Citizen Wealth

by Rathke, Wade

• ISBN13: 9781576758625
• ISBN10: 1576758621
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-07-06
• Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers

Summary

The federal government may have failed the poor, argues organizer and ACORN founder Wade Rathke, but there is another way: wealth-building. In Citizen Wealth, Rathke shows how food stamps, unemployment insurance, and tax relief offer temporary, stop-gap fixes but don't address the systemic problems that keep people from building up the assets they need to create a stable life for themselves and their families. A real, workable plan to end poverty, Rathke argues, requires a two-pronged approach. First, we need to create wealth through home ownership, and job acquisition and security, lengthens the distance between the poor house and the safe house. Second, we must also prevent the predatory attempts to reduce the relatively little wealth that many low and moderate-income families have. Such dual-track wealth- building approaches protect against the vicissitudes of income: temporary job loss, health issues, credit restrictions and more.

Author Biography

Wade Rathke first began organizing more than forty years ago when he dropped out of college to organize against the Vietnam War. Later he organized welfare recipients in Massachusetts, first in Springfield and then statewide from Boston, before leaving for Arkansas to found ACORN in Little Rock in mid-June 1970. A decade later, Wade added labor organizing to his experiences when he and other organizers responded to issues that ACORN members were having in their workplaces, whether home health workers, hotel workers, or fast food workers, and moved to New Orleans to build independent unions that later merged into the Service Employees International Union in 1984.
The common themes of these decades as a welfare rights organizer, community organizer, and labor organizer have been how to unite people at the bottom income levels around their issues to build sufficient power so that they could impact their lives, improve their communities, and change the direction of their country. Dealing with income and assets has been a constant theme of Wade’s organizing, no matter what the venue or vehicle, and he has been delighted to pull all of these strands of his experience together in writing Citizen Wealth. For a generation Wade has been recognized as perhaps the premier organizer of his generation, making this book something of a milestone in that journey.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. ix
Introduction: From the Bottom Up	p. 1
Creating Citizen Wealth
Building a Winning Campaign for Economic Security	p. 9
Home Ownership Through Community Reinvestment	p. 19
Stopping Foreclosures and Predatory Lending	p. 31
Making Work Pay Living Wages	p. 49
Creating Wealth Through Worker Organizations	p. 65
Protecting and Advancing Citizen Wealth
Making Earned Income Tax Credits Work for Workers	p. 81
Guarding Tax Refunds and Combatting High Prices	p. 95
The Debt Trap	p. 105
The "Maximum Eligible Participation" Solution	p. 115
Changing the Terms of the Debate
Working with Corporations to Create an Asset Climate	p. 129
Business Models That Foster Citizen Wealth	p. 135
Bringing Citizens into the Wealth-Building Process	p. 153
The Future of Citizen Wealth	p. 161
Notes	p. 173
Acknowledgments	p. 185
Index	p. 189
About the Author	p. 197
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