``I'm thinking of going to this:
http://www.spa.ucla.edu/dept.cfm?d=up&s=newsevents&f=news.cfm&news_id=19697
Urban Planning to Celebrate Edward Soja Posted on February 15, 2008..'' Dennis Claxton
--------
I'd go if I were you. Even if it will probably be just a fancy high end retirement party, short on substance. Soja's probably work a lot with various LA City and County programs and knews them well. Since I take it you're interest is in the prison-industrial complex, you'll know the whos whos of that scene. Try and figure out in advance if they've had any contact with Soja or he with them and then, go stand over there in that group and see what they are talking about. Sometimes these things dissolve into shop talk---which I find really really fascinating for their political insights.
Here is an excerpt from an interview with one of the City Planning professors at UCB. It gives you some insight into what social engineering looked like when it was part of the tecnocratic apparatus of the War on Poverty during the last of the Johnson administration---and on-going under the radar of the early Nixon administration.
Most people these days, even the progressives and radicals are too young to have ever seen what a progressive government apparatus looked like, how it can be devoted to actually making ordinary people's lives better, not as a sham, but as a real and functioning system.
The above is what the Republicans and centrist Democrats have been destroying for last forty years. And it is what has to be re-built, someday.
Sidenote to the single payer crew, Jenny Brown and others. The interview below should give single payer advocates an insight on where and how to get into the currently locked doors of power. (And, I have changed my mind. Jenny, Mike Perelman and others have convinced me, Hilary's plan sucks. I was dubbed by Krugman...)
In the interveiw below, Abt, is Abt Associates, a planning consultant firm whose speciality was evaluation of on-going federal programs in social services. Government guidelines for these programs specified evalutions be done by outside contractors, on the theory they would be more objective than the government agency oversight of the projects. In later years under the Carter and Reagan administration, their agency heads selected the neoliberal dominated evalution contractors to justify dismantling whatever was left of these projects.
---------
Breslin
Who was heading up Abt at the time?
Collignon
Clark Abt was president throughout most of this history. But how this meshes into disability is the following: I spent a total of five years with Abt--all while still either doing a doctorate or then later while teaching, and I was a senior economist by the time I finished. Abt Associates won a very large job to evaluate what was then called the Neighborhood Services Program. The key to this is that it was the predecessor to model cities, but it was a demonstration program in seven or eight cities that was jointly sponsored by five or so large federal departments--Housing and Urban Development, Education, whatever was then Health and Human Services, and a few others. The whole point of it was to work with local community organizations to provide better services, better development programs inside inner-city ghettos to show that the government could coordinate its efforts. I was in charge of the evaluation for at least two of the cities and a couple of the issues that were across the entire demonstration.
Ed Newman and Rehabilitation Services Administration
Collignon
That was interesting in its own right, but the key to this was that the federal monitor for this from the President's Bureau of the Budget was a fellow named Ed Newman. Ed Newman, prior to this job, had been in Massachusetts as Elliot Richardson's head of the mental retardation division--I think they were still using that word in those days--and had gone on to the Office of Management and Budget. During this three- or four-year evaluation study, Ed and I became close friends. One of the things I was doing for the national demonstration was a study of how the federal agencies coordinated their efforts. That meant I was talking to all the various feds, and Ed Newman had to be my broker as we set up those interviews.
To show you the implication, when the study was done I ended up giving personal briefings to all of the undersecretaries for the five departments--that's pretty heady stuff--on how to coordinate government services. One of my conclusions was, by the way, that often the feds can't begin to figure out how to coordinate; it's the local service organizations who make the coordination happen by putting the services together on the local scene. Most of the federal efforts usually ended up failing. But I suggested a lot of things they could do, et cetera.
So I'm working hand in glove with Ed Newman. We built a close friendship; we would often go out drinking, I would spend nights at his house afterwards, and we spent in a six-month period a great deal of time talking because we had two issues we were trying to resolve: Ed was campaigning for the job of Commissioner of Rehabilitation Services, and I was trying to decide whether to get married [laughter]. So we would basically sit and drink, and since I was a very political person--I had worked for a congressman, and I had been in politics literally growing up and so on--I would strategize with him on the politics, and he would advise me, "There's a time when it's sensible to shift your gears and get married, and family's a great thing," et cetera. The positive side to all this is that Ed got his job as commissioner, and I did marry the lady to whom I'm still married twenty-seven years \u2015 75 \u2015 later. So it was very positive on both sides. It was a very close friendship.
When Ed got his job of Commissioner of Rehabilitation Services [Administration], he then hired Abt to basically be his personal consultants in setting up shop. That included a study effort that led to a reorganization of Rehabilitation Services Administration [RSA]. This is all still before getting to Berkeley. Another fellow named Marty Gordon and I were responsible to keep people's responses for that study. But what happens in Washington is that new heads of agencies, at least in those days, were able to bring in one or two people to be their personal special assistants whose loyalty was to them. And in those days you could also instead bring in consultants. We were the consultant that Ed brought in. Literally, I interviewed at some point virtually everybody in RSA and advised Ed on who was good and who might not be as good. We did a reorganization study that led to a massive reorganizing of all of RSA that most of the staff bought onto because of the way we staged it--I don't know if that's relevant to your concerns; I could talk about that.
