

In 2007 Guillermo Vargas (aka Habacuc) illegedly starved a dog to death in the name of art. He found a sickly dog on the streets of Managua, Nicaragua and tied it to a short leash in the corner of a gallery. Across the room was a kettle of food, left inaccessible. The dog slowly died of hunger and thirst. Vargas is going to represent Costa Rica in the Bienal Cenroamericana Honduras 2008. There is currently a petition.

You can watch the starving dog, anti-Vargas, video in Spanish (notice the title of the work is “eres lo que lees” which means “you are what you read” is spelled out in dog food). One picture in the video also shows a full gallery of people who pay no attention to the starving dog (I don’t know if that was a staged photo).

Good art stirs emotion. It doesn’t have to be “beautiful”. It doesn’t have to be tasteful. Good art will stir emotion. I actually think this was a powerful form of art. Yes it was distasteful, yes it was animal cruelty, yes it was just plain disgusting. But it was powerful. Think about what it represents. Everyday there are starving sickly people, children. The numbers of those in poverty are in the millions. The number of those in poverty in our own back yard are in the thousands. And those injustices go ignored everyday. And believe me, they aren’t starving because there isn’t enough food, or there aren’t enough resources, etc- there is in no way “overpopulation”. People are dying because of first world selfishness (discussion that is best saved for another post). In short, we have the ability to save these people, we just aren’t. So when Vargas leashes a starving dog, places a kettle of food across the room, and fills the room with apathetic people, I have to admit that this is quie a poignant image. And yes, I would call that art.

Living first, with furniture

2008-04-09T23:59:00.000-07:00

Vancouver has transformed itself dramatically ever since the 1991 Central Area Plan that aimed at revitalizing Vancouver’s downtown core. During the unexpected 80s recession, Vancouver planners decided that it was going to be people that reinvigorated Vancouver streets to revive business. In 2008 it is obvious the “Living First” strategy has worked. Starting with Concord Pacific development, luxury condominiums now spread like wildfire along Vancouver’s downtown streets. The sounds of construction are unavoidable as you walk down newly landscaped streets that are waiting for the designer billboards into reality.

But just because you build it does it mean they will come? In short, yes. Vancouver is too spectacularly beautiful to not have people vying for her land. The single most obvious indicator that these luxurious shells of condomoniums are also luxurious on the inside is the sudden proliferation of furniture stores like Yaletown Sofa. I’ve been seeing these types of stores spring up everywhere downtown. Half a dozen of these luxury furnishing stores sit in or surround the downtown.

Furniture stores in the downtown core signals a boom in successful luxury living. Downtown commercial land is expensive, and these stores would not choose to pop up without knowing there is a strong customer base in the area. Yaletown Sofa smells a niche market. A rich niche market that needs furniture that is specially designed to look great in smaller condominium spaces. Furnishing stores are, in fact a pretty safe way to tell if a housing market is booming. Afterall, Martha Stewart’s contract with Macey’s went bust in the midst of the U.S. suprime crisis. Who is going to spend money on Martha Stewart furnishings if they can’t even afford to make mortgage payments into their home? Home furnishing stores and the housing market are directly related. Stores like Yaletown Sofa know it and are, quite literally, banking on it.

Promising Organizations Series II: Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)

2008-04-07T00:01:00.000-07:00

Students for a Democratic Society, UBC Chapter, (SDS) is “open collective of students inspired by the movement from the U.S. of the 60s/70s, Students For a Democratic Society.”

Their campaigns include freeing public space, Aboriginal rights, housing affordability and the democratization of UBC governance. Most recently, they staged opposition in front of the Main Street Vancouver Police Department against holding the 20 people who were arrested at the Grassy Knoll protest (Trek Park; “KnollAid”). They also organize (although I didn’t realize it until looking at their site just now) an awesome series of political films called “Cinema Politica” (a free film series that goes on in a lot of cities at major universities). TheVancouverManifesto is a personal fan of the Cinema Politica series.

The new SDS is a throwback to the 60s and 70s rights movements, most notably the Free Speech Movement. TheVancouverManifesto has a soft spot for Rights Movements and, especially, the Rights Movements in Berkeley, San Francisco Bay Area. It’s sort of a romantic time when the little guys were being trampled on and there was this great force to raise shit and do something about it. Rights Movements are particularly touching to me because they are so basic and universal. They are so undeniable and it is a heartwrenching struggle. Rights Movements go even deeper than class-based movements. And TheVancouverManifesto loves class-based protest, but Rights Movements are even more basic than class. Rights get at the core of what it means to be a member of society, a citizen, and a person. It is seriously invigorating to fight the fight.

