Civil Rights

Where Were the Anti-War Demonstrators?

Philip Palij — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:35:21 -0800

Campaign for Americas Future every so often carries stories along the lines of "Where is the outrage?". This article from a peace activist asks the question but takes it one step further and gets out to find out for himself why peace demos are so poorly attended

Great read, the comments too. The MANY excuses and the guilty consciences.

Coming Clean on the Stimulus

Alan Jenkins — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 08:34:33 -0700

A report issued by the White House and the Education Department on Monday showed that the federal economic stimulus package (the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act) has so far created or saved 250,000 education jobs. The report is the first hard evidence of the Recovery Act’s contribution to the nation’s economic health, and previews more extensive data that will be released October 30.

The report is good news for at least two reasons. First, it documents how public investment is helping to pull the nation back from the brink of a devastating economic depression. And, second, it includes crucial information that should inform the ongoing investment of stimulus funds to achieve a full recovery—especially when it comes to job creation. In analyzing the full October data, however, it is important to ask not only how many jobs were created and what infrastructure was built, but also whether we are investing in a lasting economic recovery that will include our entire nation.

Because stimulus funds are flowing largely through traditional state and local channels, particular attention is needed to ensure that they reach the communities and populations that need them most, that distribution is fair and transparent, and that progress is measured in terms of greater and more equal opportunity for all Americans.

If the last year has shown us anything, it is that we are all in it together when it comes to the economy. When all communities have access to jobs, education and health care, and can contribute to our economy through spending, taxes, and entrepreneurship, we all do better. And when millions of our people are shut out from economic participation, we are all held back. It’s in our national interest to foster the economic participation of all Americans, and to invest in the infrastructure of opportunity, particularly where it’s been ignored in the past.

Monday’s education report includes some encouraging details on this front. It reports, for example, that schools in Lafayette, Indiana are using Recovery Act funds to extend the school day and year in two schools with the highest rates of poverty. West Hartford, CT is using funds to provide after-school math and reading help for the town’s neediest elementary schools, and Hillsborough County, FL is using its incentive pay program to attract and keep highly-qualified teachers working with the most at-risk students. Along with saving hundreds of thousands of jobs, these investments go a long way toward the Recovery Act’s education goal, which is “to stimulate the economy in the short term, while investing in education advancements to ensure the long-term economic health and success of our nation.”

At the same time, however, there continues to be a troubling lack of information about the overall accountability and equity of stimulus investments on the ground. There is no indication in Monday’s report, for example, as to whether innovative efforts to expand opportunity are the norm, or simply sporadic points of light. The report is silent, moreover, on whether African American and Latino students—who are disproportionately concentrated in our nation’s most under-resourced schools—are benefiting from stimulus investments to the extent that their pressing need and overrepresentation in our public schools would dictate. The Administration has done well in identifying such interventions as priorities, but we simply don’t know how or whether they are playing out on the ground.

The same lack of information has plagued the larger recovery effort so far. While the government’s stimulus tracking website—www.recovery.gov—offers some useful information, it is currently inadequate for determining, for example, whether jobs reach women and men on an equal opportunity basis, or whether transportation and health care infrastructure projects are serving communities that reflect comparative need and the growing diversity of our nation.

Lack of transparency has been an even bigger problem at the state and local level. Residents and community groups around the country have been frequently frustrated in their attempts to identify and participate in needed initiatives. And, with a few exceptions like New York City’s NYC Stat website, state and local stimulus tracking sites are strikingly uninformative.

Eight months into the economic recovery, the lack of transparency or a documented focus on greater and more equal opportunity is disappointing. But that can and should change, starting now. For the October 30th data release and going forward, the Administration should document online and in its reporting how each stimulus investment is or is not expanding opportunity to disconnected communities. It should disaggregate employment, education, entrepreneurial, and infrastructure data by race, gender, and disability, as well as by other demographic characteristics like rural/urban/suburban, along which opportunity has frequently been segregated.

