Monday, July 31, 2006

Changing Social Change

In the article Social Justice Philanthropy (pdf), Aileen Shaw of the Synergos Institute (a global philanthropic marketing firm on Madison Avenue) attempts to seize control of the definition of this enterprise by relegating it to the paternalistic practices from which it purports to be breaking the chains. Practices like leadership indoctrination and the focus on competitive, issue-centric advocacy that view social change as a public relations challenge ensure that no fundamental social change will happen, which is, of course, the reason the ultra-rich hire advertising experts in the first place.

Rhetoric or reality--you decide.

Holding On and Letting Go

Reading through the Funding Exchange alternative philanthropy link I think it might be an opportune time for them to be approached by a peer with a vision for the next century, one that extends the community empowerment they began 27 years ago by relinquishing a degree of control still exercised by conventional philanthropy. Given the extent of our present social disintegration, perhaps they might now be willing to go all the way.

Sunday, July 30, 2006

Strategy and Tactics

Those of us with political experience know that things are rarely what they seem; hence the insistence on investigative research applicable to popular education in turn useful for community organizing and action on vital social issues.

There is of course a place for strategic reflection, but only after intervening in social conflict. While you're in the thick of battle, tactical considerations take precedence, which is why the caliber of research is so important. If your initial estimate of the situation is wrong, then you'll either fail to convince others, wrongly persuade them to follow you into folly, or suffer disastrous defeat.

Research can be gathered fairly quickly with adequate resources; education and organizing are painstakingly slow processes, but worth the effort. One can build an organization without them, but not a social movement.

Tuesday, July 11, 2006

Putting Things Right

What I hope to make apparent on this weblog is that while public demonstrations and legal proceedings might be necessary, they are insufficient tools for reining in social and political misbehavior by the Far Right. Even within the institutional arena, it's the investigative research, education, and organizing--carried out by grassroots groups, individuals, and networks--that in large part makes responsive legislation and legal judgments possible.

The impression sometimes created by protests and court victories is that people don't need to get involved themselves, but can just write a check to some high profile organization and not give it another thought.

The combination of theatric spectacle with a shallow general understanding of social change often overshadows the grassroots work needed to put things right in our country.

It's a paradox that creates tension within the human rights movement, and often prevents development of initiatives like ours.

But what mostly concerns me is the misperception that right-wing paramilitaries are our main problem, rather than the very widespread and entrenched system of exclusion from power and decision-making in this country, and how mainstream this white collar thuggery really is.

Monday, July 10, 2006

How to Help

(Hardcover Donor Edition copies now available)

Blind Spots
War of Ideas

Life as Festival
Meitheal
The Movement

Saturday, July 08, 2006

Making a Difference

[Part of our work is honoring our elders. Thanks to Florangela Davila of the Seattle Times for the following (edited) excerpts.]

Bill Wassmuth worked 21 years in Idaho as a Catholic priest. In his second career, Wassmuth battled racists as executive director of the six-state Northwest Coalition Against Malicious Harassment, work for which he is best known. Driven and full of conviction, something inspired in part by his father, he took on the Aryan Nations. Not surprisingly, Wassmuth was singled out as an enemy and almost killed.

White supremacists bombed his house in 1986, prompting Wassmuth to consider how charmed a life he had led.

As he became a leader in the movement against the Aryan Nations, someone detonated a bomb at the back of his house. He garnered national media attention for helping reclaim picturesque Northern Idaho from the hate group. And sensing he might be able to do more, Wassmuth helped found the Northwest Coalition.

The bombing made Wassmuth realize how naïve he had been about the world and how he had never experienced hatred or discrimination. Leaving the priesthood, he continued his social activism, moving to Seattle to work full time with the coalition and mobilizing against hate groups. Wassmuth's partner, Eric Ward, a black man from Eugene, Oregon said Wassmuth raised enormous public attention about bigotry and how whites can fight hate.

In his dying days four years ago, Wassmuth worried about a growing kind of hate and intolerance--the escalation of mistrust and bigotry in this post-Sept. 11 world, with its racial profiling of Arab Americans and Muslims, is disturbing, he said. "I'm a very hopeful person," he said. "But I think we risk losing some ground. I'm concerned that in the interest of national security, we'll allow some things to happen."

