A week after Katrina hit New Orleans, Federal Government officials and private relief organizations were still discussing how to send aid to the area. ACORN, which had been organizing low-income and working class residents in the city since the 1978, had already moved into action.

Banks were giving their middle-class, mostly white customers ninety days or more to make their payments, but borrowers who had subprime, high-interest loans (like many black homeowners in the Lower Ninth Ward) were given only one month. Three weeks after the storm devastated the city, ACORN released a report, "How the sub prime mortgage industry is sandbagging Katrina-affected homeowners," to expose the industry's double standard. After the media publicized the report, ACORN—along with labor unions and consumer groups—demanded meetings with the banks and sub prime lenders and successfully negotiated plans to prevent foreclosures for dozens of homeowners.

With vast parts of the city's low-income neighborhoods devastated, evacuees, many with just the clothes on their backs, fled to 44 different states, but had no way to know the physical and financial condition of their homes and neighborhoods. Glued to the television news, as well as Google maps, cell phones, and newspapers, they tried to discover how much water had flooded their bedrooms and when they could return.

ACORN’s New Orleans office was in disarray, but with chapters in 100 cities across the country, its member’s homes in Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, Little Rock, Atlanta, Birmingham, and as far away as Seattle, Vancouver, and New York become refuges for the Katrina diaspora.

From temporary headquarters in Baton Rouge, ACORN sent text messages to members with cell phones and quickly received 200 replies. Joe Stafford, twenty-five, a member from the Uptown New Orleans chapter, whose father had died in the floodwaters, fled to Houston with his girlfriend and their two children, ages ten months and two years. They were staying at a two-bedroom apartment with four other families when he received a message from ACORN organizer Steve Bradberry offering relocation aid. Stafford messaged back: “I watched my father die . . . and had to leave his body behind. I don’t know where my mother is either . . . I think she got left in New Orleans. I don’t think she left the house, she loved that house, wouldn’t leave it. ACORN helped her get that house. That’s how we joined ACORN, by getting a house.” In a few days he and his family were safely housed with Houston ACORN member Tarsha Jackson.

To plan the city's recovery effort, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin asked some of the region's business, real estate, and legal powerbrokers to form a blue-ribbon task force to make recommendations. The task force, which excluded community groups, emerged with a plan to shrink the city’s population sacrificing the hardest hit neighborhoods to protect upscale areas from future flooding. The plans resembled the 1960s federal urban renewal program, which bulldozed many low-income areas in cities across the country to make room for luxury apartments, office towers, convention centers, highways, and sports complexes. The plan called for restoring its tourist attractions—the port, the hotels, the French Quarter, the Garden District, and the Superdome—but paid little attention to the plight of the poor and working class residents, many of them scattered in cities hours away.

Just as many neighborhood activists had mobilized in the 1960s and 1970s to thwart the urban renewal bulldozer, ACORN launched a plan to save these communities by organizing residents to speak out on their own behalf.

After Nagin announced that the city would demolish 50,000 homes in the low-lying areas, ACORN plastered " NO BULLDOZING" signs on homes, trees, and broken fences all over the Lower Ninth Ward. At one point, ACORN activists chased off a backhoe crew preparing to demolish a home.
ACORN also sued the city to stop the demolition, and in January 2006, it won a court settlement requiring that homeowners be notified and given the opportunity to appeal before any action is taken.

ACORN protests pushed officials from FEMA to act when they refused to turn on the electricity so the homeowners could begin to fix their homes. ACORN’s members lobbied the Small Business Administration to provide money for loans to help owners reopen restaurants and stores.

Beginning in December, ACORN crews and volunteers from across the country began working day and night to repair the homes of families in the threatened areas. ACORN's crews tore down moldy drywall, ripped up flooring, and carted ruined possessions to the curb, and put blue tarping on roofs to prevent further water damage making the houses ready for rebuilding. Relying on volunteers and private funding, ACORN's clean-up/house-gutting program saved more that 1,500 homes.

President Bush had tried to rescind the federal law requiring union-level wages on government-funded rebuilding projects, but ACORN joined with the AFL-CIO and the NAACP to pressure Congress and successfully overturned that decision. The same coalition lobbied local and national officials to make sure that government-funded contractors hired local residents on construction jobs.