In considering future disbursements of Recovery Act funds—some $228 billion in contracts, grants, and loans remains to be distributed—federal agencies should require fund applicants to share with the public detailed information about stimulus project choices, and to invite and consider public input in determining investments. As I have urged before in this column, governments at each level should employ Opportunity Impact Statements to ensure that greater and more equal opportunity for all residents are prioritized.

The stimulus and other timely efforts are helping to stave off an economic meltdown of catastrophic proportions. But the hard work of lasting recovery lies ahead. Moving from fiscal survival to broadly shared economic security and prosperity requires a focus on opportunity for all.

Obama's Wrong Note

Alan Jenkins — Mon, 04 May 2009 19:36:07 -0700

During the presidential campaign, candidate Barack Obama spoke eloquently about race in America and its continuing relevance to our national progress. But at the press conference marking his first 100 days, President Obama got it wrong.

Black Entertainment Television reporter Andre Showell asked the President:
“As the entire nation tries to climb out of this deep recession, in communities of color, the circumstances are far worse. The black unemployment rate, as you know, is in the double digits. And in New York City, for example, the black unemployment rate for men is near 50 percent. My question to you tonight is given this unique and desperate circumstance, what specific policies can you point to that will target these communities and what's the timetable for us to see tangible results?”

The President’s response was disappointing. After recounting a number of health care initiatives, he argued that “those probably disproportionately impact African-American and Latino families simply because they’re the ones who are most vulnerable.” He concluded, “so my general approach is that if the economy is strong, that will lift all boats as long as it is also supported by, for example, strategies around college affordability and job training, tax cuts for working families as opposed to the wealthiest that level the playing field and ensure bottom-up economic growth. And I’m confident that that will help the African-American community live out the American dream at the same time that it’s helping communities all across the country.”

Unfortunately, it’s just not true that fixing the economy aiding poor communities will necessarily close the racial opportunity gap. In 2000, after a decade of remarkable economic prosperity, the poverty rate among African Americans and Latinos taken together was still 2.6 times greater than that for white Americans. From 2001 to 2003, as the economy slowed, poverty rates for most communities of color increased more dramatically than they did for whites, widening the racial poverty gap. From 2004 to 2005, while the overall number of poor Americans declined by almost 1 million, to 37 million, poverty rates for most communities of color actually increased. In other words, contrary to the President’s assumption, reductions in poverty do not inevitably close racial poverty gaps, nor do they reach all ethnic communities equally.

Nor will increasing employment, alone, close racial gaps. In 2007, when the economy was still relatively strong, Latinos earned just 73 cents for every dollar earned by whites, and African Americans earned just 75 cents. Latina women earned just 59% of what all men earned. And, as I’ve written in this column before, the statistics on “wealth”—which economists describe as assets minus debt—are far worse: for every dollar of wealth held by whites, Americans of color held only 15 cents.

All of those numbers predate the current economic crisis. They show, among other things, that rising economic tides do not reliably lift all boats.

The president was wrong, but he was not completely wrong. Creating jobs, expanding health insurance, building community clinics, will indeed aid all Americans. And African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans are, in fact, disproportionately unemployed and uninsured. But it will take more than that to ensure truly equal opportunity. It will require attacking predatory lending targeting communities of color. It will require addressing racial bias in employment and housing and in the criminal justice system. It will require investing specifically in abandoned and segregated inner-city schools. And it will require targeting job training and debt counseling, and business opportunities at communities that have been cut off from opportunity.

The thing is, President Obama is trying to do many of those things. He is investing in neglected schools, for example, and reinvigorating the nation’s anti-discrimination enforcement. But to be successful, he will also need to explain to the American people why those steps are necessary.

An Uneven Journey

Alan Jenkins — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 06:37:45 -0700

Earlier this year, I visited my father, who lives in the Bay Area. As we drove from the Oakland airport, the conversation quickly turned to the Obama presidency. Born in 1923, my dad survived the Great Depression, fought in World War II, endured vicious Jim Crow segregation and violence, participated in the Civil Rights Movement, and, this year, witnessed the inauguration of an African-American president of the United States.

