Wade Rathke:

Pearl River     I’m fifteen feet above dirt looking out the window at the water that has risen up from the bayou a few miles from the Pearl River dividing Louisiana and Mississippi.  It has filled the bioswale, anchored by cypress trees off of the road, and covered the pathway where gravel was just laid days […]

New Orleans   No question, weather warnings are critical.  Despite the unpredictability of nature, preparation is important regardless of how eminent the danger might be.  Despite the president’s reallocation of billions from FEMA funds as fires rage in California and the Gulf Coast areas face a rare, not since 1959, twofer where double trouble hurricanes might […]

New Orleans     Out and about, it’s hard not to notice patterns and paradoxes among the masked and unmasked marauders among us in this crazy pandemic time. In Mississippi recently along the Gulf Coast, there’s been real progress over recent weeks as the governor and other politicians have had to take the virus more seriously […]

Pearl River     Nursing homes have been a huge source of deaths in the United States during the coronavirus pandemic.  Local 100 represents a number of private and public homes, as well as other healthcare facilities, so has been with our workers at the razor edge.  On a monthly basis, we continue to deliver PPE to […]

Pearl River     If there’s any consensus about dealing with Covid-19, it involves the critical role of testing right now, and a vaccine down the line.  Testing allows all of us and especially public health workers and epidemiologists to identify positive individuals, potential asymptomatic carriers, and, most importantly, hot spots that can receive interventions to stop […]

New Orleans     I actually know a lot about the national political conventions, both Republican and Democratic.  ACORN was well represented every four years from the 1978 Memphis midterm under President Carter to 1980 in New York and Detroit, Dallas with the Republicans and Ronald Reagan in 1984, and on and on.  Except for 1980, […]

New Orleans     Facial recognition just seems sketchy.  Back when it was possible to fly, and I did so, it was hard not to notice how customs’ officials and kiosks were increasingly using facial recognition software.  Not just over there, but over here as well.  On its surface it seemed like a simple trade of […]

New Orleans      A little less than a decade ago, in mid-2011, ACORN International stirred up a bit of a hornets’ nest by opposing the international development consensus in a series of reports we issued that questioned the value of microfinance as a poverty reduction measure.  Boiled down, we stated flatly, that poverty cannot be […]

New Orleans     Richard Rothstein, a distinguished fellow at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. wrote a watershed volume several years ago, The Color of Law:  A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America.  The title goes to the heart of his well-documented, thoroughly researched evisceration of local, state, and federal policies that […]

New Orleans      President Trump wrong-footed me for a minute.  Trump said he was going to take a good look at whether to pardon Edward J. Snowden, the supersized intelligence leaker and former National Security contractor.  Trump claimed there was a division of opinion with some saying he did the wrong thing, and some people […]