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tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-66337127095743181232016-07-22T11:38:17.969-07:00black left unityAnalyzing/Discussing The Burning Issues of the Moment for the Black Liberation Movement.black left unity networkhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-6633712709574318123.post-25214941020936275232016-07-16T06:22:00.001-07:002016-07-16T06:22:15.773-07:00CARIBBEAN GOVERNMENTS MUST INTERVENE IN DEFENSE OF OUR AFRICAN- AMERICAN BROTHERS AND SISTERS!

INTERNATIONAL NETWORK IN DEFENSE OF HUMANITY

(CARIBBEAN CHAPTER)

PAN- AFRICAN COALITION OF  ORGANIZATIONS (PACO)

JOINT STATEMENT

CARIBBEAN GOVERNMENTS MUST INTERVENE IN DEFENSE OF OUR AFRICAN- AMERICAN BROTHERS AND SISTERS!

The murders, earlier this month, of two young African-American men -- Philando Castile and Alton Sterling -- by white American police officers, should bring home to all African-Barbadian and African-Caribbean people the critical importance of the United Nations International Decade For People of African Descent, and of our duty to make full use of this UN sanctioned international programme to come to the defense of our beleaguered African-American brothers and sisters.

These two recent US-based genocidal outrages come at a time when right-thinking people all over the world are already expressing shock and horror at the phenomenon of white American police officers callously and with regularity killing literally hundreds of African-American men, women and children every year, and the United States Criminal Justice system routinely declaring that the killers are not even required to stand trial for their wrong-doing!

Indeed, the U S Justice System has been sending such loud and clear messages that Black, Brown and Native-American lives do NOT matter, that it was not surprising that an ordinary white civilian racist in Charleston, South Carolina would get it into his head to enter the sanctuary of an historic African-American church and assassinate black men, women and children who were in a posture of prayer!

But the inherent message of the United Nations International Decade For People Of African Descent - which began on 1st January 2015- is that the African- American people of the United States of America are our black Barbadian and Caribbean kith and kin!

The nine black American men, women and children who were so brutally murdered in Charleston, as well as such recent victims as Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, Sandra Bland, Mike Browne, Freddie Gray, Philando Castile, Alton Sterling and so many others-- far too numerous to list--are our "brothers and sisters"!

And they are our brothers and sisters because their African ancestors were brought to the Americas in the same slave ships that brought our African ancestors, and were subjected to the same architectonic socialization experiences of chattel slavery and colonialism in "Plantation America" that our ancestors were subjected to on the plantations of the Caribbean.

The only truly significant difference between ourselves and our African-American brothers and sisters is that we are Blacks in a black majority society, while they are Blacks in a white majority society!

This fundamental difference is responsible for the fact that we possess pre-dominantly black or Afro/Asian governments, legislators, nation states, police forces, judicial officers, diplomatic representatives, and the list goes on, while they remain a relatively powerless and under-represented minority in the racist white majority institutions of the USA.

Furthermore, it has now become absolutely clear that the traditional White American establishment that orchestrated the genocide of the Native American population and the anti-Black slavery and slave trade of the 18th and 19th centuries has no intention-- if they can help it-- of ever permitting the black descendants of their former slaves ( or the Native American people for that matter) to ever be truly and fully free in the USA !

Thus, the very existence of the United Nations International Decade For People of African Descent impels us as Black people to come to this profound understanding of the predicament of our African-American brothers and sisters, and to the responsibilities that we must undertake as a result of that horrific predicament.

And the clearest such responsibility is that we black Barbadian and Caribbean people who are racial majorities in our national societies, and who possess predominantly black or Afro/Asian nation-states,national governments, and diplomatic seats at the United Nations and other high councils of international decision-making, are duty-bound to speak up for and to defend the rights of our African-American brothers and sisters!

We simply can no longer allow our interest in our brothers' plight to be restricted because they are supposedly citizens of a different nation! No! We who are joined together by deeply rooted ties of ancestry, kinship and affinity, must not permit artificial national barriers to keep us apart.

The time has therefore come when the Prime Ministers, the Ministers of Foreign Affairs, and the various Ambassadors and consular officers of our Caribbean nations must accept that they have a duty to speak up for and defend our African-American brothers and sisters!

Just as the American State Department, Secretary of State , President and Vice-President believe that they possess a right to intervene in and pass judgement on our national domestic affairs, our Caribbean high officials of state must assert an even greater right to intervene in and pass judgement on the existential predicament of our African-American brothers and sisters within the national arena of the USA.

It is high time that our premier officials of state take meaningful initiatives to place the plight of our African-American brothers and sisters before such high level international human rights bodies as the Inter-American Human Rights Commission and the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, and indeed, before the highest democratic international policy and law making body of them all--- the United Nations General Assembly.

Indeed, this was the approach advocated by the late great Malcom X when, in the 1960's , he established his Organization of Afro-American Unity, and commenced on a campaign to "internationalize" the domestic civil rights struggle of the African-American people by having the Governments of the newly independent African nations take the plight of the black American people before relevant international bodies.

It is also high time that our premier officials of state intervene with United States President Barack Obama and call upon him to do his duty to the African-American people of the USA!

The sad reality is that President Obama has spectacularly FAILED— during his Presidency— to address the issue of the deeply entrenched anti-Black racism that exists in the bowels of American society and in the very DNA of the institutions of the USA.

Even with these most recent racist murders, President Obama has shamelessly side-stepped his duty to represent the African-American cause, and, in the case of the South Carolina massacre for example, has sought to characterize the massacre as being related to the ease of access to guns in the USA, rather than to pinpoint the fact that it was underpinned by the trenchant anti-Black racism that exists in U S society .

Way back in the 1960's, the late Lyndon B Johnson, a white American president, distinguished himself on the race issue by establishing the Kerner Commission to enquire into the endemic racist conditions that were at the heart of the race-based civil disorders of the mid-1960's and to propose possible solutions. What has President Obama done on the issue of anti-Black racism since becoming President? The tragic answer is:– nothing of consequence!

Truly, the time has come for us to move forward on this issue! The advent of the United Nations Decade For People of African Descent says to us that the time has come for us as Black people to express solidarity with each other right across the Black Diaspora! The time has come for us to collectively declare an attitude of zero tolerance towards all elements of anti-Black racism and racial discrimination!

The time has also come for us to address the United States Government about this issue of the racial oppression of our African-American brothers and sisters, and to use our political leaders and diplomats to take this issue before the United Nations organization and other international human rights bodies!

Quite frankly, in this U N International Decade For People of African Descent, the time has come for us to undertake powerful trans-national campaigns of activism to finally and permanently destroy the centuries- old demon of institutionalized anti-Black racism!

On behalf of the Caribbean Chapter of the International Network In Defense of Humanity and the Barbados-based Pan-African Coalition of Organizations (PACO) we hereby call upon the political leaders and Governments of the Caribbean to accept and embrace this new understanding of their duty to our African-American brothers and sisters, and to act upon it with a sense of urgency!

SIGNED on behalf of the International Network In Defense of Humanity (Caribbean Chapter) by:- DAVID COMISSIONG

SIGNED on behalf of the Pan-African Coalition of Organizations (PACO) by:- WAYNE "ONKPHRA" WELLS

ENDORSED by:-

Felipe Noguera (Trinidad & Tobago)

Margaret Harris (Barbados)

Dr. Rodney Worrell (Barbados)

Ivana Cardinale (Venezuela)

Professor Keith Ellis (Canada)

Philip Springer (Barbados)

Lalu Hanuman (Guyana)

Dr. Myrna Belgrave (Barbados)

Suzanne Laurent (Martinique)

Bobby Clarke (Barbados)

Roger Wareham (USA)

David Denny (Barbados)

Baba John Howell (Barbados)

 Sistas Defying/Taking on the Cops in the Tradition of Our Past Sista FreedomFighters!

SOURCE: Clement Payne Chambers <clementpaynechambers gmail.com=""></clementpaynechambers>

black left unity networkhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-6633712709574318123.post-52846451129319237422016-07-11T06:39:00.002-07:002016-07-11T06:39:51.831-07:00 Let Us Build a Powerful Black Liberation Movement to Wage a Broad Fight Back for Radical Change!
 Let's Build a Powerful Black Liberation Movement to Wage a Broad Fight Back for Radical Change!

black left unity networkhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-6633712709574318123.post-25187742824212215952016-06-29T08:07:00.004-07:002016-06-29T08:07:34.753-07:00Black America & White America: Worlds Apart On Race/Racism
June 27, 2016- pewsocialtrends.org

On Views of Race and Inequality, Blacks and Whites Are Worlds Apart

About four-in-ten blacks are doubtful that the U.S. will ever achieve racial equality

-------------

Almost eight years after Barack Obama's election as the nation's first black president –an event that engendered a sense of optimism among many Americans about the future of race relations1 – a series of flashpoints around the U.S. has exposed deep racial divides and reignited a national conversation about race. A new Pew Research Center survey finds profound differences between black and white adults in their views on racial discrimination, barriers to black progress and the prospects for change. Blacks, far more than whites, say black people are treated unfairly across different realms of life, from dealing with the police to applying for a loan or mortgage. And, for many blacks, racial equality remains an elusive goal.

An overwhelming majority of blacks (88%) say the country needs to continue making changes for blacks to have equal rights with whites, but 43% are skeptical that such changes will ever occur. An additional 42% of blacks believe that the country will eventually make the changes needed for blacks to have equal rights with whites, and just 8% say the country has already made the necessary changes.

A much lower share of whites (53%) say the country still has work to do for blacks to achieve equal rights with whites, and only 11% express doubt that these changes will come. Four-in-ten whites believe the country will eventually make the changes needed for blacks to have equal rights, and about the same share (38%) say enough changes have already been made.

These findings are based on a national survey by Pew Research Center conducted Feb. 29-May 8, 2016, among 3,769 adults (including 1,799 whites, 1,004 blacks and 654 Hispanics).2 The survey – and the analysis of the survey findings – is centered primarily around the divide between blacks and whites and on the treatment of black people in the U.S. today. In recent years, this centuries-old divide has garnered renewed attention following the deaths of unarmed black Americans during encounters with the police, as well as a racially motivated shooting that killed nine black parishioners at a church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015.

The survey finds that black and white adults have widely different perceptions about what life is like for blacks in the U.S. For example, by large margins, blacks are more likely than whites to say black people are treated less fairly in the workplace (a difference of 42 percentage points), when applying for a loan or mortgage (41 points), in dealing with the police (34 points), in the courts (32 points), in stores or restaurants (28 points), and when voting in elections (23 points). By a margin of at least 20 percentage points, blacks are also more likely than whites to say racial discrimination (70% vs. 36%), lower quality schools (75% vs. 53%) and lack of jobs (66% vs. 45%) are major reasons that blacks may have a harder time getting ahead than whites.

More broadly, blacks and whites offer different perspectives of the current state of race relations in the U.S. White Americans are evenly divided, with 46% saying race relations are generally good and 45% saying they are generally bad. In contrast, by a nearly two-to-one margin, blacks are more likely to say race relations are bad (61%) rather than good (34%). Blacks are also about twice as likely as whites to say too little attention is paid to race and racial issues in the U.S. these days (58% vs. 27%). About four-in-ten whites (41%) – compared with 22% of blacks – say there is too much focus on race and racial issues.

Blacks and whites also differ in their opinions about the best approach for improving race relations: Among whites, more than twice as many say that in order to improve race relations, it's more important to focus on what different racial and ethnic groups have in common (57%) as say the focus should be on what makes each group unique (26%). Among blacks, similar shares say the focus should be on commonalities (45%) as say it should be on differences (44%).

When asked specifically about the impact President Barack Obama has had on race relations in the U.S., a majority of Americans give the president credit for at least trying to make things better, but a quarter say he has made race relations worse. Blacks and whites differ significantly in their assessments. Some 51% of blacks say Obama has made progress toward improving race relations, and an additional 34% say he has tried but failed to make progress. Relatively few blacks (5%) say Obama has made race relations worse, while 9% say he hasn't addressed the issue at all.

Among whites, 28% say Obama has made progress toward improving race relations and 24% say he has tried but failed to make progress. But a substantial share of whites (32%) say Obama has made race relations worse. This is driven largely by the views of white Republicans, 63% of whom say Obama has made race relations worse (compared with just 5% of white Democrats).

When asked about their views of Black Lives Matter, the activist movement that first came to national prominence following the 2014 shooting death of an unarmed black 18-year-old by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, roughly two-thirds (65%) of blacks express support, including 41% who strongly support it. Among whites, four-in-ten say they support the Black Lives Movement at least somewhat, and this is particularly the case among white Democrats and those younger than 30.

Across the survey's findings, there are significant fault lines within the white population – perhaps none more consistent than the partisan divide. For example, among whites, Democrats and Republicans differ dramatically on the very salience of race issues in this country. About six-in-ten (59%) white Republicans say too much attention is paid to race and racial issues these days, while only 21% of Democrats agree.  For their part, a 49% plurality of white Democrats say too little attention is paid to race these days, compared with only 11% of Republicans.