[A year later, Bill Morlin of the Spokesman-Review in Spokane wrote the following (edited) epitaph to Wassmuth and Ward's organization.]

The Northwest Coalition for Human Dignity -- once a premier regional civil rights organization -- has ceased operations amid a severe financial crisis. The human rights group is an apparent victim of hard economic times and the misperception that the fight against hate has been won in the Pacific Northwest.

The human rights organization began as the Northwest Coalition Against Malicious Harassment, a group founded in Coeur d'Alene in 1987 by the late Bill Wassmuth and others to combat the Aryan Nations and other hate groups. Wassmuth was its executive director until 1999, when the Seattle-based group merged with the Coalition for Human Dignity, which started in Portland.

The organization battled hate groups in Washington, Idaho, Oregon, Montana, Colorado and Wyoming. But this summer, less than a year after Wassmuth's death, the human rights coalition was evicted from its Seattle office for not paying rent.

In the wake of its apparent demise, the Northwest Coalition left behind smaller grass-roots organizations carrying on the fight against hate. One of those groups is Gonzaga's Institute for Action Against Hate, founded in 1997 by Critchlow and Wassmuth.

"For 15 years, the Northwest Coalition was a very important force in the battle against white supremacy," said Mark Potok, of the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala. He described the coalition as the largest grass-roots civil rights organization of its kind in the United States.

The coalition's sensitive records about white supremacists and hate groups in the Northwest were sold to the Center for New Community, an anti-hate group based in Chicago. Devin Burghart, director of the Center for New Community, confirmed, "We are a repository for any civil rights groups in the Northwest that may want to use these records."

"The perception that the apparent demise of the Aryan Nations meant an end to hate groups in the Pacific Northwest had a definite negative impact on the Northwest Coalition," Burghart said. "Those of us who continue to be involved in human rights work know that the perception is false," he said.

The notion that hate groups had been defeated "reverberated with foundations and the giving public alike and seriously impacted the funding of the Northwest Coalition," Burghart said. Ward, the Northwest Coalition's last director, has been working for the Center for New Community since early September.

Potok, at the Southern Poverty Law Center, said the Northwest Coalition "helped the Pacific Northwest face its racist demons." "There had been a marked reluctance to squarely face the problem of white supremacy until Bill Wassmuth and others organized the Northwest Coalition," Potok said.

Burghart said, "Hate group activity is a continuing menace in the Northwest."

"People who are concerned about having safe, welcoming and inclusive communities need to lend their support to organizations [and individuals] that are on the ground, making a difference."

Fighting Back

We don't try to persuade people to do anything. If asked, we show them what other groups have done in similar situations to good effect. Sometimes we try to convince people to stop doing things that unnecessarily endanger themselves or others. We aren't always successful at that, and they make our work more difficult.

What we do--through investigative research--is attempt to circumscribe threatening or violent behavior by the right-wing (or other bullies) in order for nice people to participate in public affairs without being afraid.

There are times, however--generally because community safeguards have failed--when it's necessary to summon a little courage and resolve. Most people fade rapidly in those circumstances. The few who rise to the occasion, though, are both worthy of and blessed with our assistance.

We help those who fight back.

Friday, July 07, 2006

Essential Observation

Someone recently remarked in horror at how bold we were for suggesting funders ought to come to us to offer their help, rather than requiring us to go to them hat in hand. As I recall, this person then proceeded to vastly overcomplicate, for our benefit, how liberal philanthropy operates.

Our enemies of the right-wing don't have to be self-sustaining on a business model, why should we be hamstrung by this misguided philanthropic policy?

The reason the right-wing has won the culture war in America--and stands to win the civil war if left unopposed--is because we have no resources. Read Chip Berlet's eloquent article Investing in Ideas.

Response to Inquiries

One of our readers asked if the public health model of social conflict would enable progressives to more effectively combat the violent right-wing, noting that progressives would be able to understand the etiology of the "disease" and therefore keep it from spreading. This thoughtful reader inquired what it means for opposition research to be oriented toward public process (as opposed to policy), as well as requested an example of how our research kept people from harm--to illustrate the fact with a clear, compelling story.

He also asked why we don't just locate the learning center at an existing non-profit, perhaps one of those in our network.