On our drive, he reminisced about how, at age 8, he had gone with his 2nd grade class to see the cavalcade of then-president Herbert Hoover as it drove through downtown Detroit. A year later, the country would throw Hoover out of office for his gross mishandling of the economy, choosing Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his message of change. Before my dad’s teen years were through, he would join the Marines and defend a segregated nation from within a segregated military. Traveling to and from southern military bases, he would experience racial humiliation, threats, and violence from white fellow Americans, often while wearing his Marine uniform.

As we marveled at the progress we’ve made as a country, we drove by block after block of boarded up houses in some of Oakland’s African-American neighborhoods, many with foreclosure signs visible. Many homes in the same neighborhoods still sported lawn signs reading “Change” and “Hope.”

As the Obama presidency sinks in, many are interpreting it in absolute terms: arguing either that it shows that racial bias and discrimination are no longer factors in American life, or that the election means little for race relations, reflecting merely a unique confluence of events—a historically unpopular incumbent, a historically bad economy, a gifted politician raised by white folks who ran a flawless 21st century campaign against a pair of tone-deaf 20th century opponents. News media coverage mostly echoed that polarized, simplistic discourse, with an emphasis on the “post-racial America” narrative.

As usual, the reality is not nearly so simple. As my dad said to me back in Oakland, this election reflects a huge step forward, but we’ve still got a long way to go.

The blocks of foreclosed homes in Oakland are a good example of the new world we’re in when it comes to equal opportunity. Despite occasional incidents, the “whites only” real estate signs (and burning crosses) of my father’s day are largely gone. Oakland has an African-American mayor, and a diverse city government. And foreclosures and crushing debt in that city are affecting people of all races.

At the same time, though, it is well documented that people and communities of color have been racially targeted by unscrupulous lenders for sub-prime and, often, predatory loans. Research by The Opportunity Agenda, the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, and the Poverty and Race Research Action Council found that people of color were far more likely to receive high-interest subprime loans than were white borrowers with the same income. Indeed, the racial divide in subprime lending is larger among upper‐income borrowers than among lower‐income ones. Predatory lending—a subset of sub-prime lending—has also long been targeted at communities of color. For these and related reasons, people of color have higher rates of foreclosure, whole neighborhoods in communities of color are in danger of deteriorating, and a generation of people of color are losing the most secure path to building wealth: homeownership.

Research shows that discriminatory and predatory lending practices have combined with practices like institutionalized housing discrimination, banking deregulation, and disproportionate disinvestment in communities of color to help perpetuate a racial gap in economic opportunity. Studies have found similar patterns in employment and in other sectors. Indeed, on some measures of equal opportunity we are moving backwards as a nation—our public schools, for example, are more racially segregated today than they were 30 years ago.

Obama’s victory does show that, in a single lifetime, transformative change is possible. Yet it also makes clear that significant progress on one front (or even many) does not guarantee similar progress on all. Accepting and understanding these two co-existent ideas is key to fulfilling our nation’s promise in the 21st century. And crafting new rules for our globalized economy that promote greater and more equal opportunity for all is key to our entire nation’s economic recovery, as well as to our long-term prosperity.

susan b anthony amendment

Fary Gover — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 11:01:34 -0800

ADAMS -- Exactly 189 years after Susan B. Anthony was born at her family's home at 67 East Rd., the house was opened to the public on Sunday to show off efforts being made to restore the building with the intention of opening a museum dedicated to the late women's rights activist.
susan b anthony amendment

Stocks are modestly higher as President Barack Obama releases details of his $75 billion mortgage relief plan. The plan is designed to help stabilize the housing market and reduce foreclosures.

Recovering Opportunity

Alan Jenkins — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 19:00:59 -0800

This week President Obama promoted his much-needed economic recovery package in a prime-time news conference and a trip to economically depressed Elkhart, Indiana, where the unemployment rate has topped 15%. Cities and towns like Elkhart are bellwethers for where the nation as a whole could be headed without swift and bold governmental action.