We also, at the very beginning of this, went out and talked to the most powerful figures in CSAVR--the Council of State Associations of Vocational and Rehabilitation Administrators--to get their perspective on what was effective and what was less effective about how RSA was conducting its activities. So we had a state perspective. Now we talked to the disability lobbyists that were in Washington, but these were early days: you had a blindness lobby, and you had a deafness lobby, each of which had one of their own in RSA as the head of activities affecting services to those groups. The other lobbies were basically--there was a paraplegic association, basically controlled by war veterans--and I'm not sure if there were any others that I can remember at this stage that were major political players. But you had nothing that resembles the disability movement now.
As someone who had always worked at the neighborhood level in inner cities, I can say, "Wait a minute. What about an organization that instead of being totally organized around running blindness vending stands--which was a major source of money and had business interests--represented the person on the street who happened to experience a disability?" It was very evident to me, and it was evident to Ed, that that grouping did not exist in the disability politics.
Breslin
Let me just interrupt you one second and ask you to clarify the dates. This is pre-1970?
Collignon
This is 1968. That's when my relationship started with Newman. And the studies here--Ed took over as RSA commissioner--you can check this one out more formally, but my guess is that it would have been around the end of 1969 or 1970. In this early '68 and '69 period he is in the Bureau of the Budget running this study and thinking about how to be made RSA commissioner. This study within RSA probably begins after [President Richard M.] Nixon's 1968 election. Newman probably gets his appointment in mid-'69, and there's this sort of crash study and I'm working on this fulltime.
Breslin
And you're in the midst of your doctorate as well.
Collignon
That's right. I'm still supposed to be writing my doctorate.
Breslin
You're a student but you're really doing this.
Collignon
All the time I was at Columbia I worked a minimum of halftime or more to finance my way through, and except for the very first year of my doctoral program--when I gratefully had a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship--I worked fulltime throughout the rest of my doctoral program because that was how I was going to get the money to finance it at that time.
Anyway, so we are doing these studies, and among the other things Ed was very clear about wanting to do was trying to use the next time that the--back then it was called the Vocation and Rehabilitation Act--came up, to try and do it as a major time to reconsider the program as a whole. We started developing a strategy group to try and think of what might happen in that and how to make that social change happen. Now the key player again is--Ed Newman was a former professor, I believe, at Tufts [University] before he took over the state agency in Massachusetts. But he was a social planner by background, and very much thought about social change. That was very much part of my thinking at the time as well.
One of the things that basically everyone always said is, you know, if political reform happens, there always has to be a thousand authors. However Abt does it, if it looks like you did it, you will probably be beaten. So the question was, How do we persuade the retiring long-time lobbyist for CSAVR--whose name was E. B. Whitman, if I remember, and there was another nickname he had that I've forgotten. Whitman, since he was going to retire, we thought, Let's persuade Whitman that this is his moment to transform the VR Act into what he thought it should be. The issue was also to get several of the congressional committees into transforming the act. So a lot of parties would say, "Hey, this is my opportunity to transform the act." Ed Newman was a great believer in creating lots of credit around this. This is related to Berkeley--finally the story evolves.
At a point in doing all this, I chose to leave Abt and accept an acting assistant professor at Berkeley. Ed was frustrated because Ed had offered me a job.
'Acting Assistant Professor at UC Berkeley
Breslin
You had just come to Berkeley.
Collignon
Okay. Ed had offered me Director of Policy for RSA, which was, for a young kid of twenty-six--just getting married--a hefty thing and big money for those days, GS-15, and I was thinking, "I haven't got a doctorate; how could I qualify for this?" He said, "Don't worry; most people don't have it." But I knew there was something else; I thought I would never get political clearance for it because I had been an antiwar activist, I was listed with HUAC [House Un-American Activities Committee], and this was the Nixon administration.
Breslin
Your FBI file was as long as the rest of us.''
Full interview at:
http://content.cdlib.org/xtf/view?docId=kt2779n58v&doc.view=frames&chunk.id=d0e3 618&toc.depth=1&toc.id=d0e3618&brand=calisphere
The Act, mentioned above was the pivotal Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which became law and formed the basis for disabled civil rights, most of the architectual barriers activities, federal employment guidelines on disability, school integration, and many other things. Go here for a further rundown:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rehabilitation_Act
Notice the act languished for four years as the political tide had turned against progressive government service and the purge was underway. The Carter administration, Secretary of HEW, Joseph Califano stalled on signing the implimentation rules. He had to be dragged, kicking and screaming all the way through a protracted take-over and sit-in in the San Francisco Federal building by disability rights activists. He finally signed the fucking regulations to be rid of the embarassing questions from the media after nightly local news conferences held in SF on the subject had started to get national coverage.
This whole history should be of some service to the single payer healthplan advocates, a kind of how to course.
CG