But that fight has been won. At least in the first world. Rights are more a function of systemic and social kinks rather than law-bound oppression or deep seated defenses of inequality. In the first world the issue should be about class (a fight that is failing, for reasons I will bring up in an upcoming post). Where there were thousands fighting the good fight, now there are mere dozens. It’s sad to see the fight die, but it died for a reason. The issue has been addressed. No, it hasn’t been hidden or occluded- the protest is dead because the issue is dead.

But I like the jeery nature of the SDS and because seeing them in action is reminscent of a time that I wish I had seen, I have to promote this group. It’s actually quite funny because members of the SDS look like members of the SDS. White, middle class made up to be scruffy, angry anarchist haircut (you know what I mean). But it really is the privileged who get to protest and be on the frontlines. Mainly because the real people who really require the benefits of protest are too busy working to get by and/or so marginalized that they can’t take part.

So, in short, hoorah the middle class white people who have the time and privileged position to protest for those who don’t have time or access to do it themselves. You fool yourself by pretending you know what oppression is like, but at least you’re heart is in the right place. I like you, Students for a Democratic Society, if only because you remind me of the good fight.

Read the rest of the Promising organizations series: http://thevancouvermanifesto.blogspot.com/2008/03/promising-organizations-series-roak.html

UBC grassy knoll protest: Where did the activism go?

2008-04-06T00:53:00.000-07:00

On April 4th a protest was held at the grassy knoll at UBC. The grassy knoll is undergoing redevelopment; the plan for Trek Park (affectionately called the grassy knoll) is a new transit loop that would effectively level and remove the grassy hill UBC students love to sit upon on the rare sunny day.

The protest started with live bands and good times. A bon fire was then lit in the centre concrete area and the brigade was called to hose it down. Protesters were quite fond of the festive fire and attempted to step on the hose to stop the extinguishing of potentially a symbol of the firey spirit that is Grassy Knoll protest.

One woman, who was stepping on the hose, who news is calling “Stef” was arrested:

"(the woman) was grabbed by an RCMP officer and thrown to the ground, pinned, and handcuffed. Her face was literally shoved in a puddle of mud while an RCMP officer sat on top of her," the release said, describing it as an "uncalled act of police aggression."

A small army of 25 students that grew to a whopping 35 created a human chain around the police car that detained the rabble-rouser “Stef”. 19 more students were arrested.

There is a pretty thorough play-by-play at the UBC Insider with links to videos and all that jazz.

The CTV report interviewed a guy from The Ubyssey (UBC’s horribly named popular news source). He claimed that there is problems with the RCMP: “the RCMP don’t understand how university students protest” (try reading that in a dinky sort of voice).

So my question is, where the activism at these days? I assume the human chain idea was reminiscent of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement sit in, except it was short of approximately 3000 people. It was a nice gesture for the 35 odd people to “swarm” the car and sit around it in peaceful protest but really, if the police can arrest you, they will.

What I’m getting at, rather poorly, is that activism is pretty weak nowadays. You know why? There’s nothing good to protest. Yeah, I said it. We live in Canada. It’s pretty nice here. Even the shit I complain about on this blog is pretty much nothing compared to the Rights Movements of the 60s-70s. Really, grassy knoll? Weak. Don’t get me wrong, I love the grassy knoll and I don’t want it to be mowed over with concrete, but am I going to participate in a human chain and then get arrested over it? I don’t think so- I’ve got better things to do. Mainly binge drinking at some dive bar on a Friday night.

I think of myself as rather progressive and I enjoy the lefty stuff just as much as the next radical. So I seriously sit and WAIT for something that I can CARE about so that I can get my pitchfork and torch and start a ruckus. But there is seriously nothing I care so deeply about that I can protest. I even sometimes WISH I could go back in time so there was something worth fighting for.
Iraq you say? And how about that Amnesty International stuff? Yeah, I care. I care enough to give money to their causes. Not enough to participate in them. I’m not quite a “global citizen” in that sense and I suspect that most aren’t. As much as I care about human rights, I really only feel like doing things about MY human rights or those directly around me. I like.. feel bad and sad for international far- away causes and I DO have an intellectual realization that globalization damns us all (in such a way that my consumer preferences is probably damning that kid in the third world). But “the man” has effectively done his job in putting up the national citizenship barriers such that I really only care about “my own people”.

Selfish? Damn straight. But who are you to judge me when it was society who brought me up to only care about myself?

Thank you, Trevor Linden

2008-04-05T23:46:00.001-07:00

SIGN THE PETITION FOR TREVOR LINDEN DAY, JULY 16TH