Evacuees with low-paying jobs were eligible for the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), a federal program that provides an income supplement to low-wage workers—from a few hundred dollars to $4,000 a year—to help lift them out of poverty. To obtain the benefit, however, people have to know about the credit, and file a tax form. In February 2006, with funding from the William J. Clinton Foundation, ACORN reached out to Katrina survivors in ten southern cities to provided on-the-spot tax preparation and helped direct displaced residents to other much needed federal and state benefits programs for Katrina survivors.

ACORN sued to ensure that New Orleans' displaced, largely black population would have access to out-of-state polling places, especially in Atlanta and Houston, for the New Orleans’ municipal elections in April and May 2006. After a federal judge rejected ACORN’s demand for satellite voting stations outside New Orleans, ACORN’s organizers (along with other groups, like the Metropolitan Organization, a local the Industrial Areas Foundation affiliate) registered over 20,000 absentee voters helping to elect City Council members sympathetic to ACORN’s agenda. This helped to elect City Council members sympathetic to ACORN’s agenda.

Within three months after the storm, ACORN formed the ACORN Katrina Survivors Association (AKSA), the only national grassroots group that represented the evacuees. AKSA drafted a platform and sent delegations of members to Baton Rouge and Washington to demand bolder and quicker action.

They held public protests and press conferences and engaged in regular negotiations with FEMA officials to ensure that the agency provide disaster housing and other assistance to displaced survivors. Mixing confrontation and collaboration, ACORN's tactics only sometimes proved effective against a slow moving, seemingly uncaring bureaucracy.

ACORN brought together experts—including planners, architects, and engineers from New York’s Pratt Institute, LSU, and Cornell, as well as environmentalists, lawyers, and housing developers, to forge an alternative recovery plan to the city’s powerbrokers. Working with the AKSA, and their allies, they inventoried the Ninth Ward’s businesses, public buildings and parks, schools and social agencies, presented their plans at an unending number of official meetings, but if implemented would give families the opportunity to return home to affordable housing, living wage jobs, and good schools.

ACORN’s pressure, protest and planning work resulted in the city designating its group the city’s official neighborhood-planning team for the Lower Ninth and New Orleans East, two of the poorest neighborhoods and helped implement the plans, including building the first new homes in the Lower Ninth.

Since the 2008 presidential elections, ACORN was hit with another disaster-- a ferocious attack by the Republican Party, Fox News and their business allies. It included false accusations of “voter fraud” and an assault orchestrated by right-wing entrepreneur Andrew Breibart. Using the same tactics to he used to try to defame Shirley Sherrod, Breitbart posted doctored videos on his Big Government website. The infamous doctored "pimp and prostitute" videos appeared to entrap several ACORN staffers in providing advice to promote prostitution. This was a storm ACORN couldn’t weather. The controversy, reported widely and often mistakenly not only by Fox News, but the New York Times and other mainstream media, led many of ACORN’s one-time allies among funders and Democrats to abandon the group. Although ACORN was subsequently exonerated of any wrongdoing, it was too late. All of ACORN’s local chapters closed their doors.

ACORN was dismantled but its legacy—in New Orleans and elsewhere—continues. One group, called A Community Voice, led by former ACORN leaders Vanessa Gueringer and Gwen Adams, continues ACORN’s mission in New Orleans, regularly confronting local officials over issues like policing and the rebuilding of the Ninth Ward. “We must fight for our $91.4 million that the city got for shuttered schools in our community and spent elsewhere,” said Gueringer at a recent community meeting. “We can't afford to let our children down. They deserve schools in our community that they can attend. It is just wrong. We must continue to fight,” she added. The group is one of at least a dozen former ACORN affiliates that are now independent—but continuing the work of organizing the working poor for power in cities across the country.

A similar but shorter version of this appeared in this weeks Nation. Both are based on two chapters of John Atlas’s new book Seeds of Change, The Story of ACORN, America’s Most Controversial Antipoverty Community Organizing Group, Vanderbilt University Press. Available at Amazon and Vanderbilt University Press

It's called the Kalamazoo Promise and it is funded entirely and in perpetuity by private, anonymous donors. Their goal - to send every school-aged child attending Kalamazoo Public Schools to community college, college or a university in the state of Michigan.