Our response:

We occasionally recruit and convert progressives to our way of viewing conflict, but that means they first have to divorce themselves from the delusions of institutional thinking.

In other words, they are no longer progressives. In the meantime, keeping people safe requires us to persuade them not to do stupid things. We don't always prevail.

In our experience, the public health model is essential to public safety in all public processes, from electoral campaigns to community projects. Reign of Terror, the shorter online version of my memoir Blind Spots, is intended to illustrate this. My report Research as Organizing Tool discusses The Public Health Model in more depth.

As for housing the learning center, you will notice it is an initiative of Public Good. While we collaborate with the various nodes of our network, we respect the diversity of their unique approaches and niches as a valuable aspect of covering all the angles. This independence--and effectiveness--would, unfortunately, be compromised by altering that relationship.

Thursday, July 06, 2006

What's this all about?

*Public Good Learning Center*
An initiative of the Public Good Project investigative research and education network

The Public Good Project is a volunteer network of researchers, analysts and activists engaged in defending democracy. The bulk of the investigative research conducted by Public Good associates since 1993 has been on the malicious, covert, often criminal activities of the violent right-wing. Public Good interventions also include social conflict where anti-democratic institutions act as though they are above the law.

The purpose of seeking funding for a social conflict learning center is threefold: 1. to pass on the skills and knowledge of experienced investigative researchers, analysts and activists 2. to employ these people as faculty and mentors to other people who are just learning the craft, and 3. to provide a location to regularly connect and confer.

The lessons these mentors need to teach pro-democracy activists, scholars, and journalists -- in order to maintain even minimal social prophylaxis against the anti-democratic movement -- are not at present systematically available. The social conflict learning center will serve to connect presently isolated nodes of the Public Good network as it now exists and grows, as well as continue to support the work of its affiliates and individuals regularly seeking guidance or consultation.
What we are hoping to find by approaching the philanthropic sector with our proposal are a few people to form a working group whose purpose is to fund the startup of the center.

The social conflict learning center does not, perhaps, lend itself to conventional philanthropic measurement. It's purpose, primarily, is to mentor and connect mostly unfunded grassroots activists struggling to protect communities across the country. To what degree paying students might be able to subsidize activist scholars' education is difficult to predict. We welcome serious offers of assistance and advice.

(For more information about the Continuity Initiative, contact Public Good's Administrative Director, Jay Taber. e-mail: tbarj@yahoo.com )

Saturday, July 01, 2006

Continuity

In the summer of 2001, RAND analysts David Ronfeldt and John Arquilla wrote in their seminal paper Networks and Netwars and the Fight for the Future, that the deep dynamic guiding their analysis is that the information revolution favors the rise of network forms of organization--the next major form of organization to come into its own to redefine societies--and in so doing, the nature of conflict and cooperation. The rise of networks, they argued, means that power is migrating to nonstate actors, and that whoever masters the network form stands to gain the advantage.

By early 2003, their colleague Paul de Armond, research director for the Public Good Project, observed,

"We are on the cusp of the biggest movement of social transformation that has hit this country in a generation. Among other things, that means the number of potential recruits is more than we've seen since the 1960s."

Building on the work of Ronfeldt, de Armond, and Arquilla, activist scholar Jay Taber remarked in his 2005 book War of Ideas, "The challenge for those devoted to training and nurturing agents for social change is in providing programs that focus on the specific tools these agents will need--to develop research and analysis capacity in a manner similar to intelligence and security capabilities conducted during military warfare."

Also during that summer of 2001, Jay conducted a series of interviews of four top political opposition-researchers from around the country for his report Research as Organizing Tool. In this report, Mr. de Armond--an internationally recognized authority onright-wing terrorism--observed that, "Opposition research doesn't even occur to liberal organizations. They know nothing but their own ideological stance and these fantasy pictures that they bill to the opposition. They start reacting to that fantasy and the opposition just runs right over them."

In 1996, Paul developed a research training course for a university class to identify the locus of anti-social/anti-democratic activity using their three textbooks: The Investigative Reporter and Editor's Handbook, Manual on Opposition Research, and Get the Facts on Anybody. As Paul points out, though, most advocacy groups are strictly oriented to public policy, not the process. They do not do opposition research on anti-democratic groups opposing their policy through intimidation, harassment, and violence, because they do not engage in opposition activity. They are engaged in the political diplomatic model.