And while about eight-in-ten (78%) white Democrats say the country needs to continue making changes to achieve racial equality between whites and blacks, just 36% of white Republicans agree; 54% of white Republicans believe the country has already made the changes necessary for blacks to have equal rights with whites.

How blacks and whites view the state of race in America
There are large gaps between blacks and whites in their views of race relations and racial inequality in the United States. Explore how the opinions of blacks and whites vary by age, education, gender and party identification in key questions from our report.

The economic realities of black and white households

Trends in key economic and demographic indicators provide some context for the experiences and outlook of blacks today. While there has been clear progress in closing the white-black gap in some areas – particularly when it comes to high school completion rates – decades-old black-white gaps in economic well-being persist and have even widened in some cases.

According to a new Pew Research Center analysis of data from the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2014 the median adjusted income for households headed by blacks was $43,300, and for whites it was $71,300. 3 Blacks also lag behind whites in college completion, but even among adults with a bachelor's degree, blacks earned significantly less in 2014 than whites ($82,300 for households headed by a college-educated black compared with $106,600 for comparable white households).

The racial gap extends to household wealth – a measure where the gap has widened since the Great Recession. In 2013, the most recent year available, the median net worth of households headed by whites was roughly 13 times that of black households ($144,200 for whites compared with $11,200 for blacks).

For most Americans, household wealth is closely tied to home equity, and there are sharp and persistent gaps in homeownership between blacks and whites. In 2015, 72% of white household heads owned a home, compared with 43% of black household heads.

And on the flipside of wealth – poverty – racial gaps persist, even though the poverty rate for blacks has come down significantly since the mid-1980s. Blacks are still more than twice as likely as whites to be living in poverty (26% compared with 10% in 2014).

Blacks and whites are divided on reasons that blacks may be struggling to get ahead

Despite these economic realities, when asked about the financial situation of blacks compared with whites today, about four-in-ten blacks either say that both groups are about equally well off (30%) or that blacks are better off than whites financially (8%). Still, about six-in-ten (58%) blacks say that, as a group, they are worse off than whites.

Among whites, a plurality (47%) say blacks are worse off financially, while 37% say blacks are about as well off as whites and 5% say blacks are doing better than whites.

Blacks and whites with a bachelor's degree are more likely than those with less education to say blacks are worse off financially than whites these days. Roughly eight-in-ten (81%) blacks with a four-year college degree say this, compared with 61% of blacks with only some college education and 46% of blacks with a high school diploma or less. In a similar pattern, about two-thirds (66%) of white college graduates say blacks are worse off financially than whites, while fewer among those who attended college but did not receive a degree (47%) and those who did not attend college (29%) say the same.

When asked about the underlying reasons that blacks may be having a harder time getting ahead than whites, large majorities of black adults point to societal factors. Two-thirds or more blacks say failing schools (75%), racial discrimination (70%) and a lack of jobs (66%) are major reasons that black people may have a harder time getting ahead these days.

On each of these items, the views of blacks differ significantly from those of whites. But, by far, the biggest gap comes on racial discrimination, where only 36% of whites say this is a major reason that blacks may be struggling to get ahead, 34 percentage points lower than the share of blacks who say the same.

The views of blacks and whites are more closely aligned when it comes to the impact that family instability (57% and 55%, respectively) and a lack of good role models (51% and 52%) has on black progress. However, the relative ranking of these items varies among blacks and whites. While whites rank family instability and a lack of good role models above or on a par with societal factors as major reasons that blacks may have a harder time getting ahead than whites, fewer blacks say these items are major reasons than say the same about lower quality schools, discrimination, and lack of jobs.

Blacks are more likely than whites to say a lack of motivation to work hard may be holding blacks back: 43% of black adults and 30% of whites say this is a major reason blacks are having a harder time getting ahead than whites. 4

More whites and blacks say individual discrimination is a bigger problem than institutional racism

On balance, the public thinks that when it comes to discrimination against black people in the U.S. today, discrimination that is based on the prejudice of individual people is a bigger problem than discrimination that is built into the nation's laws and institutions. This is the case among both blacks and whites, but while whites offer this opinion by a large margin (70% to 19%), blacks are more evenly divided (48% to 40%).

Still, large majorities of black adults say that blacks in this country are treated unfairly in a range of institutional settings – from the criminal justice system, to the workplace to banks and financial institutions.

Fully 84% of blacks say that black people in this country are treated less fairly than whites in dealing with the police, and three-quarters say blacks are treated less fairly in the courts.

Roughly two-thirds of black adults say that blacks are treated less fairly than whites when applying for a loan or mortgage (66%) and in the workplace (64%). Somewhat smaller shares – though still upwards of four-in-ten – see unfair treatment for blacks in stores and restaurants (49%) and when voting in elections (43%).

Across all of these realms, whites are much less likely than blacks to perceive unequal treatment – with differences ranging from 23 to 42 percentage points.

Personal experiences with discrimination

A majority of blacks (71%) say that they have experienced discrimination or been treated unfairly because of their race or ethnicity. Roughly one-in-ten (11%) say this happens to them on a regular basis, while 60% say they have experienced this rarely or from time to time.

Among blacks, men and women are equally likely to report having personally experienced racial discrimination, and there are no large gaps by age. There is an educational divide, however: Blacks with at least some college experience (81%) are much more likely than blacks who never attended college (59%) to say they have been discriminated against because of their race.

Experiences with racial discrimination are far less common among whites, but a sizable minority (30%) of white adults report that they have been discriminated against or treated unfairly because of their race or ethnicity. Only 2% say this happens to them regularly and 28% say it occurs less frequently. Whites who say they have a lot of contact with blacks are more likely to say they've been discriminated against because of their race than are whites who have less contact with blacks.

While some whites report being treated unfairly at times because of their race, the overall impact is relatively minor. Only 5% of whites say their race or ethnicity has made it harder for them to succeed in life. A majority of whites (62%) say their race hasn't made much of difference in their ability to succeed, and 31% say their race has made things easier for them.

College-educated whites are especially likely to see their race as an advantage: 47% say being white has made it easier for them to succeed.  By comparison, 31% of whites with some college education and 17% of those with a high school diploma or less say their race has made things easier for them. White Democrats (49%) are also among the most likely to say that their race or ethnicity has made it easier for them to get ahead in life.

For many blacks, the cumulative impact of discrimination has had a markedly negative impact on their lives. Four-in-ten blacks say their race has made it harder for them to succeed in life. Roughly half (51%) say their race hasn't made a difference in their overall success, and just 8% say being black has made things easier.

There is a sharp educational divide among blacks on the overall impact their race has had on their ability to succeed. Fully 55% of blacks with a four-year college degree say their race has made it harder for them to succeed in life. Some 45% of blacks who attended college but did not receive a bachelor's degree say the same. Among blacks with a high school education or less, a far lower share (29%) say their race has made it harder for them to succeed. A majority of this group (60%) say their race hasn't made a difference.

About half of blacks say people have acted like they were suspicious of them

Unfair treatment can come in different forms. Roughly half of blacks (47%) say that in the past 12 months someone has acted as if they were suspicious of them because of their race or ethnicity. Many blacks also report feeling like others have questioned their intelligence. Some 45% say that in the past 12 months people have treated them as if they were not smart because of their race or ethnicity.

Roughly one-in-five blacks (21%) say they have been treated unfairly by an employer in the past year because of their race or ethnicity, and a similar share (18%) report having been unfairly stopped by the police during this period.

Black men are more likely than black women to say that people have treated them with suspicion (52% vs. 44%). And they are more likely to say they have been unfairly stopped by the police (22% vs. 15%).

Being treated with suspicion and being treated as if they are not intelligent are more common experiences for black adults who attended college than for those who did not. For example, 52% of those with at least some college education say that, in the past 12 months, someone has treated them as if they thought they weren't smart because of their race or ethnicity, compared with 37% of those with a high school diploma or less.

Among blacks, widespread support for the Black Lives Matter movement

Most blacks (65%) express support for the Black Lives Matter movement: 41% strongly support it, and 24% say they support it somewhat. Some 12% of blacks say they oppose Black Lives Matter (including 4% who strongly oppose it). Even so, blacks have somewhat mixed views about the extent to which the Black Lives Matter movement will be effective, in the long run, in helping blacks achieve equality. Most (59%) think it will be effective, but only 20% think it will be very effective. About one-in-five (21%) say it won't be too effective or won't be effective at all in the long run.

Blacks with a bachelor's degree or more are among the most skeptical that the Black Lives Matter movement will ultimately help bring about racial equality. About three-in-ten (31%) of those with a bachelor's degree or more education say that, in the long run, the movement won't be too effective or won't be effective at all, compared with about two-in-ten adults with less education.

Granted, many blacks are skeptical overall that the country will eventually make the changes needed to bring about racial equality. But even among those who think change will eventually come, only 23% say Black Lives Matter will be very effective in helping bring about equality.

For their part, whites have mixed views of the Black Lives Matter movement. Four-in-ten whites say they support the movement (14% strongly support and 26% somewhat support). And about a third (34%) of whites say, in the long run, the Black Lives Matter movement will be at least somewhat effective in helping blacks achieve equality.

Young white adults are more enthusiastic about Black Lives Matter than middle-aged and older whites. Six-in-ten of those ages 18 to 29 say they support it, compared with 46% of whites ages 30 to 49, 37% of whites ages 50 to 64, and 26% of whites 65 and older. Young whites are also somewhat more likely than their older counterparts to say that the Black Lives Matter movement will be at least somewhat effective in the long run (47% vs. 37%, 32% and 26%, respectively).

Whites' views on Black Lives Matter also differ significantly by party identification. Some 64% of white Democrats support the movement, including 29% who do so strongly. One-in-five white Republicans and 42% of white independents say they support the Black Lives Matter movement (4% of Republicans and 11% of independents strongly support it). White Democrats are also much more likely than Republicans and independents to say that the movement will ultimately be at least somewhat effective in bringing about racial equality (53% vs. 20% and 34%, respectively).

When asked how well they feel they understand the goals of the Black Lives Matter movement, blacks are much more likely than whites to say they understand it very or fairly well. Even so, about one-in-five blacks (19%) say they don't have a good understanding of its goals, compared with 29% of whites. But general awareness of Black Lives Matter is widespread among whites and blacks: Overall, 81% of blacks and 76% of whites have heard at least a little about the movement, including about half or more of each group (56% and 48%, respectively), who say they have heard a lot.

Many blacks and whites say community engagement is key to bringing about racial equality

More than four-in-ten blacks (48%) and whites (46%) say that working with community members to solve problems in their community would be a very effective tactic for groups striving to help blacks achieve equality. But the two groups disagree about the effectiveness of some other tactics.

In particular, while nearly four-in-ten (38%) black adults say working to get more black people elected to office would be very effective, just 24% of whites say the same. Blacks are also more likely than whites to say it would be very effective for groups working to help blacks achieve equality to bring people of different racial backgrounds together to talk about race (41% vs. 34%). Similarly, blacks see more value than whites in organizing protests and rallies, although relatively few blacks view this as a very effective way to bring about change (19% vs. 7% of whites).

The remainder of this report examines in greater detail the public's views of the state of race relations and racial inequality in the U.S. Chapter 1 looks at some key demographic and economic indicators where blacks have made progress or lag behind other racial and ethnic groups. Chapter 2 focuses on views about the current state of race relations and its trajectory, as well as the job Obama has done on this issue. Chapter 3 examines the extent to which Americans think the country has made – or will eventually make – the changes necessary for blacks to achieve equal rights with whites. It also looks at perceptions about the way blacks and whites are treated across many realms of American life. Chapter 4 focuses on what the public sees as effective strategies for groups and organizations working to promote racial equality and explores attitudes toward the Black Lives Matter movement and other organizations that strive to bring about equality for black Americans. Chapter 5 looks at personal experiences with discrimination as well as perceptions about the impact race and gender have had in one's life. Chapter 6 describes the outlook and experiences of blacks, whites and Hispanics, particularly as they relate to personal finances.

Other key findings

About half (48%) of whites say they are very satisfied with the quality of life in their community, compared with about a third (34%) of blacks. This gap persists after controlling for income. For example, 57% of whites with an annual family income of $75,000 or more report that they are very satisfied with the quality of life in their community; just 38% of blacks in the same income group say the same.

Blacks are far more likely than whites to say they have experienced financial hardship in the past 12 months. About four-in-ten (41%) blacks say they have had trouble paying their bills, and about a quarter (23%) say they have gotten food from a food bank or food pantry during this period. Among whites, 25% say they have struggled to pay their bills, and 8% report having sought out food from a food bank in the past 12 months.

Black men are far more likely than white men to say their gender has made it harder for them to get ahead in life (20% vs. 5%, respectively). Among women, similar shares of blacks (28%) and whites (27%) say their gender has set them back.

About eight-in-ten (81%) blacks say they feel at least somewhat connected to a broader black community in the U.S., including 36% who feel very connected. Blacks who feel a strong sense of connection to a broader black community are more likely than those who don't to say that in the past 12 months they have made a financial contribution to, attended an event sponsored by, or volunteered their time to a group or organization working specifically to improve the lives of black Americans.