As the President said in Elkhart, “That is not only our moral responsibility - to lend a helping hand to our fellow Americans in times of emergency - but it also makes good economic sense. If you don't have money, you can't spend it. And if people don't spend, our economy will continue to decline.”

There’s another bellwether even closer to home for the nation’s first black president. Unemployment among African Americans rose in January to 12.6 percent, nearly double the current, already high rate of unemployment (6.9 percent) for white Americans. African Americans struggled throughout the 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s to gain equal access to manufacturing jobs, only to see those jobs evaporate with the advent of globalization. With the weak economy, their inroads into other sectors like education, healthcare, and construction are faltering as well.

What is a daunting economic recession for most of the nation is a crushing Great Depression for many of America’s communities of color. Black male unemployment in New York City, for example, was a staggering 49% before the current recession. The Native American unemployment rate on many reservations is upwards of 80%.

The causes of these racial gaps in economic opportunity are multiple. While traditional, overt bigotry has significantly subsided in recent decades, research shows that non-white job candidates receive less accurate information, fewer call-backs, and fewer job offers than do equally qualified whites. Neighborhoods of color, moreover, are more likely to be segregated away from quality jobs, good schools, fair lending and quality healthcare—all steppingstones to economic opportunity. For Native Americans, a string of broken governmental promises has exacerbated other forms of inequality.

And there is the legacy of past intentional exclusion, which kept people of color out of jobs in construction, law enforcement, and other sectors that have been gateways to middle classed status for other groups. Today, those jobs are often filled through word of mouth, family connections, and other informal systems that continue to exclude people of color.

Just as the plight of Elkhart, Indiana is important to our country as a whole, the racial opportunity gap should be a concern of all Americans. Closing the gap would create millions of new workers and new taxpayers, entrepreneurs and businesses, successful students and healthier communities. It would relieve stressed social services and go a long way toward restoring consumer confidence.

And closing the gap is achievable, starting with the economic recovery package. Between the House and Senate versions of the bill there are crucial elements that combine job creation with infrastructure that improves our schools, hospitals, public transportation, and energy independence. Those should be preserved, and targeted to expand opportunity for all.

“Shovel readiness,” the shorthand for projects that are ready go today, is important given the rapid loss of jobs and consumer spending. But blindly funding the projects that states and municipalities have already teed up could reinforce, or even deepen the inequality of opportunity that already exists in many parts of the country.

Investments should be directed toward those shovel-ready projects that both ensure equal-opportunity employment and have the purpose of connecting neglected communities to quality schools, hospitals, and healthy food stores, as well as green jobs for the new economy.

A first step in that direction is for the House-Senate Conference Committee considering the economic recovery bill to ensure that it explicitly directs the president to coordinate equal opportunity enforcement across the myriad agencies that will be administering recovery funds. These provisions have never been well coordinated, and the last administration largely ignored them entirely. Requiring coordination up front will speed the process of review and enforcement that is required by existing laws, while making clear that equal opportunity provisions cannot be waived or ignored as they have been in the past.

Second, with or without a mandate from Congress, the Administration should act now to ensure that investments will be made with equal opportunity in mind. Whereas the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice has historically held this responsibility, the magnitude of recovery spending calls for an inter-agency strategy with attention from key cabinet members. I’ve called before in this column for the adoption of an Opportunity Impact Statement process to ensure both equal and expanded opportunity in government spending, and I continue to view that as one crucial piece of this puzzle.

Finally, it must be acknowledged that investing in “shovel-ready” projects will inevitably be just one part of America’s economic recovery. Great Depression-level unemployment rates existed in many communities of color for years before the current crisis, and expanding opportunity to those communities is key to our nation’s long-term prosperity. Just as the recovery effort is a welcome chance to repair our crumbling infrastructure and invest in energy independence, it can and should be a chance to invest in our shared prosperity. That means complementing shovel-ready projects with some that will take more time, but for which apprenticeships and job retraining can begin immediately.