So in terms of the training he does, it's been personal, not institutional. "Individual reporters, individual members of non-profits, once converted from the ideological projection model," he says,"where you imagine what the opposition is and respond to your imagination, actually get into research, analysis, and intervention"--what Paul calls the public health model.

In his mind, pressure groups tend to make things worse. However, when people start acting from the public health model--which is to look at the causative mechanism, how the behavior is transmitted, and what sort of interventions can either prevent or modify it, they see how effective it is.

"These unrealistic models," he claims, "are self-perpetuating, self-sustaining, self re-enforcing...particularly the pressure group model where the institution is committed to advocacy of a particular position whether or not it's related to reality--but it's saleable...if it changes its model of interacting with the world-- [it] also loses its funding." To illustrate, Mr. de Armond recalls a lot of prominent groups used the militias as a fundraising vehicle in the 1990s without ever really addressing the issue.

According to Devin Burghart--director of the Building Democracy Initiative at the Center for New Community in Chicago--BDI gets calls all the time from individuals looking for guidance or advice. "They want to speak to someone who has experienced some of the same problems that they're going through in their local community, and can possibly talk them through some of the different things they're dealing with."

The training conducted by BDI, says Burghart, involves a mixture of opposition research, propaganda analysis, and investigative techniques, depending on the needs and the interests of the people involved and what they're facing in their community, as well as putting it into a framework of how to look at the situation, and what good research can do for them. The training, he says, has helped BDI establish a regional network of organizations that keep an ear to the ground doing local research, while continuing to develop themselves organizationally. "This base of people, trained in research," he notes, "allows BDI to look around and strategically target new problem areas, using locally generated incident reports."

Tarso Luis Ramos--the former senior researcher with Western States Center in Portland, Oregon--observed, "People who are in some way organic researchers...the kinds of people who keep newspaper clippings, who maybe attend meetings, who try to dig up information on what's going on in their community that's bothering them...exist in many communities and are incredible resources....It's been important to me as a researcher to identify people like that." In order to build collective power, he notes, it's necessary for individuals of this sort to become connected, even if the primary function of those individuals continues to be research, as opposed to trying to get them to do organizing. As he astutely observes, "Often times researchers and organizers have really different skills sets and you shouldn't try to do both things. But I think making those connections is vital."

Chip Berlet at Political Research Associates outside Boston observes the dilemma is that there is not really good coordination among the various levels—national, regional, and local—not enough interaction in either direction. For the most part, he says, a lot of grass roots activists don’t even know where to start to look for information that would be helpful to them. They don’t know how to frame the questions, or how to find groups that might be helpful.

A good question for public interest foundations--notorious for not funding research, conferences, or media, he says--is “How’s a movement supposed to grow?” As he notes, what the right wing did was fund conferences, media, and research, along with grass roots activity. Progressive foundations could take a lesson from their adversaries.

Sounding a note of hope, Mr. Berlet observes that in his travels around the country, he has found a lot of local people are good with research skills. “What we need to do”, he says, “is just get folks understanding that you need to pass on those skills.”

Last summer, while the nation’s attention was focused on the imminent loss of New Orleans to flooding, Americans were mostly unaware of another great loss within the yet-to-be-breached levees of this remarkable city six weeks earlier. Jack Minnis, research director for SNCC in the early 1960s, passed away. His home was later destroyed by the flooding, but his wife Earlene was able to salvage some of Jack’s research files. Recently, a few survivors of the Civil Rights Movement talked about their memories of Minnis.

Judy Richardson remarked:


“Whenever I speak on campuses about SNCC, I talk about Minnis. …about SNCC's research department and Jack: He was this crusty older white guy who smoked like a fiend, looked generally unkempt, and could get research from a turnip. He was always finding information — like buried treasure — that would make all the difference.

Even before I started working on Eyes on the Prize and doing commentaries for the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice, I realized that the way Minnis organized material had affected me. Documenting his analysis absolutely shaped the way I try to present information. The Chronology of Violence in Mississippi that Minnis put together in advance of the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project is something I still show to students and teachers. What it proved was that white violence was long-standing and endemic not just the problem of a few racist rednecks. And Minnis’ Chronology was invaluable in helping northern journalists understand the extent of what we were dealing with.”