Majorities of blacks say the NAACP (77%), the National Urban League (66%) and the Congressional Black Caucus (63%) have been at least somewhat effective in helping blacks achieve equality in this country. Only about three-in-ten or fewer say each of these groups has been very effective, likely reflecting, at least in part, the widespread view among blacks that the country has work to do for blacks to achieve equal rights with whites.

-----------------

Terminology

A Pew Research Center survey conducted shortly after the November 2008 presidential election among 1,500 voters found that 52% of all voters said Barack Obama's election would lead to better race relations (including 49% of white voters and 75% of black voters). ↩

The survey includes an oversample of black and Hispanic adults. For more details about how the survey was conducted, see the Methodology section of the report. While the overview of the report focuses on the differences of opinion between black and white Americans, the views of Hispanics are presented throughout the remainder of the report. Due to small sample sizes, the views of Asians and other racial groups that make up a relatively small share of the U.S. population are not shown separately, but they are included in the overall numbers for all adults. Demographic data on Asians is analyzed separately in Chapter 1, which relies on data from the U.S. Census Bureau. ↩

Median household income figures have been adjusted to 2014 dollars and are scaled to a three-person household. ↩

White responses to this item may have been affected, at least in part, by social desirability bias, or the tendency of people to give what they believe is the socially acceptable answer. In this case, 35% of whites who believed they were speaking with a white interviewer said lack of motivation is a major reason blacks may have a harder time getting ahead; about one-in-five (21%) whites who believed their interviewer was black gave this answer. ↩

black left unity networkhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-6633712709574318123.post-22396138286691607062016-06-28T09:14:00.002-07:002016-06-28T09:14:19.117-07:00 American Ugliness: The Racist/Sexist Reality of the Post-Pulse Massacre
 American Ugliness: Queer and Trans People of Color Say "Not in Our Names"

 Kassandra Shore and Candice Darden console each other while gathered with thousands of mourners at a vigil for the victims of the Pulse nightclub shooting, outside City Hall in Los Angeles, June 13, 2016. (Photo: Monica Almeida / The New York Times)

By Jack Aponte, Truthout | Op-Ed
 Tuesday, 14 June 2016

I had bad dreams Sunday night. I'm not surprised. A roommate broke the news of the Orlando shooting to my partner and me on Sunday morning; from then on my day was dominated by shock, anger and grief. I was almost surprised when I finally managed to calm down enough to lie down in bed, close my eyes and be still. Such a day does not make for sweet dreams.

 In my dream, my partner and I had just gotten off a plane and were walking through an eerily empty airport. The people around us were staring up at TV screens showing clips that looked like footage from the Persian Gulf War that had terrified me as a small child. But I knew these were images of new bombings in Iraq -- bombings aimed at ISIS (also known as Daesh) but resulting in the same massive loss of lives that has characterized the wars I've seen the United States wage in my lifetime.

 My dream self knew right away that the bombings were in retaliation for the shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando. I grew enraged. I began to yell at the people around us: "This is horrible! The United States is horrible! This is the worst country in the world!" And then I awoke.

As of now, no new wars have been declared, though in this world of war without end it becomes difficult to distinguish between the end of one conflict and the beginning of the next. That said, it took no time at all for the main parties' presidential candidates to begin rattling their sabers at the usual specters of ISIS and "radical Islamism," as Hillary Clinton put it.

My community must say "not in our names" to prevent our tragedy from being co-opted for others' violent, imperialistic agendas.

Even Bernie Sanders jumped on the bandwagon, using the tragedy as a moment to call for the destruction of ISIS, despite the fact that by all appearances Omar Mateen was a lone wolf who seems not to have understood the differences between the ideologically opposed Islamist military organizations -- ISIS, al-Qaeda and Hezbollah -- that he admired. While police assert that Mateen mentioned ISIS in his 911 call before the massacre, there is no evidence that he was trained, directed or at all in contact with ISIS or any other foreign militias or radical organizations; all he got from them was inspiration.

 But Mateen didn't need to look to ISIS for inspiration for his attack on Pulse, a LGBT nightclub that he targeted on its "Latin Night," when it was populated primarily by queer and trans Latinx and Black people. The homophobia, transphobia, racism, sexism and violence that Mateen reportedly exhibited on many occasions exist in abundance right here in the United States, where Mateen was born and raised.

 Black queer writer adrienne maree brown speaks to this in her reflections on what happened in Orlando. She first cites an older piece of hers -- written fittingly on the 10th anniversary of 9/11 -- in which she speaks of the "bloody birthright" with which Americans are born:

you cannot shirk responsibility for this country
you cannot shake off these atrocities
its a bloody birthright
all children are born into blood

She goes on to reflect that as "a post-nationalist american-born revolutionary," she and others who share her hopes and visions of a better world "need to do the hard work of taking on america, and shaping the future that can grow from this place":

we are born with our dignity
we look beautiful weeping, waging love
when scared we sashay the tar streets
press together in the steaming darkness
sweating out freedom songs, love songs
this
is america

Yes, this is America. Omar Mateen's access to guns, his idolization of cops and the New York City Police Department specifically, his racism and his physical abuse of his ex-wife are all very American. But perhaps none of the revelations of the complexity of Mateen's rage and hatred is more American than the hatred he may have directed at himself. On Sunday afternoon, I spotted the headline "Drag Queen: Anti-Gay Terrorist Omar Mateen Was My Friend," the first of a series of articles and revelations that indicate that Mateen might have been somewhere on the queer spectrum himself; that he was not always violent and antagonistic toward queer and trans people; that something had changed in him. Immediately upon reading that first headline my thoughts jumped to the 1999 film American Beauty, in which a retired Marine Corps colonel beats and kicks out his teenage son for perceived homosexuality, kisses Kevin Spacey's character in a moment of weakness and self-revelation, and then removes a gun from his collection and murders the object of his affection.

 Yes, this is indeed America.

 But we who are born with the bloody birthright of being American have a choice about what we take from the tragedy in Orlando and where we go from here. Our so-called political leaders spout the expected lines about radical Islam, but Latinx and Black queer and trans folks and our allies are choosing a different path. Queer and trans people I've spoken to, queer and trans organizations, and Latinx and Black folks are gathering together for comfort, community and solidarity as we grieve and mourn the dead.
 (Image: Micah Bazant)
 In my experience, we're not gathering because we're more afraid of homophobic or transphobic violence than we were before Saturday night's atrocity. The fear that I've heard most of my friends and community express is the fear of the violence that the US government may well cynically and hypocritically enact in the names of Latinx and Black queer and trans folks who, on any other day, would at best be ignored by most of these politicians.

 Queer and trans people of color are rejecting the calls for violence being made in our name and are standing in solidarity with our Muslim siblings -- many of whom are also queer and trans. Countless statements released by organizations that center queer and trans people of color in recent days have condemned any Islamophobia in our names.
 From the Transgender Law Center:

In this first moment of shock and grief, we call on our community not to promote Islamophobia and unfounded assumptions. What we do know is that one need not look outside of the U.S. mainstream to find a climate of extremely violent rhetoric, systems, and laws and policies targeting LGBT people of color.

From the National Queer Asian Pacific Islander Alliance:

The acts of an individual are not representative of any one ethnicity, race, or faith. With Islamophobia in our country growing to greater and more dangerous levels, it is ever more important to be intentional about what narratives we choose to lift up.... For those of us who are LGBTQ and Muslim, we wait to see which of our identities we will be more fearful of disclosing in a world that questions our existence and intentions daily.

From Trikone, a nonprofit organization for LGBTQ people of South Asian descent:

There will be attempts to fuel this into a fire. There will be attempts to divide our community with ideologies and dialogues. We urge you to use caution and refuse to participate in such unnecessary backlash. It will only delay the healing process.

 From a coalition of Atlanta-based groups that includes the Georgia Trans Latina Coalition, Latino LinQ, NAESM, SisterLove and many others:

We do not live in silos. We are all deeply connected through the various intersections of race, gender, ability, sexuality, religion, and background and we call for unity against violence and solidarity in love. We must take care of each other in our pain, with a commitment not to return violence with violence either in word or deed. Instead, we must advance ideas of inclusion, affirmation and understanding. This massacre occurred in a time in our country where Islamophobia is an increasing threat. We urge people to refrain from using this tragedy to further bigotry or hatred towards the Muslim community; let it ignite in us the commitment to work against hatred and violence directed at LGBTQ people and all people.

And from Black Lives Matter:

Homegrown terror is the product of a long history of colonialism, including state and vigilante violence. It is the product of white supremacy and capitalism, which deforms the spirit and fuels interpersonal violence.... To honor our dead, and fight like hell for the living, we need a new vision for safety that prioritizes human rights and does not facilitate deadly violence. We need a world that realizes that the word "terrorist" is not synonymous with Muslim, any more than "criminal" is synonymous with Black. The enemy is now and has always been the four threats of white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, and militarism ... Until these systems are defeated, until anti-Blackness no longer fuels anti-Muslim and anti-queer and trans bigotry, exploitation, and exclusion -- we can never be truly free.

Once again, my community must say "not in our names" to prevent our tragedy from being co-opted for others' violent, imperialistic agendas. Last time, the community was New York; in the years after 9/11, we gathered in the streets to plead to our government and our nation that we not allow the September 11, 2001, attacks to be used as justification for the disproportionate, indiscriminate wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. People who had lost loved ones in the attacks, who had made it out of the towers covered in soot and debris, whose lives had been entirely displaced and disrupted by the attacks, who lived looking at that empty hole in the skyline day after day -- we gathered, chanted and marched countless times to plead with the rest of the far-less-impacted US population that they not use our tragedy as an excuse to wreak more injustice and death on the world.

 Now it is Latinx, Black and other queer and trans people of color who are rising up and through our tragedy, trying to lift our voices above the din of "terror" and "jihad" and "ISIS" to say no more, not again, not in our names this time. Not that we are under any delusions that this nation would go to war over 100 dead and wounded queer and trans people, much less Black and Brown ones; in fact, I already see the fact that this was an attack on Latinx and Black queer and trans communities being subsumed by the theme of terror, an easier sell to our largely homophobic and transphobic US society. We will continue to lift our voices against our erasure in our own time of tragedy, and against the physical and verbal violence that many in our nation would gladly direct at us, queer and trans people of color, were their hate not being carefully directed toward Muslims instead.

Jack Aponte

Jack Aponte is a gender/queer Boricua living in Oakland, California. Follow them at @jackaponte.

black left unity networkhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-6633712709574318123.post-18851195480996421502016-06-22T07:48:00.000-07:002016-06-22T07:48:23.394-07:00CLASS STRUGGLE FOR BEGINNERS Part 64- 40 Years of Persistent Black Poverty
LOCKED OUT- The National Urban League's State of Black America2016 Report: 40 Years of Persistent Black Poverty

From the President's Desk
Marc H. Morial

As we observe the 40th anniversary of the State of Black America®, the similarities in the nation in 2016 and that which then-National Urban League Executive Director Vernon Jordan documented in 1976 are disheartening. Our nation was struggling to overcome the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. Pressure was building to slash social services for the poor, who were demonized and characterized as "chislers." Communities were rocked by hostility and violence triggered by legal challenges to the social status quo.

As with every economic downturn, communities of color bore the brunt of the decline. Black Americans remained nearly twice as likely as whites to be unemployed. Since 1976, the Black unemployment rate has consistently remained about twice that of the white rate across time, regardless of educational attainment. The household income gap remains at about 60 cents for every dollar. Black Americans are only slightly less likely today to live in poverty than they were in 1976.

On the criminal justice front, Jordan noted that Blacks were underrepresented in law enforcement in 1976. "The City of Chicago is an example: with a population that is 32.7 percent black, it has a police force that is only 16 percent black." Today, in hundreds of police departments across the nation, the percentage of whites on the force is more than 30 percentage points higher than in the communities they serve.

"The urgency of the problems that grip the American people allow no time for delay or for half-way measures," Jordan observed.

There have been times when Americans have met our shared challenges – as well as those of the international community – with full-measured urgency. When Europe found itself in physical and economic ruin after World War II, the United States invested $13 billion (or what would be approximately $130 billion today) to help rebuild Western European economies through the European Recovery Program, more commonly known as the Marshall Plan. The Marshall Plan ushered a dramatic increase in economic growth in European history. Though the plan officially ended in 1953, the unprecedented economic growth it sparked continued over two decades.

Former National Urban League President John Jacob introduced the concept of an urban Marshall Plan for America in the 15th State of Black America® in 1990. At the time, he said the nation should commit itself to completing "our unfinished revolution for democracy and human rights."