Many observers called it 'groundbreaking', 'a bold new experiment', and 'a model for America'. I call it a 'no-brainier'.

Ahhh...finally a little down time this week. The summer program is over and we are ramping up for our After-School programs. No light task, but it does allow for a slight reprieve.

To allow me to procrastinate the planning I need to do for the Education Department training week and ensure I'll be working under a tight deadline for no reason, I decided to change offices. It's a bigger office with more windows and more wall space. I can get all of the papers off of the floor and organize a little better.

As with all moving jobs, it allowed me to sift through stuff, throwing away the pointless, old stuff and discovering treasures I had forgotten about long ago. Some of the treasures were photos I'd enlarged or printed on regular paper and stashed away until I could find frames or reasons to use them. Now is that time.

After a few days of cleaning, sifting, and moving furniture, I began to hang photos. I found some frames that had been donated... but others were hung simply with "tacky" directly on the wall. Once I completed the move and had all of the photos hung, I looked around and realized the framing definitely gave it a little "umph," but it wasn't the frames that I was going for when I printed the pictures. It's the meaning behind each one.

In recent weeks, there has been a controversy in New York City involving a Muslim center that is a few blocks from where the Twin Towers once were. This controversy highlights the misperceptions that many people in this country have about Muslims. Bob Hooper, a regular blogger in Everyday Citizen, wrote an informative blog about the prejudice and anger among certain groups of Christians towards mosques in various parts of the country. In a Jasper the Cat cartoon that I did last December, I wrote about the various things that I learned about Muslims in America. From what I learned, I believe that most Muslim Americans are patriotic and just as concerned about extremists as their fellow Americans. In this blog, I write of more things that I learned in these past few weeks.

Here is topic that is seldom discussed by adults, and which, in my opinion, begs discussion and clarification. A dictionary might go on for half a page, but I will submit what I believe is a very simple and quite adequate definition. Lying is knowingly representing to another, or to others, as a fact or truth, something the speaker or writer knows to be false. This is not the same thing as expressing an opinion, however mistaken that opinion might be. Now we are ready for step two.

We are taught as children by parents, teachers, pastors, and other influential adults that lying is wrong – even a sin. Distinctions are made between harmful lies and “white” lies (those that are deemed to be harmless or even beneficial in intent). Adults lie for the same reasons children lie (to avoid consequences for something they have done, to get out of corners they have gotten themselves into, to attain something they want, to make someone else feel better). Sometimes business persons lie for business advantage (to increase revenue, to conceal from the customer that they themselves have been in some way remiss, or simply because they think the customer is a fool and won’t know the difference). There are two very good reasons that rational adults avoid lying. The first is that most rational adults know that lying is wrong and that it weakens the fabric of society. The second is that, if they make practice of lying, they will become known as liars, and no one will trust them on matters large or small.

The Cordoba House could have been and still could be a powerful healing force for good, an educational tool, and a wonderful symbol of tolerance and inclusion of true American values. It won't happen. If it goes forward, the Cordoba House will become a target of hate-mongers instead of a symbol of peace. It will be defaced and vandalized, and the media will rush to cover the incidents while asking, "Was this a good idea?" Should they move somewhere less offensive, say, Tennessee or Kentucky or California? -- John Cory, Reader Supported News. Aug. 21, 2010   

Former Republican U.S. Senator from Wyoming, Alan Simpson, is a co-chair of President Obama's recently formed bipartisan commission tasked with producing ideas to reduce the government's long term deficit. The other day he responded to a critic by asserting that the American people overuse Social Security claiming that the program is a milk cow with 310 million tits.

While I disagree with Simpson's "analysis" I believe it would be counterproductive to force him to resign. Surprisingly, some Republican leaders (while not having the courage to actually vote for a congressional commission with the same focus even after having signed on as co-sponsors) have declined to prejudge the outcome of the process.