Gwen Patton said:


“I am convinced that the National Democratic Party of Alabama, which elected the first maiden Black elected official since Reconstruction in Lowndes, Greene, Macon and Bullock Counties, never would have happened if it had not been for Jack Minnis' incredible research.”


Wally Roberts wrote:


“Jack Minnis was an important influence on my career as a journalist. I first encountered his research methods as a volunteer in the Mississippi Freedom Summer project in 1964 when I read some of the research he had done for SNCC on the power structure of the South and the institutions that fostered and enforced segregation. After that summer, I went on to Brown University where I had been accepted the previous spring, to do graduate work in history. After about six weeks, I had had it with history and felt compelled to quit and find work that would allow me to continue the type of work I had been doing in Mississippi. …Three years later I was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for local reporting.

I went on to write for magazines and other newspapers and did get a couple of other awards until I burnt out on the corporate world and went back into community organizing where I remain today. About 5 years ago l got in touch with Jack through the SNCC list and told him all this and thanked him for his work. … I owe much of my success at this work to Jack.”


In his memoirs, Minnis said:


"I got my first impressions of Jim Forman and SNCC, not from my own observations, but from the comments of Les Dunbar, Director of Southern Regional Council, and Wiley Branton, Director of SRC's Voter Education Project. They had hired me in the spring of '62 to appraise the results of voter registration projects to which they had contributed. Since they were distributing funds from tax-exempt foundations, they were sort of edgy about whether recipients would observe the political prohibitions of such grants.

As I perceived it, their difficulty was that SNCC seemed to be operating on principles they didn't understand. In their world, individuals sought jobs with paychecks, the understanding being they'd do what they were told because the paycheck could be withheld. SNCC was composed of people who'd walked away from opportunities to make good wages, for the chance to work their asses off, under murky and dangerous conditions, for nothing that could be called a paycheck. Their puzzlement was how do you control what people do if you can't threaten to take away their livelihood? The answer, of course, was that you don't control them. It was a concept that these essentially good-hearted and well-intentioned folks were not comfortable with."


Building a movement requires having a network that can accommodate, educate, nurture, and socialize new recruits.

This will not happen until the infrastructure is in place to accomplish it. The consensus of the top researchers in the country present at the December 2005 national human rights conference was that a few organizations in the US do original opposition research and have way more than they can handle, but most don't do it at all. Many don't even understand what it is.

All the participants in the researchers workshop encouraged Jay to pursue this as a vital yet largely absent component of the human rights movement. They also agreed that a project like this needs to be free of institutional constraints like those extent in religiously-based organizations, in order to focus on recruiting, teaching, and nurturing network development and capacity as opposed to garnering headlines--something Jack Minnis spoke to four decades ago.

In the spring of 2006, Jay Taber, by then an associate scholar with the Center for World Indigenous Studies -- having recently received national recognition for his reports and books on the topic -- began to generate interest in establishing a research learning center in San Francisco, in order for experienced political opposition-researchers across the US to pass on their skills and knowledge to another generation. At present, he's still seeking a source of funding.

The primary function of the center would be in the field of communication: learning to present ideas and information in the most effective format applicable to a targeted audience. Students of the center would learn by doing projects they select and design within the framework of a proposed, reviewed, and accepted application. Genres of presentation would include exposes, occasional papers, white papers, investigative reports, and intelligence estimates.

Using expert researchers as guest instructors, advisors, and distance-learning adjunct faculty, students would be mentored on how to plan a project, conduct the research, write up the results, and disseminate their analysis in varying formats for different venues. These skills would then be built on in studies, seminars, and exercises designed to examine the uses of communication devices in psychological warfare, in which students would create products based on the information acquired in their initial research project.

An intermediate project to opening a brick and mortar establishment would be to interview and record these researchers for later editing in anticipation of making the lessons they've learned available online, and might very well comprise the initial task of the center's digital library archive. Serious inquiries and offers of assistance with this proposal are now being solicited.

As the renowned political researcher Dan Junas once said, "It's always worse than you think, and you never know until you look."

http://www.publicgood.org/reports/pdf/Continuity.pdf

e-mail: tbarj@yahoo.com