Dear Mr./Madame President, that revolution remains unfinished.
------------------------

 1976-2016: 40 Years of Persistent Black Poverty

We are More "Educated", Yet still Poorer than Whitefolks

 -----------------

The National Urban League's State of Black America2016 Executive Summary...

black left unity networkhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-6633712709574318123.post-85457300698115733372016-06-17T15:11:00.002-07:002016-06-17T15:17:52.984-07:00CLASS STRUGGLE FOR BEGINNERS -Part 63 :Temporary Work/Permanent Racism

<article class="hnews item post-265488 post type-post status-publish format-standard has-post-thumbnail hentry category-employmentlabor tag-african-american tag-african-americans tag-chicago-workers-collaborative tag-cicero tag-class-action-lawsuits tag-equal-employment-opportunity-commission tag-gage-park tag-hiring-discrimination tag-illinois tag-immigrants tag-jobs tag-labor-movement tag-latinos tag-lawsuits tag-legislation tag-lobbyists tag-low-income-neighborhoods tag-low-wage-jobs tag-low-wage-workers tag-minimum-wage tag-political-organizing tag-rep-luis-arroyo tag-reveal tag-southwest-side tag-springfield tag-temp-agencies tag-temporary-workers tag-the-illinois-department-of-labor tag-unemployment tag-wages prominence-top-story featured-media featured-media-image" id="post-265488" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/Article">
Growing temp industry shuts out black workers, exploits Latinos

Leone Bicchieri is the executive director of Chicago Workers' Collaborative, a labor group that is running a grassroots campaign to reform temp agency hiring practices.

By Will Evans

| <time class="entry-date updated dtstamp pubdate" datetime="2016-06-08T15:38:03+00:00">June 8, 2016- </time>http://chicagoreporter.com
The code word for black workers caught Rosa Ceja by surprise.

She was working for a temp agency in spring 2014, supervising workers at a big brick packaging plant northwest of Chicago. Crews of minimum-wage temp workers in hairnets boxed consumer products such as adult diapers and energy drinks in shifts around the clock.

She knew the company wanted only men for some jobs and only women for others. And she knew those codes: "heavies" for men, "lights" for women.

But when Ceja asked the recruiting office to send more heavies, she was told there were only "guapos" available. She was confused. "Guapo" means "good-looking" in Spanish. "I'm like, 'Who cares if he's cute?' " Ceja remembers saying.

Guapo, her fellow recruiters told her, meant a black worker. Black people didn't want to work hard or get their hands dirty, they explained, so they were called the pretty ones. Latinos, the "feos" or ugly ones, were what the company wanted.

Ceja said she checked with a packing company supervisor to make sure.

"She said, 'If you ever bring me a black guy, they're automatically walking out,' " Ceja said.

Ceja had stumbled into the noxious muck of systemic discrimination in the rapidly growing temp industry. Around the country, temp agencies have used code words, symbols and gestures to illegally hire workers by sex, race and age. Whether filling orders for only white workers or only Latino ones, the tactics often hit black workers the hardest.

As Ceja underwent a crash course in this hidden system, an advocacy group called the Chicago Workers' Collaborative was devising a counteroffensive.

The group eventually developed legislation to make temp agencies keep track of the race and gender of all job applicants.

Illinois Senate Bill 47 would provide the proof, supporters said, that temp agencies were shutting out black workers in favor of Latinos they could more easily exploit. If it passed, it could mean a fair chance at a paycheck.

Although a modest reform, it was likely the first of its kind. It put Illinois at the forefront of tackling a national problem in an increasingly important part of the workforce.

This is the story of why SB 47 was born – and how it was killed.

♦ ♦ ♦

Inside Illinois' silvery-domed Capitol building in May 2015, Democratic Rep. Ken Dunkin was trying to guide the bill through a Labor and Commerce Committee hearing. It already had cruised through the state Senate the month before.

But a powerful Latino lawmaker pushed back, and not gently. Staffing agencies were doing a great job employing his mostly Latino constituents, he said. The exchange got heated.

"You're hurting people in my community," said Rep. Luis Arroyo, also a Democrat and a power player on Chicago's Northwest Side. "You're hurting the people that I'm putting to work in my community."

Dunkin tried to say the bill, which would amend the Day and Temporary Labor Services Act, wasn't just about boosting the job prospects of black workers. But Arroyo cut him off. If it wasn't just about black workers, Arroyo argued, why weren't any Latinos complaining about the situation?

"I don't want folks to get this twisted," Dunkin said.

"It's twisted already," Arroyo shot back.

Arroyo's district is 61 percent Latino and 4 percent black. The Chicago district Dunkin held – and lost in the March primary – is just about the opposite, at 52 percent black and 4 percent Latino.

The debate echoed the tensions between black and Latino laborers competing for minimum-wage jobs on the streets of Chicago.

It's a dynamic playing out in cities across the country, as some employers choose Latinos for jobs black workers once often had. The clash is particularly sharp in Illinois, with one of the highest rates of black unemployment, far surpassing Latino joblessness.

And that wasn't the only problem.

Dan Shomon, a lobbyist for an alliance of temp agencies, said the proposed law would create a paperwork nightmare costing businesses millions of dollars. Shomon is also executive director of the Staffing Services Association of Illinois, which he said represents 25 agencies that provide 250,000 jobs a year.

"We oppose discrimination also," said Shomon, a top aide to Barack Obama during his state and U.S. Senate careers until 2006. He didn't mention that, just one week before, a board member of his association had signed an $800,000 settlement to resolve government findings of widespread discrimination at his company. Other association members also have been hit with bias claims.

Shomon said the bill's requirement to track the race and gender of job applicants wasn't necessary: The federal government already collects that data, he told legislators. He had that wrong, but nobody caught the error. He repeated it a few times.

After the SB 47 hearing, Shomon took Arroyo and another bill opponent to Saputo's, an Italian restaurant popular with politicos, spending $45 on each of them, according to lobbyist expenditure records. Asked about this, Arroyo said free meals don't buy votes in Springfield.
"I would be a heavy, heavy individual if that was the case," he said.

Following another hearing on the bill a few days later, the lobbyist treated Arroyo to a $50 meal at Nick & Nino's, a "penthouse steakhouse" with 30th-floor views of the Capitol dome. By then, the bill effectively was dead.

At the second hearing, Arroyo and another lawmaker had made Dunkin promise that he wouldn't bring it up for a final vote unless the industry lobbyist approved it.

And with that, a lobbyist who spread inaccurate information, representing companies that have faced serious allegations of discrimination, squelched what could have been a trailblazing reform.

♦ ♦ ♦
SB 47 had grown out of a larger battle over hiring discrimination in the temp industry.

The Chicago Workers' Collaborative has been raising a ruckus for years as one of the nation's only labor groups running a grassroots campaign to reform temp agency hiring practices. The regional office of the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is among the most active in the country in suing over temp industry job bias. And a Chicago union organizer-turned-workers rights attorney has unleashed multiple class-action lawsuits against temp agencies on behalf of black workers, recently clinching a $1.5 million settlement.

The temp agency tactics aren't lost on job seekers who show up at stark storefront recruiting offices before dawn. Some take buses across Chicago as early as 4 a.m. – not for a job they can count on, but for a chance to snag a shift making as little as $8.25 per hour.

They sit next to each other with packed lunches, in rows of plastic chairs or wooden benches. They wait for hours to see whether they will get a spot on the vans that transport temp workers to various plastics manufacturers, food factories, printing plants and packaging facilities.

For Derell Pruitt, it was bad enough watching Latino workers board the vans while black workers like him were left behind. The worst, he said, was one time last year when he actually did get sent out for a job. It was for a temp agency called Most Valuable Personnel, or MVP.

As soon as the vanload of workers arrived at the job site, a packaging plant, Pruitt said a supervisor picked all the Latinos and sent back all the black workers. They weren't needed, they were told.

"I could not believe that they would not pick one black, not one," said Pruitt, talking in a McDonald's near his Waukegan home. "It was very bold and humiliating, too."

Rosa Ceja said the same thing happened on her watch. Back when she learned that black workers were "guapos" to be avoided, she was a dispatcher for MVP, working on-site at the same packaging plant.

"Right now, if I think about it, it's really, really sad," she said.

Another former dispatcher, Adriana Hernandez of Round Lake, has similar stories: "They would tell me, 'Remember, the supervisor doesn't want any older ladies, and she doesn't want any black people.' " She provided a text message that she claimed showed the codes for men and women, an order for "10 lights and 4 heavys."

In response to the allegations, an attorney for MVP, Elliot Richardson, said, "We deny that we discriminate on any basis, including race or gender or for any other reasons whatsoever."

He declined to address specifics.

"It's not our desire to be litigating this in the media," Richardson said. "We have directed our clients not to speak to the media about these pending matters."

The packaging plant, called Metropolitan Graphic Arts, or MGA, doesn't hire by race, said its president, Greg Szymanski. If any workers were sent back, he said, it was because they didn't want to do the job.

"We'll hire the United Nations, and we'll look for good workers, period," he said.

But Szymanski acknowledged requesting male workers for certain jobs and women for others.

"If it's picking up very heavy things, men are stronger, sure," he said. "We've been in this business, and we know that men do this job better and women do this job better."

MGA's clients include a long list of name-brand companies that once scrolled across its website: Advil, Dove, Crest, Tide, Huggies, Tums, L'Oreal, Arm & Hammer, Target, Starbucks, Walmart and Unilever.

Pruitt is part of class-action lawsuits claiming that MVP discriminated against black workers and didn't pay him for his time. MVP responded in court filings that Pruitt never worked for the company.

Pruitt, 40, said he had to go to counseling for his rage – against Latinos.

"I was starting to hate them," he said. "I knew that I shouldn't be thinking the way that I was thinking, but I was frustrated and angry."

Pruitt said he has gone from backing Obama to full-throated support for Donald Trump, citing the Republican presidential candidate's combative stance on immigration.

"I want to help build that wall," he said of Trump's plan to seal off the U.S. border with Mexico. "I want to help get rid of some of these people."

Racial preferences loom over recruiting offices around the country, lawsuits and interviews show.
A trio of temp agencies in Tennessee, for example, systematically recruited Latinos at the expense of black workers, according to government lawsuits.

"Whether it's low-wage Hispanic workers or low-wage African American workers, each of them are trying to make a decent living, and they're being pitted against each other," said Faye Williams, regional attorney for the Memphis office of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

This dynamic goes back to the 1990s, when global economic competition drove employers to seek a cheaper, more flexible workforce, said Virginia Tech sociology professor Barbara Ellen Smith.

They found a solution in temp agencies, which allowed for quick and easy hiring and firing. And they found a willing workforce in a growing stream of Latino immigrants, desperate for work of any kind, she said.

"In effect, employers were replacing black workers with Latino immigrant workers," said Smith, who studied the phenomenon among warehouse workers in Memphis. "You've got a population that's really kind of exploitable."

The ensuing conflict between black and Latino workers served employers' interests, too: "It keeps people from organizing," she said.

Overcoming that racial divide has been the ongoing struggle of the Chicago Workers' Collaborative. The group, formed in 2000, traditionally advocated for Latino workers, campaigning against problems such as wage theft and sexual harassment. But a few years ago, its leaders reached out to black workers and discovered a reservoir of frustration and resentment.

"Their view was those 10 Latinos … getting in that van are the reason I'm not going to work," said Leone Bicchieri, the group's executive director. "As opposed to, it's the dispatcher following orders from someone higher up."

Black workers, he said, are more likely to complain about wage theft or workplace injuries than Latino workers, who might be worried about their immigration status or unsure of other options.

Bicchieri's wife emigrated from Mexico and worked for years as a temp. He's trying to convince Latino workers it's in their long-term interests to fight job discrimination that actually favors them.

The group's pitch is this: Black workers are losing jobs, and Latinos are losing their rights. Only united can they hold temp agencies accountable.

♦ ♦ ♦

Most Valuable Personnel recently transferred its Illinois branches to Elite Staffing. This is their office on 55th Street in Gage Park on the Southwest Side.

Rejected black workers left sitting in temp agency lobbies may feel discrimination, but they can't quantify it.

Despite lobbyist Dan Shomon's repeated assurances that federal regulators already collect the data, it's just not true. Officials with both the American Staffing Association and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission agree on that point.

The federal government compiles the demographics only of employees, not of job applicants. And the temp industry pushed for a federal exemption to those reporting requirements in the 1960s.

There is a state law in Illinois requiring agencies to keep a record of the race and gender of each temp worker who is hired. But it appears that law isn't always followed or enforced.

MVP lawyers told a judge in 2014 that the company doesn't record the race of its workers and doesn't keep any record of job applicants.

The Illinois Department of Labor doesn't inspect temp agency records unless it receives a complaint, and there haven't been any related to race and gender recordkeeping, according to the department.

That raises the question: Even if the reform were enacted, would new rules also be ignored?
Shomon, the lobbyist, declined to answer questions from Reveal or provide information that backed up his assertions to lawmakers. Instead, he pointed to the long-standing federal law against hiring bias, writing by email, "This discrimination is already prohibited by the EEOC."

The nonprofit trade group he represents came together, according to its website, to "fight to keep our industry free of unnecessary regulations."

Its leadership is quite familiar with the discrimination problem.

The secretary of the board of directors is Chuck Porcelli, CEO of Bensenville-based ASG Staffing, recent federal and state filings show. A former office manager sued the company in 2014, accusing it of catering to customer requests for workers of a certain race or sex. The company used a coding system, the suit said, for "racial 'earmarking.' " A "Code 3, heavy," for example, meant a request for a Latino man.

The company denied the allegations and settled confidentially with the former employee. ASG's attorney, Bethany Drucker, said it does not discriminate.

