Wade Rathke:

Pearl River      Brothers and sisters, it’s bad. Furthermore, it’s getting worse! Piled on to that, it will get much, much worse, before there’s even a hint of it getting better. A recession has a simple economic definition. Any two quarters of falling economic activity earns the title. Economists and forecasters say that the good news […]

New Orleans        On the USA pandemic map, there’s a big fat circle around New Orleans now along with New York, San Francisco, and Boston, some of the oldest cities in the country.  Of course, Miami and Los Angeles are also hotspots. In New Orleans, we can already see the impacts of exploding unemployment at […]

New Orleans       A lot of Silicon Valley are self-isolating in what should be shame as their app-based, platform capitalism, or whatever they wanted to call it, is exposed as little more than rapacious capitalism based on worker exploitation.  Hundreds of thousands of workers in the gig economy are now caught in a vicious double […]

Little Rock      Depending on how you look at it, one of the assets – or liabilities – of being an organizer for over fifty years, is that in the immortal words of the old country and western song, you know “when to hold ‘em, and when to fold ‘em.”  The clock is running out on […]

Greenville       Talking to ACORN’s head organizer in France from one of the organization’s offices in Lyon was something of an other-worldly experience.  He was cancelling a train trip to Paris and had only hours to get back to his home in Grenoble.  The President of France has ordered a fifteen-day period where all residents were […]

New Orleans        We all feel like we’re caught in the eye of the pandemic storm, but our collective empathy doesn’t necessarily make us feel safer and more secure. New Orleans’ Mayor LaToya Cantrell, almost as an aside, mentions that our public health officials are worried that, relative to our size, the covid-19 epidemic seems […]

Pearl River     Yes, we’re all tired of hearing about covid-19 and our powerlessness to protect ourselves, our federal government’s incompetence, our local government’s uncertainty, and the general chaos.  On the other hand, perhaps the virus this time is teaching that this is a parade without an end with many more to come.  If so, this […]

Pearl River     The ACORN Union in England has launched a petition in the wake of the coronavirus that has already gained 3000 signatures and rising. As reported in The Independent The ACORN union, which supports tenants, workers and residents, launched a petition this week urging the government to enact temporary rent freezes for renters suffering […]

New Orleans     The reviews of  President Trump’s press conference, where he claimed he was trying to calm the American people and was expected to show leadership in meeting the covid-19 crisis, were almost uniformly bad.  The stock market reacted by cratering to the worst level since 1987 and has now lost 85% of its […]

New Orleans       In the “time of the virus,” I talked to Jackie Dartz, a member of the Local 100 United Labor Unions executive board and longtime steward at LARC, the Lafayette Association of Retarded Citizens, about direct care workers that were at the frontlines about their preparations for the covid-19 pandemic on Wade’s World.  […]