Despite the historic election of our first African-American president, much work remains to ensure equal opportunity, even as we work to expand economic security for everyone. Pursuing those two goals at once is crucial to being the nation we were meant to be, and to a lasting economic recovery.

Dr. King's Modern Legacy

Alan Jenkins — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 20:13:10 -0800

In the days just before and after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 80th birthday, I had the opportunity to visit two places that are integral to his modern day legacy: Washington, DC and the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans. As I witnessed the inauguration of Barack Obama as the nation’s 44th president, I thought of Dr. King’s admonition, in his 1963 I Have a Dream Speech, that “we cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote.” Despite some continuing problems at the ballot box, this was an election about which Dr. King could be truly satisfied; African Americans turned out in record numbers to elect the nation’s first African-American president.

In the same speech, Dr. King reminded the nation that “when the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the ‘unalienable Rights’ of ‘Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.’”

For anyone who’s visited the Gulf Coast recently, it is obvious that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as the people of the Lower Ninth Ward—overwhelmingly poor and African-American—are concerned. The world witnessed in 2005 how our government left the region’s people to drown in their homes and suffer unspeakable conditions in the New Orleans Convention Center and Superdome. More than three years later, that abandonment continues.

While tourist haunts like the French Quarter appear fully restored, low-income African-American neighborhoods like the Lower Ninth remain decimated. According to Oxfam America, for example, there are no plans to replace or repair almost half of the affordable apartments that were destroyed by the flooding and storms. And “despite the real need,” Oxfam reports, “more than 30,000 low-income homeowners are ineligible for rebuilding assistance and tens of thousands more have not received the level of assistance needed to rebuild their homes.” Workers, so important to the rebuilding of neighborhoods and the economy, can find neither decent housing nor living wages. Hospitals, public housing, and schools in the neediest communities remain shuttered or demolished.

Almost immediately after Hurricane Katrina, the Bush Administration ignored or removed the legal guarantees that could have protected displaced residents and workers. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration waived the enforcement of key health and safety regulations in hurricane-affected areas; the administration waived Davis-Bacon Act provisions requiring federal contractors to pay prevailing wages. Gulf Coast contractors were exempted from key civil rights laws. And, as Advocates for Environmental Human Rights has pointed out, federal law governing responses to national disasters continues to fall far short of international human rights standards that are touted by the US as the proper approach for other nations. Contrary to international requirements, our government has neither recognized nor upheld the right of displaced residents to return to their homes and neighborhoods.

In Dr. King’s speech from the Lincoln Memorial, he “refuse[d] to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt…[or] that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation.” In this remarkable moment, so full of hope and promise, one cannot help but share Dr. King’s belief.

As President Obama moves ahead with an economic recovery package that may exceed $1 trillion, the first shovel should break ground in the Lower Ninth Ward, creating jobs, and housing, and schools, and hospitals, and hope where they are all so desperately needed. And the human rights and opportunity protections that Dr. King fought for should flow back to the Gulf Coast like a mighty stream. I can think of no greater sign of change in America, and no greater embodiment of Dr. King’s legacy, than to bring justice home to the Lower Ninth Ward.

Pre-Inventing History

Alan Jenkins — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 06:56:31 -0700

You’ve got to admire the conservative echo chamber. In the shadow of a financial meltdown that McCain and Obama both (correctly) agree stemmed largely from a lack of governmental oversight of irresponsible corporate behavior, conservative spinmeisters are blaming the meltdown on too many loans to minorities, the Community Reinvestment Act, and the heavy hand of…wait for it…community organizers.

As reported by Media Matters for America, the communications drumbeat is clear, consistent, and growing:

On The O’Reilly Factor, Laura Ingraham claimed that changes to the Community Reinvestment Act instituted by President Clinton thirteen years ago “pushed all these institutions to lend to minorities, many were very risky loans.”
In a column headlined “They Gave Your Mortgage to a Less Qualified Minority,” Ann Coulter tried to draw a connection between the financial crisis and lending to people of color.
On The Radio Factor, Bill O-Reilly chastised Rep. Barney Frank, saying “Who’s the guy that was “oh, if you don’t lend money to poor people, you’re a bigot?”
On Your World with Neil Cavuto, Cavuto wondered aloud why no one had pointed out that “loaning to minorities and risky folks is a disaster.”