There is still a long road to be traveled in actually getting deficit cutting legislation before the Congress but those liberals (such as Keith Olbermann, whom I admire) who want him to resign are wrong to suggest that future Social Security obligations don't impact the long-term deficit. Social Security "reform" should be one of the topics that the Commission make a part of its recommendation.

Dr. Laura Schlesinger quit her radio show this week to regain her First Amendment rights. After repeatedly using an extremely offensive, racist word on the air, Dr. Laura wants to be able to say what she wants, where she wants, how she wants, why she wants and more.

To paraphrase another (former) public figure, we won’t be able to kick Dr. Laura around anymore. She is taking her ball, and going home. Instead of telling her mommy to tell our mommy; however, Dr. Laura told Larry King.

I am glad to hear that President is taking recess time of his own, away from the interruptions of usual family affairs and politics. I wish him to recharge himself with passion, vigor and energy during this vacation to emerge with the clear view of priorities of political and 2010/2012 election issues and what is most important for this country and him.

I sincerely wish to see him succeed in his mission. As an extremely meager christian who barely follows the basic christian rules but trust myself as a right-minded human being and my pure intention for him and this country, I sincerely believe that there is a reason why God appointed him as a Head of this country at this point of time. I wish him to achieve, accomplish the purposes of his existence, his mission that God assigned to him.

And I applaud his handling of following: “….but shortly after the president arrived, he announced a series of recess appointments. He filled four diplomatic and agency jobs under a temporary authority he gains while Congress is on recess, and he blamed Republicans for forcing him to bypass the normal confirmation process.”

Those of us who take jobs as teachers, educators, and social workers know what we're getting into when we sign up for the degree and the job. We sign on to higher salaries than people without an education, but lower than most degreed people make. But, for the most part, making the big bucks is not our intent.

In fact, the longer I'm in education, the more my job becomes a day-by-day battle to ensure children are receiving the best education possible with the resources we are given and the systems we are working against.

Last week President Obama said that Muslims have a Constitutional right to build an Islamic Studies center near Ground Zero. The next day he said that he did not endorse the "wisdom" of their choice to build it there. There is nothing hard to understand in, or unreasonable about believing, both of his statements. Yet fools, and the majority of our mainstream media pundits, think otherwise. They detect a contradiction, or at least a backtracking, in his statements.

Non-fools know that having a right to do something does not mean that it is wise to do it. I have a right to quit my job; but it would be unwise for me to do so since I like my job better than any other that I am likely to get in this economy. What's so hard to understand about that? Nothing. But the mainstream media pundits either do not understand it, or they think that the American people are too stupid to understand it. My guess is the latter.

Recently on these pages, I reviewed Tunes of Glory, 1960, directed by Ronald Neame, the fictional screenplay by James Kennaway based loosely on the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. A few weeks ago, a fellow member of Clan MacLeod, who had read my review of Tunes of Glory, called my attention to another film involving the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. I obtained To End All Wars from Netflix, watched it, mulled it over, checked a few things, and decided that it was worthy of a review.

Throughout, I was in a "compare and contrast” mode regarding this film and David Lean's 1957 epic, "Bridge on the River Kwai" (inspired by the same Japanese military railroad construction project through Thailand, utilizing Allied prisoners-of-war). My impression, despite Lean's film being both an epic and a classic, was that this film, To End All Wars, was most likely more historically accurate, and that it certainly contained more depth, more realistic ambiguity, and more complexity (appropriately reflecting a very complex social and cultural situation).

In the last two columns, I have risked irritating any I may have missed, by tangling with American perceptions and practices of Christianity. One internet reader said I had missed the point:

"This nation was and is founded on fundmental chrisian [sic] beliefs and ideals. The facts [Mr. Hooper] lays out that what is seen in behavior is different than the ideal......well that is the nature of the world. We all, including the writer, voice and truely [sic] believe in ideals, but our nature is to fall vicitim [sic] to our base drives and narcissistic deceptions."

Our founding document is the Constitution. It is designedly and intentionally secular. It is godless -- not in the sense that it is anti-Christian, or anti-religion, but that it is wisely neutral.

We Americans are free to be as religious or agnostic or atheist as our individual consciences dictate. None of our varied positions on the supernatural is to be favored by government. At least, that's how it stands today. The Christian right wants it changed. That debate is both contemporary and historical. It is perpetual and it is important. Thus far, thank God, theocrats have lost.