Another association board member, Scott Reedy, is president of the Chicago-area firm Source One Staffing. His company agreed to pay $800,000 last year to resolve two lawsuits by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The government accused Source One of discriminating against temp workers by race, gender and disability.

"That's a significant case and significant relief with respect to serious systemic discrimination," said commission regional attorney John Hendrickson.

It all started in 2007, when a few female temp workers complained that a supervisor at a West Chicago plastics plant had sexually harassed them.

The government found that Source One segregated jobs into "men's work" and "women's work" and sent women to inferior, lower-paying jobs. The company sometimes assigned women to hostile work environments and then retaliated against those who complained.

One client, according to email requests, repeatedly asked for "girls." Another, according to a deposition, wanted only "pretty girls."

As for race, Source One also filled client requests for Latino workers, discriminating against white and black applicants, according to the commission.

Reedy, the company president and association board member, was personally swept up into the case. A former employee testified that he instructed her to fill gender-specific requests, but to lie to government investigators about what was happening.

The government called it witness tampering and said it "raises serious questions about unethical or even criminal conduct by Source One's owner and/or its attorney."

Source One denied wrongdoing but agreed to the settlement and ongoing supervision by an independent monitor. Reedy had to personally guarantee $150,000 of the settlement, a requirement Hendrickson, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission attorney, called "extraordinarily rare."

Reedy, reached by phone, said of the government allegations: "That's done and gone, and I already spent eight years on it." He declined to answer other questions, saying, "I don't have any comments regarding anything," and hung up the phone.

Companies run by other association board members face pending discrimination complaints with the commission and in court.

At the Springfield hearings for SB 47, though, legislators seemed to doubt whether there was a problem to fix at all. Rep. Luis Arroyo, for one, didn't believe it.

"They tried to say that the temp agencies only hire Latinos. I think that that's wrong to say that," Arroyo said in a January interview. "Did I do any investigations? Do I know that for a fact?

No, I don't."

♦ ♦ ♦
Pamela Sanchez tried to tell them. She worked as a Most Valuable Personnel dispatcher in Cicero, a Chicago suburb, until February 2015. The workers collaborative invited her to Springfield to testify at a committee hearing in May 2015. She brought her daughter.

Rep. Elizabeth "Lisa" Hernandez, who represents Cicero, asked Sanchez whether temp workers are chosen on a first-come, first-served basis. She was surprised at the answer.

"No, ma'am," Sanchez replied. "Most of the time, people will choose by race."

Some wrote off the dispatcher's firsthand account. The rumor going around, Arroyo said, was that Sanchez had been paid to say those things.

"That's what they were saying in the halls and in the back," he said.

After all, Arroyo said, "Why would a Latina say that they are only hiring Latinos?" It didn't make sense that she would speak out against something that benefited Latinos.

"Latinos normally don't do that," he said.

Pamela Sanchez, a former dispatcher for Most Valuable Personnel, stands outside her home on the West Side of Chicago. She testified at a committee hearing in Springfield about discrimination against black workers.

Sanchez, a soft-spoken single mother of two from Chicago's West Lawn neighborhood, said she went public because she used to be a temp worker herself.

"I know how hard it is when you need to be there and looking for a job and they don't pick you," she said. "I cannot be shutting my mouth no more."

There was also an element of guilt, of making things right. She says she still feels bad about the time she confirmed a black worker for a temp job, telling him to come into the office the following day around 4 a.m. He waited for five hours, she said, but was passed over. She said her manager told her, "Oh, you know they don't want no blacks."

Sanchez said MVP fired her last year after she complained to upper management about problems at the Cicero office. Shortly afterward, she signed a court declaration for lawyers suing MVP over discrimination. It makes it clear that Sanchez had much more to say, had legislators asked.
In it, she describes the multitude of ways the system is rigged against black workers:

MVP had her pass out fliers advertising work in Spanish only, she said. Van drivers picked up laborers in Latino neighborhoods such as Little Village. Recruiters like herself kept their own lists of Latino workers to call if a job came open.

Latinos who ventured into a recruiting office were given an application and often sent out to work right away. Black job seekers were told they couldn't fill out an application unless there was a job opening. They had to sign an authorization to run a criminal background check, but Latino workers didn't.

MVP, Sanchez said, would send black workers to jobs no one else wanted, such as meatpacking plants. The cold conditions were so uncomfortable that Latino workers asked to be transferred elsewhere. With no other option, the black workers would go, she said.

MVP recently transferred its Illinois branches, including the Cicero one, to Elite Staffing, but maintains branches in other states. Elite Staffing is a founding member of the Staffing Services Association of Illinois, and an Elite executive currently serves as board president.

As for Arroyo's rumor about her testimony, Sanchez said she wasn't paid a penny. Arroyo, however, was.

Three months after the hearing at which Arroyo lambasted SB 47's sponsor for "hurting my community," several temp agencies gathered for a fundraising dinner Aug. 24. Six agencies pooled together $5,000 for Arroyo's campaign account, according to campaign finance records.
One of the donors was Personnel Staffing Group, the parent company of MVP, where Sanchez worked.

Another was ASG Staffing, the company accused of coding workers by race and sex.
A third was ClearStaff, a Woodridge-based agency sued in 2014 by a former sales representative who complained about office talk involving racial slurs and sexual favors for clients. She lost her suit but had prompted an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission investigation.

The commission found reasonable cause that the company discriminated against black job applicants and paid Latino workers less than non-Latinos. The commission couldn't come to a resolution with ClearStaff and decided not to file suit, according to court records. ClearStaff's president, Richard Seeman, formerly served on the board of the industry association. He didn't respond to phone calls.

This wasn't a routine show of support for Arroyo. None of the agencies had donated to him before, campaign contribution records show. But Arroyo said the donations had nothing to do with his stance on SB 47.

"I've always supported the temp agencies, because it works in the Northwest Side, he said. "You got to support the people that support you."
 ----------------

Whistleblowers and lawsuits expose racial discrimination by temp agencies

Attorney Chris Williams visits the Northern Illinois District Court in Chicago. His law firm, Workers' Law Office, has sued six temp agencies and many of their clients for excluding black job applicants.

By Will Evans

| <time class="entry-date updated dtstamp pubdate" datetime="2016-06-09T18:52:31+00:00">June 9, 2016- http://chicagoreporter.com</time>

Editor's Note: This is the second story in a two-part series about racial discrimination in the fast-growing temp worker industry. Around the country, temp agencies have used code words, symbols and gestures to illegally hire workers by sex, race and age. The tactics often hit black workers the hardest. In response to this discrimination, the Chicago Workers' Collaborative, a labor advocacy group, developed legislation to make temp agencies keep track of the race and gender of all job applicants. The bill was killed, but several lawsuits continue to target racial discrimination in the industry. Read part one of the series.

Temp agencies opposed the bill in part because they worried it would fuel discrimination lawsuits against them.

Indeed, data on the disparity between applicants and hires can form crucial evidence in such cases. And Chicago-area agencies already are facing a few.

Chris Williams has become the attorney to fear. Since 2012, his Workers' Law Office has sued six temp agencies and many of their clients for excluding black applicants. That's on top of many other wage-related lawsuits and discrimination complaints filed with federal regulators.

Williams went from teaching English learners for the City Colleges of Chicago to union organizing in the 1990s. In 2000, he helped launch what became the Chicago Workers' Collaborative.

After he was admitted to the Illinois bar in 2004, Williams co-founded and led a legal clinic to help immigrant workers who had been cheated on wages. That's where he first heard about discrimination against black workers at temp agencies.

It all fit together, Williams said.

"There is a desire to hire workers who are more vulnerable and thus subject to exploitative working conditions … which then reduces labor costs," he said.

Even permanent workers aren't immune, he said. "It drives down wages for everybody."

Temp agencies, he said, are worried that his legal onslaught and the reform legislation is an "attack on their business model." In December, the candy manufacturer that makes Lemonheads, Red Hots and Jujyfruits, plus two of its temp agency suppliers, agreed to a preliminary settlement of $1.5 million in a racial discrimination lawsuit.

"He is notorious for bringing these cases," said Scott Polen, whose company, TempsNow, was sued last month.

Polen, a board member of the temp industry association, said Williams brings unfounded lawsuits to milk agencies for settlement money. TempsNow, he says, doesn't take race into account.

"Quite honestly, because of Chris Williams, I wouldn't even contemplate doing something like that," he said, "because it's just not worth it, not to mention it's wrong."

Another lawsuit, filed last year, focuses on the workers Most Valuable Personnel supplied to Gold Standard Baking. The mammoth brick-walled industrial bakery near railroad tracks on the Southwest Side churns out more than 10 million croissants a week for convenience stores and supermarkets around the country.

Of some 5,000 temps provided to the bakery by MVP over several years, 98 percent had Latino surnames, according to the suit. MVP disputes those numbers.

In court filings, company lawyers called the suit "nothing more than a charade, designed to harass Defendants." The plaintiffs "are throwing metaphoric noodles at the wall, hoping that any allegation will stick."

Beyond the legal sparring, though, there are the accounts of insiders such as former bakery supervisor Maria Carretero. Bakery managers, she said in a court declaration, called black workers lazy and worthless and told MVP not to send them.

"Quitan esos negros," a plant manager yelled angrily in Spanish, she said. "Get rid of those blacks."

"It was common knowledge that GSB (Gold Standard Baking) did not want to have African Americans at the factory," Carretero's statement said.

Reached by phone, a bakery executive, Mark Grosshans, said, "I don't want to discuss this."
Pamela Sanchez, the former MVP dispatcher who testified at the Springfield hearing, worked on-site at the bakery for several months. Black workers, she said, usually were assigned only on weekends to avoid paying Latino workers overtime or to graveyard shifts that were hard to fill.

Even then, Sanchez said the bakery told her to "DNR" ("do not return") those black workers after their shift.

Michael Keys is one of the plaintiffs in a discrimination case brought against Chicago temp agencies.

Job orders became hard to fill as Latino workers complained about the heat, the speed of the machines and the lack of breaks, she said. But the bakery still didn't want black workers.
Sanchez recently sued MVP and the bakery for retaliating against her after she complained about discrimination.

An MVP lawyer said in court that the reason for its largely Latino workforce isn't nefarious at all: The agency's Cicero office is in a predominantly Latino neighborhood.

Many temp agencies are. A 2001 academic paper found that Chicago temp agencies strategically placed their recruiting offices in Latino neighborhoods to attract the kind of workforce their clients wanted.

Black workers, of course, can travel. Some trek long distances. And as Williams notes, just across the street from that Cicero office is a mostly black neighborhood.

Without hard data, the other way to ferret out discrimination is through whistleblowers. But many are afraid to stick out their necks – and with good reason.

♦ ♦ ♦
As SB 47 stumbled through the Illinois General Assembly last year, Rosa Ceja faced her own crucible. The former MVP dispatcher had spoken out, and the company sued her.
It was for something she wrote on Facebook.

Ceja's Facebook feed often features photos of herself in heavy makeup, sometimes mugging for the camera with pursed lips – the kind of beauty-shot selfies that abound on social media. Other times, her posts feature the young niece and nephew she raises in her Waukegan-area house.

But one day, Ceja wrote, in Spanish, "If MVP (Most Valuable Personnel) owes you hours (or) you've been victims of abuse please send me a message there are people interested in ending the injustices they are doing. Please share."

Ceja was forced out of the company in 2014, she said, after complaining about sexual harassment by an MVP van driver. He recently was convicted of battery against her. MVP contends that Ceja abandoned her position.

Afterward, she, too, signed a statement about the discrimination she witnessed. She accused top managers of being complicit in rejecting black workers. The company, in its legal response, called it hearsay.

When Ceja posted on Facebook in December 2014 to see whether anyone else had problems with MVP, she wasn't just poking around for fun. Federal investigators had asked her if she could find other victims or witnesses, according to her court filings.

Her Facebook friends asked her what she was talking about. Ceja replied: "People sometimes don't get paid or if they report that they have been sexually abused they don't care."

The day before SB 47 was introduced in January 2015, MVP sued Ceja for defamation. "Ceja's statements have damaged MVP's reputation in the industry and the community," the suit said.
The company demanded at least $50,000.

Ceja panicked. She thought she'd lose her house. She stopped answering her phone. She couldn't sleep. The company sent subpoenas to her Facebook friends who had commented on her post. Some were furious, Ceja said, that she had pulled them into a legal dispute.

The lawsuit dragged on as legislators argued over SB 47. Then last summer, the judge dismissed the suit. Ceja's post was opinion, protected by the First Amendment.

Separately, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission found reasonable cause that MVP's lawsuit constituted illegal retaliation against her. The National Labor Relations Board issued a complaint that the company's lawsuit violated Ceja's rights.

But it had taken a toll. Ceja says she lost friends and job opportunities. And she's still nervous. She doesn't want anyone to know her address.

The lawsuit also has had a broader chilling effect, said Chris Williams, Ceja's lawyer.

"People are very aware that Rosa has been sued," he said, "and as a result are very nervous about speaking publicly."

♦ ♦ ♦

In this audio clip produced by Reveal, listen to Dan Shoman, a lobbyist for an alliance of Illinois temp agencies, tell legislators that SB 47's requirement to track the race and gender of job applicants wasn't necessary since the federal government already collects the data. He had that wrong, but nobody caught the error.