In a different variation on that theme, Michele Malkin argued that “illegal immigration, crime enabling banks, and open borders Bush policies fueled the mortgage crisis.” And in a post entitled “Cause and Effect?,” Mark Krikorian noted that Washington Mutual became the largest bank failure in American history just as the bank’s last press release was touting its success in reaching out to Hispanic potential employees, consumers, and communities. Coincidence?

The community organizer strand of the argument has been built more slowly. Bill Conerly wrote that, along with easy money from the Fed and “politicians trying to increase home ownership…[a]dding to the problem were community activists insisting that banks weaken credit standards for poor people.” Conerly concludes that [r]emoving these stimulus factors will pretty much solve the problem for the next couple of decades.”

Stanley Kurtz was more direct, writing in the New York Post not only that “the seeds of today’s financial meltdown lie in the Community Reinvestment Act,” but that the CRA “provided an opening to radical groups like ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) to abuse the law by forcing banks to make hundreds of millions of dollars in ‘subprime’ loans to often uncreditworthy poor and minority customers.” Kurtz credits Barack Obama with personally “training the army of ACORN organizers who participated in [Chicago ACORN’s] drive against Chicago’s banks.”

The twisted narrative is patently false, but highly strategic. It is designed simultaneously to (1) shift perceived responsibility for the crisis from lack of market regulation to rabid overregulation; (2) blame Obama and his community organizing ilk for planting the seeds of the crisis; (3) assure working and middle classed white homeowners—who represent the majority of home foreclosures—that the crisis was actually caused by an irresponsible “other” rather than systemic and regulatory breakdowns; and (4) head off the kind of future, long-term regulation that the next administration (whatever its party) will be rightfully called upon to consider. Now that’s spin you can believe in!

Never mind the facts of the matter. Never mind that most U.S. foreclosures have befallen native-born white folks. Never mind that the Community Reinvestment Act neither includes a racial equity component nor encourages (much less requires) loans to unqualified buyers. Never mind that the CRA does not even regulate many of the practices or financial instruments at the heart of the fiscal crisis, or that the Bush Administration backed away from aggressive enforcement of the Act throughout most of the last decade.

Race is, of course, relevant to the subprime mess, but not in the ways that the conservative pundits would have us believe. African-American and Latino homebuyers were heavily targeted by subprime lenders, irrespective of their income, and disproportionately sold predatory loans. Racial targeting and predatory lending were illegal practices that serious enforcement of fair lending laws can prevent. People of color face stiff barriers to the opportunity for fair credit at market rates. But that’s a far cry from the claim that they got too much credit and, as a minority of distressed borrowers, somehow caused the financial crisis.

The idea that low-income and minority borrowers are either inherently “risky” or the cause of the mortgage meltdown is further belied by the success of Community Development Financial Institutions like Self-Help Federal Credit Union in Durham, NC. These institutions, known as CDFIs, provide credit to people in underserved, low-income markets, including disproportionate numbers of people of color. They combine reasonable interest rates with borrower education, credit counseling, and individualized service, and have exceedingly low rates of default. Unfortunately, however, neither the industry nor federal regulators have applied the lessons of CDFIs to the larger credit sector.

So the far right-wing claims are false. But that doesn’t mean that they’ll be dismissed by a jittery public, especially in the midst of a chaotic and confusing media and political maelstrom. And the conservative drumbeat is a gift that keeps on giving; months from now when Congress and a new Administration sit down to hammer out a 21st century rulebook for the financial sector, the far-right will have laid the groundwork for the argument that extending fair credit opportunity to people who have been irrationally and unfairly excluded from the American Dream somehow hurts the entire economy, as well as the intended beneficiaries.