"He who dares not offend cannot be honest." -- Thomas Paine, 1737-1809

A self-described devout Roman Catholic, Miller accepts Darwinian evolution as fact, including what fundamentalists call macro-evolution -- the process by which different species originate. Miller sees no conflict with religion, and wonders aloud why any reasonable person would.

After the lecture, Miller invited questions and comments. Pressed to explain how he reconciles religion with science, Miller said he envisions reality as two concentric spheres -- an inner one where rational science prevails, and an outer one from which the inner originates. Miller believes God created the inner sphere, which exists at God's pleasure. That sounds like Deism to me. Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine and other Enlightenment rationalists among our founders would nod approvingly.

I’m not one of those people who goes around saying, “I never watch TV,” because I do watch TV, I seldom watch anything serious, and I enjoy what I watch. I don’t watch during the day and during the commercials I usually mute the sound and read a book or take care of some task that can be completed in a short period of time. This means, of course, that I miss a lot of the obnoxious ad matter that comes across the small screen. Over the years, though, I have paid attention to a few of the clever ads, such as the old Volkswagen ad that featured a young Dustin Hoffman showing the charisma that would develop fully in The Graduate. I loved that commercial. We had driven VWs long before Dustin Hoffman came along, and we drove them until the kids got too big to fit in the small back seat. So it wasn’t because of the ad that we bought VWs. We watched the ads because we liked VWs and we liked Dustin Hoffman.

For the last year, we have partnered with The Gleaning Network of Texas to create an After-School Academy Learning Garden.

We started the garden after receiving approval from the Dallas Housing Authority to use a fenced in plot of land behind the After-School Academy. We were given approval in June of last year.

If you know anything about Texas soil, you know June is not the smartest month to start a garden. But, with the perseverance of Susie Marshall, Executive Director of The Gleaning Network, the garden was under way.

It has taken some time for the kids to get used to the garden. But they have taken ownership of the garden and often beg to go water, dig, look at the worms, or "cook" the compost.

When most people hear the name "Hugh Hefner" nobody really associates him with Women's rights, let alone civil rights. But, According to Celebrity Cafe, "Brigitte Berman’s new documentary, Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel, explores a part of Hefner’s life most people are not familiar with, according to Fox News."

As a child, Hugh Hefner was raised in a "strict" Methodist household, where he was a democrat in a conservative republican home.

Hefner said Playboy was part of the sexual revolution that benefited women. He said the revolution gave both sexes more freedom in the bedroom and everywhere else. It helped change the situation of women being beholden to men.

Hugh Hefner, not everyone's favorite person, but a women's rights advocate none the less, created a organization that made sure women had the right to choose, but many people do not know of his foundations efforts.

I love soda.  That should be no such a big surprise if you saw my previous post where I admitted to loving junk food.  I love science.  And you know I loves Science Blogging.  But if I had known my little affair of junk food and science and social media would end up in the mess now regarded as #PepsiGate/#SbFail, I would have shunned the tasty but not-so-healthy beverage long ago.  You see, Cola has shattered my science blogging world.

Frankly, I'm curious about what Christianity is, and isn't.

In a previous column, I outed the icon of capitalism, Ayn Rand -- an atheist who not only preached self above others but saw Christianity as "the best kindergarten of communism possible." And, I relayed Glenn Beck's companion advice that if your church advocates social or economic justice, you should "leave that church."

There's a disturbing resonance between Rand and Beck and the paranoid, angry, militaristic, flaggity-braggity, gun-toting right -- a good many of whom claim Christianity. Frankly, I think they're giving Jesus -- as well as the Republican Party -- a bad name, Also frankly, to use a religious term, they scare hell out of me. I am reminded of Sinclair Lewis's book It can't happen here. In 1935 Lewis warned, "When fascism comes to America, it will come wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross." And an AK-47?

Maybe I'm wrong, but I see a disconnect today from the vital and necessary role of Christianity in not just advocating but struggling for social and economic justice. And so I began to wonder: is this country really as Christian as we hear? What is Christianity, that word we bandy about?