Burnt Orange Report

One Warm Fuzzy Feeling, A Little Bit of a Fix-er-Up-er

By Jim Dallas

About a month ago I cited the UFW as an example of how to write good fundraising letters. The L.A. Times (via Matt Stoller) shows us why good fundraising can make little difference if the funds aren't used well:

Today, a Times investigation has found, Chavez's heirs run a web of tax-exempt organizations that exploit his legacy and invoke the harsh lives of farmworkers to raise millions of dollars in public and private money.

The money does little to improve the lives of California farmworkers, who still struggle with the most basic health and housing needs and try to get by on seasonal, minimum-wage jobs.

Most of the funds go to burnish the Chavez image and expand the family business, a multimillion-dollar enterprise with an annual payroll of $12 million that includes a dozen Chavez relatives.

The UFW is the linchpin of the Farm Worker Movement, a network of a dozen tax-exempt organizations that do business with one another, enrich friends and family, and focus on projects far from the fields: They build affordable housing in San Francisco and Albuquerque, own a top-ranked radio station in Phoenix, run a political campaign in support of an Indian casino and lobby for gay marriage.

The current UFW leaders have jettisoned other Chavez principles:

The UFW undercut another union to sign up construction workers, poaching on the turf of building trade unions that once were allies.

The UFW forfeited the right to boycott supermarkets and stores, a tactic Chavez pioneered, in order to sign up members in unrelated professions.

And Chavez's heirs broke with labor solidarity and hired nonunion workers to build the $3.2-million National Chavez Center around their founder's grave in the Tehachapi Mountains, a site they now market as a tourist attraction and rent out for weddings.

For what it's worth, the story reads like a hit piece; at least a couple of the sources seem like they've got some axes to grind. That doesn't mean the criticisms are baseless, though.

The point to take away from this is not that unions are crooked and that idealism is futile. The point Matt Stoller makes is that half the battle for organized laborers is keeping their institutions clean. The same can be said, I think, of any progressive institution.

Which leads us to recent posts by some bloggers (e.g. Matt Yglesias), who ask of our House Democrats, "where's the beef?"

I'm all for a Democratic political reform package but I wouldn't put too much stock into it. At the moment, Republicans are loving lobbying reform bills. Such bills allow them to seemingly get out from under the cloud of sleaze while remaining, fundamentally, in hock to corporate interests.

To run a campaign, you need ideas the other side can't sign on to. More to the point, you need ideas they can't easily co-opt by counterproposing a watered-down version. That means you need to attack some of the substance of what K Street Republicanism has done, not just the atmospherics of the lobbying trade.

Dern tootin'. While my googling skillz are not running on all four today, I do recall someone saying something to the effect of "our ethics reform proposal will have gone far enough when half the caucus has to be dragged along kicking and screaming." I like that saying. I think I'll put it in my clip-and-save box.