At the final May hearing for SB 47 last year, Rep. Luis Arroyo said he had met with Rep. Ken Dunkin, the bill's sponsor, and Dan Shomon, the industry lobbyist, to work out an agreement.

Arroyo would vote the bill out of committee, but only if Dunkin agreed not to bring it to a final House vote without the opposition's approval.

Dunkin tried to give himself some wiggle room. He would try to find a compromise, he said, but questioned the opposition's willingness to negotiate sincerely.

"There's been a whole bunch of unnecessary games being played with this, and I'm right in the middle," he said at the hearing.

Republican Rep. Mike Tryon nailed him down. Tryon was named legislator of the year by Shomon's alliance of temp agencies in 2011. An announcement at the time lauded him for doing "his best to make sure their needs are met."

Tryon made Dunkin commit publicly that he wouldn't push the bill further without the industry's blessing. No compromise ever was reached, and the bill never got a final vote. Dunkin, who wouldn't give an interview, lost to a primary challenger this year.

Now, Democratic Rep. Carol Ammons, whose career in Springfield is only as old as SB 47, wants to revive the fight.

Winning her seat in an upset to become the first black representative of the Champaign-Urbana district, Ammons is ambitious. She doesn't think SB 47 went far enough.

"The industry is exploiting Latino workers, black workers, white workers," she said. "The goal now is to expose the exploiter."

Arroyo, for his part, said he'd back a bill like SB 47 if he had any evidence of discrimination.
"If there is an investigation and there is a fact that they only hire Latinos, I wouldn't be for that," he said. "I will get on the bill right away, and I would support the bill."

About Will Evans

Will Evans is a reporter for Reveal, covering labor and workplace issues. Follow him on Twitter: @willCIRblack left unity networkhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-6633712709574318123.post-9043624391067174952016-06-14T13:50:00.003-07:002016-06-14T13:50:48.427-07:00Black Workers for Justice Statement on the Orlando Massacre

Black Workers for Justice Statement on the Orlando Massacre

The Black Workers for Justice is outraged and saddened by the brutal attack on the patrons of the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida. We extend our condolences to the families of those killed, and hope for healing and a speedy recovery of the wounded. We stand in strong solidarity with the LGBTQ community. While we don't know why the shooter picked Saturday night for his heinous crime, it was a Latin Night and as such many in the club were Latinx. We extend our solidarity to that community as well.

This outrageous homophobic attack did not happen in a vacuum. The creation of hateful and anti-democratic legislation like North Carolina's HB2 and similar laws passed or proposed in other states and the poisonous rhetoric used by its proponents is the toxic environment in which this reprehensible act took place.

Sister Patience Carter, one of the shooting victims at Orlando's Pulse nightclub wrote a poem about her survival as she lay recovering in the hospital Monday night. She read it to reporters Tuesday, saying it was part of her healing process.

WATCH VIDEO HERE: http://usat.ly/28Cp2sj

As one of our members has said, we are living in the intersection of homophobia, religious extremism and Islamophobia. The attacks on the LGBTQ community are both physical and policy based. Extremism masked by religion is subjecting millions of true believers to unimaginable horrors of violence. It is anti-democratic, patriarchal, racist and fascist. However, this unspeakable violence cannot be separated from the continuous violence caused by the US direct and supported violence of wars and military invasions throughout the Middle East and Africa to dismantle governments and for regime change. All of this, at the end of the day is in the service of US and European Imperialism. To be clear, this extremism is not restricted to Islam.

Islamophobia is an irrational hatred of Muslims based on the actions of religious extremists and is racialized to target Brown and Black people from the Middle East, South Asia, the US and Africa.

Capitalism and white supremacy undergirds these ideologies. Capitalism in crisis and decline uses them to try to maintain the status quo while its benefactors continue to enrich themselves creating even more destitution for workers with austerity budgets, privatization and a reduction in wages. They continue to trample on Black workers and other workers of color with scandalous levels of structural unemployment, mass incarceration, including the school to prison pipeline, and rampant and unpunished brutality and murder of Black people by the police and other state sanctioned actors.

Fighting back is the only answer as demonstrated by Verizon workers who waged a courageous strike and won. Similarly, public employees in Durham with the aid of the community and progressive elected officials conducted an extended campaign for a Living Wage and won.

The workplace struggles and the struggles against homophobia and Islamophobia have to be linked and joined with the Movement for Black Lives, and the various Moral Monday type efforts across the country.

We all must become hyper vigilant as we have argued before and protect each other with security measures designed to defend against a variety of attacks. The relative comfort and safety of our churches, mosques and gay clubs cannot be taken for granted in this environment. From Stonewall to Pulse, from the 16 Street Baptist Church to Emmanuel AME Church we must defend ourselves and openly and vigorously oppose the hatred that drives these attacks.

The Black liberation movement is critical to the larger fightback against working class exploitation, national, women's and LGBTQ oppression. A Manifesto for Black liberation can help to unite our many battlefronts and mobilize mass based and transformative power against these conditions.

June 13, 2016

black left unity networkhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-6633712709574318123.post-17359702848899726732016-06-06T17:22:00.001-07:002016-06-06T17:22:41.132-07:00Straightforward Answers About Cuba Today from Cuba's UN Ambassador

Cuban Ambassador to the United Nations Rodolfo Reyes at the Left Forum

Published on May 24, 2016

A question and answer session with the ambassador. Chaired by Ike Nahem of the July 26 Coalition. Apologies for the camera angle at the beginning. It straightens out pretty quickly.

black left unity networkhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-6633712709574318123.post-23596989237306706472016-06-03T06:16:00.001-07:002016-06-03T06:16:06.083-07:00Verizon Workers Give Their Bosses a Massive Pushback!Why the Verizon Worker's Victory is A Big Deal

Sarah Jaffe
May 31, 2016
progressive.org

On Friday, May 27, the six-and-a-half-week Verizon strike came to an end with a tentative contract agreement.

The Communications Workers of America and International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, the unions that represent the Verizon workers, hailed the contract as a victory, citing its creation of 1300 new call center jobs along the East Coast, first-ever contracts for Verizon wireless store employees in Brooklyn and Everett, Massachusetts, and raises of nearly 11 percent over the life of the contract. The workers beat back demands from the company to cut pensions, transfer workers out of state for up to two months, and proposed cuts in disability and accident benefits.

Robert Master is co-chair of the New York State Working Families Party and political director for District 1 of CWA. He sat down with The Progressive to talk about the role of technology in the strike, the changed political circumstances since the last time Verizon workers walked out, and what the contract gains mean for the future of labor. This is an excerpt from a longer interview that will be published in the July/August issue of the magazine.

Q: Give us a rundown on what you think the most significant wins in this contract are.

Robert Master: The most significant wins are the preservation of job security and good jobs. That was the central goal of the strike; I think we won a pretty sweeping victory on those issues. Also, the addition of 1300 call center jobs across the footprint—that we actually increased the percentage of call center work that's going to be handled by unionized workers in the mid-Atlantic and the northeast was big. We reversed a number of contracting-out initiatives among technicians, so there'll probably be 100 or 200 jobs there. And then protecting the pension, getting a good raise, minimizing the damage on healthcare and of course getting the first contract at Verizon Wireless, all of these things are very big wins.

Q: We first talked at the beginning of the sixth week of the Verizon strike. What was happening as the company came back to the table?

Master: The secretary of labor, Tom Perez, convened a mediation process. We know that sales were down very significantly in the wireless stores that we're picketing. Thanks to our visit to the Philippines, we know that the call center workers in the Philippines who were handling FIOS customer calls were authorized to give customers who are disgruntled between $15 and $50 a month off to keep them as customers.

People were really responding. It's hard to measure if it's more than or equal to what we saw [during the Verizon strike] in 2011, which was six weeks before Occupy. We felt a lot of that anger then, too. But this is a big company, the sixteenth-largest company in America. They've got a lot of money so it's no joke.

Q: CWA has been organizing Verizon wireless workers recently—I met a few of them on the picket lines, their first time joining the wireline technicians on strike. Talk about their role in this.

Master: We have represented about 100 wireless cell site technicians since 1989, but obviously our focus on that is even greater than it has been in the past. We tried to get local groups and local unions across the country to start adopting stores and be out in front of them. This is Verizon's big public face, this is where they're vulnerable to consumer pressure.

Q: There's this idea that workers in unions are opposed to technological advancement, that they're stubbornly trying to maintain old economy jobs. But in this strike it was the unions that called for Verizon to invest in its fiber optic technology.

Master: The company always says these wages and these benefits and these work rules are relics of the era of the princess phone. They're antiques and we have to get rid of them. The first thing we say is, our members are building the most advanced fiber optic internet network in America so we are not antiques.

Yes, we are serving, in New York state, almost three million people who are still dependent on copper lines. And those people deserve to have good phone service. Despite the fact that Verizon doesn't want to be considered a phone company they actually are a regulated phone company.

But also, when it comes to the wireless workers who are allegedly on the digital cutting edge, the company says "Oh no, we can't pay them, we can't share our giant mega profits with them. We're paying them the industry standard." So, either we're antiques or on the cutting edge, but both times the executives and the shareholders are the only winners.

Telephone systems have always been automated and so telephone strikes always take a while to actually have an impact on consumers. Ironically, despite the fact that we're dealing with even more advanced technologies now the impact has hit harder, faster. Partly because they've under-invested in the network for fifteen years, partly because they're completely understaffed. Partly because they no longer hire most of their managers out of the rank and file. They hired them out of college and they have no skills and so they do things like make telephone poles fall on customers' houses and make telephone poles fall into street, and they cannot do FIOS installations. They're way behind. Customers are really mad.

We're not Luddites at all. We're all about building more FIOS instead of buying some failed internet brand like Yahoo for four or five billion dollars or whatever they're going to spend on that. Build FIOS in Buffalo. Create good jobs. Give folks in Buffalo the opportunity to take advantage of the best internet service in the country.

Q: It still comes back to the question of what the company's responsibility to the workers is.

Master: A perfect example—and one of the big fights—was that we had a provision of the contract that said X percent of call center work that originates in a particular state must be handled in that state. It means that your work is going to be handled by a person making about $69,000 a year who has health insurance and maybe a pension. As opposed to shipping it to the Philippines, where someone's making $1.75 an hour, being forced to work six days a week without getting overtime pay, and where women are tested monthly to see whether not they're pregnant because they don't want any pregnant women working in the location. These are the choices we have.

Q: Tell me about the trip to the Philippines and the connections you're making there.

Master: We sent a delegation, Tim Dubnau our organizing director and three strikers, and they picketed one of the call centers and then most dramatically they tried to have a meeting with Verizon management in the Philippines [and were chased down a public road by armed security].

There's like 4,000 or 5000 call center workers there. They're furious, they wanted to be supportive of what we are doing. I think the lesson that we took away from it is Verizon's greed knows no national boundaries. The truth is the limitations that we have on how this work is handled are the only things preventing these jobs from being turned into $1.75 an hour jobs. Which by the way Filipinos can't live on. It's been really fascinating and there's been a very strong response there to try to be helpful to us.

Q: After quite a long strike, against a company that was really hardline the last time around, what's the significance for the labor movement of staying out this long and coming back with a pretty good contract?

Master: By executing a pretty smart strike plan and staying on message in the media, we were able to inflict real damage on the company and protect the interests of members. In an era in which strikes have become so infrequent this really does demonstrate that workers can exercise the strike power in effective ways still.

Q: Did it help that 2016 is an election year?

Master: I was talking to the president of the union right after the New York primary and I said "We should remind ourselves never to call a strike again unless it's one week before a competitive New York state primary in which a socialist is running," because it was amazing. You had a credible national candidate for president on a nationally-televised debate calling out the CEO of a big corporation. That just does not happen very often. Given the current climate, Hillary Clinton made a big point of coming to our picket line the first day of the strike, Bill Clinton went to a picket line in Buffalo. When we were in New Mexico the Hillary campaign put out a statement supporting our action at the shareholders' meeting. I was not surprised by the way our concerns intersected with broader concerns about corporate power, Wall Street power, but it was a pretty cool thing to have experienced.

Q:What signal does this send going forward?

Master: We knew that public sentiment would be on our side. America is against big corporations right now and that's a good healthy thing for our society. Nobody goes out and says "Oh no, Lowell [McAdam, Verizon CEO] really deserves $18 million a year," that's just not something you feel on the street.

Sarah Jaffe is an independent journalist covering labor, economic justice, and social movements. She is the author of Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt, to be published by Nation Books in August.
black left unity networkhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-6633712709574318123.post-44791333583125985942016-05-15T13:06:00.002-07:002016-05-15T13:06:24.606-07:00Young Black Grads Still In Deep Economic Depression
 Unemployment for young black grads is still worse than it was for young white grads in the aftermath of the recession

By Elise Gould and Tanyell Cooke

• May 11, 2016- epi.org

The black unemployment rate is typically twice as high as the white unemployment rate, and African Americans are often the last to feel the economic benefits during a recovery. These realities are reflected in the fact that the unemployment rate for young black graduates is still worse today than it ever was for whites in the aftermath of the Great Recession. Young black college graduates (age 24–29) currently have an unemployment rate of 9.4 percent—higher than the peak unemployment rate for young white college graduates during the recovery (9.0 percent). Young blacks with only a high-school degree (age 17–20) face a grimmer picture: an unemployment rate of 28.4 percent, which is also higher than the peak unemployment rate for white high-school graduates during the recovery (25.9 percent).