That’s why it’s so important to tell the real story. Simply debunking myths can have the unintended effect of reinforcing the myth itself (and, yes, I realize that I’ve spent most of this column debunking conservative myths, but I know my audience). Americans are ready to hear and internalize the story of how the real cause of the financial crisis was a disinvestment in the enforcement of basic rules, and the discredited idea that the sector can regulate itself.

Another crucial part of the story is that the Community Reinvestment Act and fair lending laws—combined with rigorous governmental oversight—are part of the solution, not part of the problem. Discrimination against minority homeowners and neighborhoods is real, and addressing that problem will expand opportunity while creating strong communities and growing the economy.

The success of community development financial institutions is another important part of the story. We know from that experience how to foster successful borrowing and homeownership. Doing so is in our entire nation’s interest because, as the financial crisis has made clear, we’re all in it together when it comes to our economy. Expanding opportunity leads to greater shared prosperity for all.

We need to tell that story with twice the discipline and consistency that the far-right is using to tell theirs. In doing so, we’ve got at least one clear advantage. Our story is true.

Opportunity at Risk at the Ballot Box

Alan Jenkins — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 09:17:30 -0700

With Election Day just two months away, the presidential campaigns are (finally) beginning their home stretch. At the same time, voters are starting to pay attention to a dizzying array of ballot initiatives that will also be on the November ballot in many states. Referenda in two states, Colorado and Nebraska, deserve particular attention because, if passed, they would cripple equal opportunity efforts that are especially important in these changing times. The many Coloradans and Nebraskans working to defeat those initiatives are on the right side of history.

Both initiatives are the handiwork of wealthy California businessman Ward Connerly, who has successfully pushed similar initiatives in California, Michigan, and Washington State. Using identical language, the Colorado and Nebraska initiatives would make it illegal for public institutions to consider gender or race in public higher education, employment, or contracting, even in order to overcome identified discrimination or to promote inclusive college campuses.

Connerly had initially promised referenda in eight states—a “Super Tuesday” against opportunity. But several never got off the ground, and his efforts in Arizona, Missouri, and Oklahoma failed when the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and others showed that large numbers of the signatures that Connerly’s forces offered officials were false, inaccurate, or incomplete.

The remaining initiatives in Colorado and Nebraska are wrongheaded. They squelch voluntary efforts to expand opportunity at a time when doing so is crucial to our national progress, and to the common good.

We’ve made great strides as a nation toward the goal of opportunity for all. And each time we’ve expanded opportunity—the idea that everyone deserves a fair chance to achieve his or her full potential—to more Americans, we’ve benefited as a nation of more prosperous, better educated, and more cohesive people. Indeed, opportunity for all is the embodiment of our national motto, e pluribus unum, “from many, one.”

But research and experience show that we’re not there yet. After decades of progress, for example, women in America earn just 77 cents for every dollar that men earn. Predominantly African-American and Latino public schools are far more likely to have fewer resources, more students per classroom, and fewer trained and certified teachers per school. And women and minority entrepreneurs are more likely to face barriers to fair loans, contracts and the “good ole boy” networks that still hold sway in much of the business world. Despite our national progress, too many women and communities of color remain unplugged from opportunity. Given that reality, achieving our national promise requires proactive efforts to expand opportunity for everyone, not just a pledge to do no harm.

The Colorado and Nebraska referenda will have far-reaching negative effects. Outreach to encourage women and other students from underrepresented groups to apply to state universities would become suspect, as would recruitment of an inclusive public workforce. State and local efforts to ensure equal opportunity in employment, business, and commerce would be hampered.

Mandating that kind of straitjacket when our universities, corporations, and people are working hard to adapt to an increasingly globalized economic environment just doesn't make sense. Connerly's initiatives are a bad choice for our states, our nation, and the common good.

When did lawful dissent become "terror"

Philip Palij — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 13:15:03 -0700

So here it is America, vegetarians and left wing groups have been defined in mind of the FBI and the state as suitable candidates for observation, surveillance, illegal arrest and detention. The security paradigm has changed.

The Mugabe tactics in Rhodesia are here on your streets, now, at the hands of the state. The darkness is coming.