Economic Snapshot

Unemployment for young black grads is still worse than it was for young white grads in the recession's aftermathCurrent unemployment rate and post-recession peak unemployment rate by race and educational attainment

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fill: black; font-family: proxima-nova, sans-serif; font-size: 13.4333; font-weight: normal;" x="4" y="17"><tspan style="font-weight: bold;">Peak:</tspan><tspan dy="16" style="font-weight: bold;" x="4">25.9%</tspan><tspan dy="16" x="4">(2010)</tspan></text></g><g style="cursor: default;" transform="translate(121,-13)"><text style="color: black; fill: black; font-family: proxima-nova, sans-serif; font-size: 13.4333; font-weight: normal;" x="4" y="17"><tspan style="font-weight: bold;">42.0%</tspan><tspan dx="0"> (2011)</tspan></text></g><g style="cursor: default;" transform="translate(339,179)"><text style="color: black; fill: black; font-family: proxima-nova, sans-serif; font-size: 13.4333; font-weight: normal;" x="4" y="17"><tspan style="font-weight: bold;">9.0%</tspan><tspan dx="0"> (2011)</tspan></text></g><g style="cursor: default;" transform="translate(443,111)"><text style="color: black; fill: black; font-family: proxima-nova, sans-serif; font-size: 13.4333; font-weight: normal;" x="4" y="17"><tspan style="font-weight: bold;">20.7%</tspan><tspan dx="0"> (2011)</tspan></text></g></g><g class="highcharts-data-labels highcharts-tracker" opacity="1" transform="translate(10,20) scale(1 1)" visibility="visible"><g style="cursor: default;" transform="translate(32,177)"><text style="color: white; fill: white; font-family: proxima-nova, sans-serif; font-size: 13.4333; font-weight: normal;" x="4" y="17">14.6%</text></g><g style="cursor: default;" transform="translate(140,97)"><text style="color: white; fill: white; font-family: proxima-nova, sans-serif; font-size: 13.4333; font-weight: normal;" x="4" y="17">28.4%</text></g><g style="cursor: default;" transform="translate(357,235)"><text style="color: white; fill: white; font-family: proxima-nova, sans-serif; font-size: 13.4333; font-weight: normal;" x="4" y="17">4.7%</text></g><g style="cursor: default;" transform="translate(465,207)"><text style="color: white; fill: white; font-family: proxima-nova, sans-serif; font-size: 13.4333; font-weight: normal;" x="4" y="17">9.4%</text></g></g><g class="highcharts-axis-labels highcharts-xaxis-labels"><text opacity="1" style="color: black; cursor: default; fill: black; font-family: proxima-nova, sans-serif; font-size: 13.4333; font-weight: normal; width: 87px;" text-anchor="middle" x="63.7" y="299"><tspan>White high</tspan><tspan dy="16" x="63.7">school</tspan></text><text opacity="1" style="color: black; cursor: default; fill: black; font-family: proxima-nova, sans-serif; font-size: 13.4333; font-weight: normal; width: 87px;" text-anchor="middle" x="171.10000000000002" y="299"><tspan>Black high</tspan><tspan dy="16" x="171.10000000000002">school</tspan></text><text opacity="1" style="color: black; cursor: default; fill: black; font-family: proxima-nova, sans-serif; font-size: 13.4333; font-weight: normal; width: 87px;" text-anchor="middle" x="278.5" y="299"></text><text opacity="1" style="color: black; cursor: default; fill: black; font-family: proxima-nova, sans-serif; font-size: 13.4333; font-weight: normal; width: 87px;" text-anchor="middle" x="385.90000000000003" y="299"><tspan>White college</tspan></text><text opacity="1" style="color: black; cursor: default; fill: black; font-family: proxima-nova, sans-serif; font-size: 13.4333; font-weight: normal; width: 87px;" text-anchor="middle" x="493.3" y="299"><tspan>Black college</tspan></text></g><g class="highcharts-axis-labels highcharts-yaxis-labels"></g><g class="highcharts-axis-labels highcharts-yaxis-labels"></g><g class="highcharts-tooltip" opacity="0" style="border: 0px; 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ChartData

Peak data for white high school grads reflects 12-month moving average ending in June 2010; for black high school grads, ending in January 2011; for black college grads, ending in August 2011; and for white college grads, ending in September 2011.

Since these young graduates have the same basic degree and are in the same labor market position as their peers (whether high school or college), one would hope there would be little disparity in the unemployment rates of each group. The fact that having an equivalent amount of education and a virtual blank slate of prior professional work experience still does not generate parity in unemployment across race is evidence that factors such as discrimination, or unequal access to the informal networks that often lead to job opportunities are in play.black left unity networkhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-6633712709574318123.post-26249173362782334602016-05-08T06:23:00.000-07:002016-05-08T06:23:11.441-07:00CLASS STRUGGLE FOR BEGINNERS- Part 62: Workers Sue Alabama Over Racist Wage Law
'The state stole my raise': workers sue Alabama over 'racist' wage law

 Nine months ago Birmingham became first city in the Deep South to raise the minimum wage, then saw it overturned by law described as 'a slap in the face'

 Workers in Harlem at a minimum wage rally. While New York and California have passes laws to raise the minimum wage to $15, Alabama's is stuck at $7.25.
<svg height="22" viewbox="0 0 22 22" width="22"></svg>

Jana Kasperkevic

New York

Saturday 7 May 2016

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<time class="content__dateline-lm js-lm u-h" data-timestamp="1462648662000" datetime="2016-05-07T15:17:42-0400" itemprop="dateModified"> </time>

Fast-food workers from Birmingham, Alabama, are suing their state legislature after it passed a law that put a stop to their expected pay raise.

 Nine months ago, the workers scored a major victory as Birmingham became the first city in the deep south to pass a law enacting a higher minimum wage. At the time, the city council agreed to increase the local minimum wage from $7.25 to $8.50 by July 2016 and to $10.10 by July 2017. The victory was short-lived as the state legislature passed a law earlier this year, prohibiting cities from increasing their local minimum wage, voiding Birmingham's ordinance.

 On Thursday, Birmingham fast food workers, Alabama's chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Greater Birmingham Ministries filed a federal civil rights lawsuit arguing that HB-174, passed two months ago, is tainted "with racial animus". Most of the Birmingham workers who would have received a pay hike in July were African American, according to Richard Rouco, one of the lawyers representing the plaintiffs.

 Alabama passes law banning cities and towns from increasing minimum wage

"Despite working hard for the same restaurant for three years, I've only gotten one 25-cent raise," said Marnika Lewis, 23, one of the plaintiffs in the case. She works at Moe's restaurant, earning $7.75 an hour. "I can't afford to feed my son or heat my home on the $270 I'm paid each week, so I have to rely on public assistance just to scrape by. If the legislature and governor hadn't illegally stolen my raise, I would have had money to pay for my son's child care."

 Another plaintiff in the lawsuit is Antoin Adams, 23, who works at Hardee's and earns $7.25 an hour.

 Since Alabama has no state minimum wage, it uses the federal minimum wage that has been stuck at $7.25 since July 2009. Americans earning $7.25 an hour who work full time – 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year – make just a little more than $15,000 a year.

 Adams said he earns little more than $10,000 a year, before taxes. At the moment, he cannot afford to get his car fixed and often has to decide between spending money on food or treating his chronic asthma conditions.

 "I want to go to college, but on $7.25 saving up is impossible. I'd love to be a computer technician, and a raise to $10.10 sure would have helped me along that path," he said. "The state stole my raise."

In the wake of congressional inaction on wages, the Obama administration has come out in support of states and cities raising their minimum wage.

 "Since the president called for an increase in minimum wage in the State of the Union 2013, 18 states have raised their minimum wage so we are very encouraged by what is happening," US deputy labor secretary Chris Lu pointed out in April. "Not only states, but cities as well have taken the lead on this action."

 Most recently, both California and New York passed laws that would see their minimum wages go up to $15 an hour by 2022. Although Obama had praised the two states for their efforts to raise wages, publicly he has yet to endorse a $15 federal minimum wage. Instead, he has thrown his support behind a proposal introduced by congressional Democrats, which would raise the federal minimum wage to $12 an hour by 2020.

 Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton has also publicly declared her support for raising the federal minimum wage to $12 an hour even as her rival for the democratic presidential nomination Bernie Sanders threw his support behind a $15 minimum wage.

 Most recently, however, Clinton has implied that she would not be opposed to a nationwide $15 minimum wage if there was a widespread support.

 "I hope the rest of the country will catch up with New York and California," she said while speaking on a panel on equal pay earlier this month. Increasing the federal minimum wage would benefit women as they account for two-thirds of minimum wage workers, she said.

According to Rouco, the plaintiffs' lawyer, if Birmingham were allowed to raise its minimum wage to $10.10 an hour, it would result in a raise for more than 40,000 workers, most of whom are African American. About 74% of Birmingham's residents are black and almost third of them live in poverty.

 The state's attempt to block a minimum wage increase in Birmingham is also an insult, local leaders and officials said.

 "It's really a slap in the face," said Scott Douglas, executive director of Greater Birmingham Ministries. "And the reasons they gave for doing it? Like: 'Oh, Alabama needs a unified minimum wage. We can't have patchwork minimum wages'. When they are not lifting a finger to raise any wages across the state? It was like somebody slaps you and then winks. It was that kind of an insult."

 Rouco said they are "firmly optimistic" about the outcomes of the lawsuit, adding that the firm is not in the habit of filing lawsuits they don't expect to win. The aim of the suit is to get a verdict saying that the state law banning cities and towns from increasing their minimum wages cannot be enforced. In the case of such a verdict, he said, the Birmingham new minimum wage would go into effect immediately.

black left unity networkhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-6633712709574318123.post-87612740339400046762016-05-06T13:44:00.002-07:002016-05-06T13:47:10.056-07:00Obamacare: A NeoLiberal Disaster That Will Make You Sick & Poor

Obamacare: The Neoliberal Model Comes Home to Roost in the United States—If We Let It

by Howard Waitzkin and Ida Hellander

http://monthlyreview.org

Howard Waitzkin is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of New Mexico and practices internal medicine part-time in rural New Mexico and Illinois. His books include Medicine and Public Health at the End of Empire (Paradigm, 2011).

Ida Hellander is a longtime advocate for single-payer health reform in the United States.
As the Affordable Care Act (ACA, otherwise known as Obamacare) continues along a very bumpy road, it is worth asking where it came from and what comes next. Officially, Obamacare represents the latest in more than a century of efforts in the United States to achieve universal access to health care. In reality, Obamacare has strengthened the for-profit insurance industry by transferring public, tax-generated revenues to the private sector.

It has done and will do little to improve the problem of uninsurance in the United States; in fact, it has already begun to worsen the problem of underinsurance. Obamacare is also financially unsustainable because it has no effective way to control costs. Meanwhile, despite benefits for some of the richest corporations and executives, and adverse or mixed effects for the non-rich, a remarkable manipulation of political symbolism has conveyed the notion that Obamacare is a creation of the left, warranting strenuous opposition from the right.

Abundant data substantiate that the failure of Obamacare has become nearly inevitable. Even after the ACA is fully implemented, more than one-half of the previously uninsured population will remain uninsured—at least 27 million people, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office—and at least twice that number will remain underinsured.1 Due to high deductibles (about $10,000 for a family bronze plan and $6,000 for silver) and co-payments, coverage under Obamacare has become unusable for many individuals and families, and employer-sponsored coverage is headed in the same direction.2 Private insurance generally produces administrative expenses about eight times higher than public administration; administrative waste has increased even more under Obamacare, and remains much higher than in other capitalist countries with national health programs.3

These administrative expenditures pay for activities like marketing, billing, denials of claims, processing copayments and deductibles, exorbitant salaries and deferred income for executives (sometimes more than $30 million per year), profits, and dividends for corporate shareholders.4 The overall costs of the health system under Obamacare are projected to rise from 17.4 percent of GDP in 2013 to 19.6 percent in 2022.5 A conservative projection shows that premiums and out-of-pocket expenditures for the average family will equal half of the average family income by 2019 and the full average family income itself by 2029.6

The Origins of Obamacare
The overall structure of Obamacare is not new. Similar "reforms" have appeared in other countries over the last two decades. The year 1994 was a significant one for health reform worldwide. Colombia enacted a national program of "managed competition," to replace its existing health system, which had been based largely on public hospitals and clinics. The World Bank mandated and partly financed the reform, and President César Gaviria and his colleagues promoted the reform to financial elites at the World Economic Forum and elsewhere. That same year a similar proposal, designed by the U.S. insurance industry and spearheaded by Hillary Clinton, was advanced but ultimately abandoned. The right wing opposed the plan as a big-government boondoggle, while on the left, opposition centered on the massively increased, tax-subsidized role that the plan would create for the private insurance industry, especially a handful of the nation's largest companies.

During the 1990s, several European countries considered proposals for health reform that followed a similar model of privatization, "managed competition," and increased access of the private insurance industry to public health care trust funds.7 Although a few, like the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, implemented elements of such reforms, most European countries did not, acceding to opposition from left-oriented parties, labor unions, and civic organizations.

In Latin America, Asia, and some African nations, for-profit multinational insurance corporations, mostly based in the United States, tried to expand their operations. Access to public social security trust funds, previously designated to provide retirement and health care benefits, proved a primary motivation for this expansion.8 Conferences and publications organized by the World Bank and insurance companies legitimated such efforts by recruiting progressive spokespersons such as Desmond Tutu in South Africa.9

Then, in 2006, Republican Governor Mitt Romney in Massachusetts implemented a reform that required all state residents to buy insurance through the state system if they did not already hold insurance coverage. Romney later disavowed the reform during his 2012 presidential campaign, but the same overall structure re-emerged in Obamacare.

While framed as programs to improve access for the poor and underserved, these initiatives facilitated the efforts of for-profit insurance corporations providing "managed care." The corporations could collect prepaid capitation fees or other premiums from government agencies administering trust funds, as well as from employers and patients, and could invest the reserves at high rates of return. Insurance corporations also profited by denying or delaying necessary care through strategies such as utilization review and preauthorization requirements; cost-sharing such as copayments, deductibles, co-insurance, and pharmacy tiers; limiting access to only certain physicians; and frequent redesign of benefits.

Such proposals fostered neoliberalism. They promoted multiple competing, for-profit, private insurance corporations. Programs and institutions previously based in the public sector were cut back and, if possible, privatized. Overall government budgets for public-sector health care were reduced. Private corporations gained access to public trust funds. Public hospitals and clinics entered into competition with private institutions, their budgets were determined by demand rather than supply, and prior global budgets for safety net institutions were not guaranteed. Insurance executives made operational decisions about services, and their authority superseded that of physicians and other clinicians.

The Strange Career of Neoliberal Health Reform
The roots of the neoliberal model for health reform emerged initially from Cold War military policy. The economist Alain Enthoven provided much of the intellectual framework for these early efforts. Enthoven had worked as Assistant Secretary of Defense under Robert S. McNamara during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. While at the Pentagon between 1961 and 1969, he led a group of analysts who developed the "planning-programming-budgeting system" (PPBS) and cost-benefit analysis, intended to promote more cost-effective spending decisions for military expenditures.10 After leaving the military sector, Enthoven emerged as the principal architect of "managed competition," which became the prevailing model for the Clinton reform, Romney-care, Obamacare, and neoliberal health reform throughout the world. Decades later, he remains a strong advocate for this model.11

After a brief excursion between 1969 and 1973 as vice president and then president of Litton Industries, a major military contractor, Enthoven joined the faculty at Stanford in 1973 as a professor of both management and health care economics. There his work on health policy incorporated several elements common to military and medical systems (Table 1): distrust of professionals, deference to managers, choice among competing alternatives, and cost-benefit analysis, but not necessarily cost reduction.12

Table 1. Complementary Themes in Military Planning-Programming-Budgeting System (PPBS) and Managed Competition in Health Care

<colgroup><col></col><col></col><col></col></colgroup>

	Focus of Theme

Theme	PPBS	Managed Competition

Distrust of professionals	Military brass	Medical guild

Trust of managers	Independent analysts	Managers of organizational sponsors

Choice among competing alternatives	Weapon systems, military strategies	Organized health plans

Scientific method	Cost-benefit analysis in case studies	Cost-benefit analysis in case studies

"Tools" for managers	Cost-benefit analysis, 5-year defense plan, draft Presidential memos, development concept papers	Techniques to prevent "market failure": pricing, cost-benefit analysis, annual enrollment, quality assurance, subsidy management

Incrementalism with strains	Military officers, corporate contractors, members of Congress	Physicians, middle-class consumers, private insurance companies not equipped for managed care

Cost analysis but not necessarily cost reduction	No budget ceiling for military expenditures	No budget ceiling for health care expenditures

Sources: See Note 11.

By 1977, only four years after leaving the defense sector, Enthoven offered the Carter Administration his proposal for a Consumer Choice Health Plan. Although Carter rejected the plan, Enthoven soon published the proposal.13 In this early work, Enthoven presented the basic concepts of most subsequent health reform proposals; Obamacare incorporates this same overall structure.

During the 1980s, Enthoven collaborated with managed care and insurance executives to refine the proposal. A new name, "managed competition," proved attractive to business leaders, who met regularly in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.14 The five largest insurance corporations funded this group, as well as providing support for Bill Clinton's presidential campaign and Clinton's Health Security Act.

Several conditions led to the creation of Obamacare as a reform that enhanced the fortunes of the private insurance industry. Campaign financing, as usual, played a major role. Obama, who as a state legislator in Illinois had favored a single-payer approach, drastically changed his position as a presidential candidate. For the 2008 campaign, Obama received the largest financial contributions in history from the insurance industry, more than three times the contributions received by his Republican rival, John McCain. With funding from the insurance industry and financial corporations linked to Wall Street, Obama became the first presidential candidate in history able to turn down government funds for his campaign.15

The Boilerplate Neoliberal Health Reform

The neoliberal health agenda, including Obamacare, emerged as one component of a worldwide agenda developed by the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and other international financial institutions. This agenda to promote market-driven health care facilitated multinational corporations' access to public-sector health and social security trust funds. An underlying managerial ideology claimed, nearly always without evidence, that corporate executives could achieve superior quality and efficiency by "managing" medical services in the marketplace.16 Enthoven and colleagues in academic health economics participated in this effort, refining terms and giving the enterprise a scholarly credibility.

Health reform proposals across different countries have resembled one another closely. The specific details of each plan appeared to conform to a word-processed, cookie-cutter template, in which only the names of national institutions and local actors have varied. Six broad features have characterized nearly all neoliberal health initiatives (Table 2).

Table 2. Structural Elements of Neoliberal Health Reform

<colgroup><col></col><col></col><col></col></colgroup>

Colombia Reform (1994)	Clinton Proposal (1994)	Obamacare (2010)

Large privately controlled organizations of health care providers

 "Provider Institutions of Health Services" (Instituciones Prestadores de Servicios de Salud, IPSSs)	"Accountable Health Partnerships" (AHPs)	 Large organizations that include many physicians' practices, hospitals, and/or other health facilities; "Accountable Care Organizations" (ACOs) in Medicare

Large organizations of health care purchasers

 Corporations Promoting Health (Empresas Promotoras de Salud, EPSs)	Health Insurance Purchasing Cooperatives (HIPCs)	Large for-profit insurance corporations contract with networks of provider organizations for managed care coverage

Constriction of public hospitals and safety net providers

 Fiscal crisis of state and local public hospitals; many close	Predicted adverse effect on public hospitals and clinics	Fiscal crisis and closure of public hospitals; fiscal crisis of other safety-net providers

Tiered benefits packages

Varying "health service packages"	"Uniform effective health benefits"	Designated by metals (bronze, silver, gold, platinum) in the "marketplaces"

Multi-payer and multi-payment financing

Capitation payments†

Copayments

Deductibles

Taxes

Capitation payments‡

Copayments

Deductibles

Taxes

Capitation payments‡

Copayments

Deductibles

Taxes

Changes in tax code

Increased payroll taxes for employees and employers

Reduced tax deduction for "Cadillac" private plans that exceed minimum benefits standards

Tax incentive to buy less expensive coverage

Excise tax on "Cadillac" private plans that exceed a specified cost limit.

Penalties through tax system for non-purchase of private sector health insurance

† Sources: patients, employers, public sector trust ("solidarity") funds (the latter being "contributory" for employed workers; and "subsidized" for low income and unemployed).

‡ Sources: patients, employers, public sector trust funds—Medicaid, Medicare.

1. Organizations of providers. One element of neoliberal proposals involves large privately controlled organizations of health care providers. These organizations operate under the direct control or strong influence of private, for-profit insurance corporations, in collaboration with hospitals and health systems. The organizations may employ health care providers directly, or may contract with providers in a preferred network. In the Clinton proposal, these organizations were named Accountable Health Partnerships (AHPs). In Obamacare, they are called Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs). (Technically, ACOs are supported only in Medicare, although Obamacare accelerated organizational consolidation in anticipation of broader implementation of payment reform.) The Colombian health reform labels them Provider Institutions of Health Services (Instituciones Prestadores de Servicios de Salud, or IPSSs).

In this model, for-profit managed care organizations (MCOs), usually subsidiaries of multinational insurance corporations, offer health plans competitively. In reality, competition is constrained by the small number of organizations large enough to possess the financial resources and infrastructure required under the reform proposals, as well as consolidation in the private insurance industry. The MCOs contract with or employ large numbers of health practitioners.

This approach drastically reduces medical practice based on fee-for-service reimbursement. Instead, physicians and hospitals are largely absorbed into MCOs.

2. Organizations of purchasers. A second element of neoliberal proposals involves large organizations purchasing or facilitating the purchase of private health insurance, usually through MCOs. The Clinton proposal referred to these organizations as Health Insurance Purchasing Cooperatives (HPICs), even though they were not necessarily organized as member-owned or worker-owned cooperatives. Under Obamacare, the federal and state health insurance "exchanges"—later renamed "marketplaces" to reflect the reality of private corporations selling their services with government subsidies and coordination—fulfill a similar role. The ACA does allow a small role for non-profit Consumer-Operated and Oriented Plans (COOPs), which so far have not achieved financial success.17 In Colombia, the corresponding entities are called Corporations Promoting Health (Empresas Promotoras de Salud, or EPSs); some EPSs likewise misleadingly include "cooperative" in their names (such as SALUDCOOP in Bogotá).18
Such organizations purchase or facilitate the purchase of health plans from private insurance corporations, which in turn contract with large privately controlled organizations of health care providers (such as the AHPs, ACOs, or IPSSs described above).

In the United States, the marketplaces serve the "non-group market"—mainly people who previously paid for their own coverage or were uninsured. Private health plans on the marketplaces are heavily subsidized from general tax revenues, while public programs such as Medicaid and Medicare are rapidly becoming privatized. Instead of 1 to 2 percent overhead, as in the traditional Medicare program, private Medicare Advantage plans show overhead costs and profits of at least 14 percent.19 In Colombia, purchasing organizations contract with provider organizations to deliver care for the previously uninsured, with funding provided by the federal government through national and local tax revenues and a payroll tax (termed the "subsidized regime"), and other purchasing organizations contract with companies that provide health insurance for workers and their families through the social security system (the "contributory regime").

3. Constriction of public hospitals and safety net providers. Public hospitals at the state, county, or municipal levels compete for patients covered under public programs like Medicaid or Medicare with private hospitals participating as subsidiaries or contractors of insurance corporations or MCOs. With less public-sector funding, public hospitals reduce services and programs, and many eventually close. Although community health centers (CHCs) sometimes enjoy temporary improvements in funding, as in Obamacare, they increasingly serve as the providers of last resort for the remaining uninsured and underinsured. As a result, CHCs remain vulnerable to cutbacks and face an insecure future. Under Obamacare, multiple public hospitals have closed or are on the brink of closure.20 In Colombia, public hospitals and clinics also have faced budget cuts and closures, and those that survive confront those of the newly insured with access barriers, such as high copayments. Similar problems have occurred in Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, and other countries in Latin America.21

4. Tiered benefits packages. Neoliberal proposals define benefits packages in hierarchical tiers. The national reform provides a minimum package of benefits that experts view as essential, and individuals or their employers can buy additional coverage. Poor and near poor people in the U.S. Medicaid program are eligible for benefits that used to be free of cost-sharing, but since Obamacare passed, states increasingly have imposed premiums and copayments.

With "minimum benefits packages," for instance, all women are entitled to pap smears. But treatment of cervical cancer revealed by pap-smear screening would not necessarily be covered, or might require cost sharing, leaving women vulnerable to different local government funding and policies. Benefits for treatment of cervical cancer for poor women with positive pap smears have varied according to the financial resources and policies of different states or municipalities. This variability has occurred in Colombia, Mexico, and other countries that have adopted minimum benefits packages.

In the United States, neoliberal reforms also have included tiered benefits packages. The Clinton proposal aimed to create "uniform effective health benefits" required under all health plans, but it also would have allowed the sale of additional benefits to patients or employers able to afford them. Under Obamacare, a package of minimum essential services may be only partially insured.

Various metals—bronze, silver, gold, platinum—identify the tiers of coverage, where bronze represents the lowest tier (covering 60 percent of in-network health care expenses) and platinum the highest (90 percent). Individuals' and families' premiums cost the most under the most valuable metal, and their out-of-pocket copayments average the least. However, these percentages represent actuarial calculations of the insurance companies' financial payouts for services during a year among all beneficiaries at a specific tier; therefore, an individual or family expecting 60 percent coverage may pay much more in actual premiums, deductibles, and copayments. Under Obamacare, the "value" of coverage in a tier is strictly a financial calculation, based on actuarial principles in accounting. Similar tiered benefit approaches to both services and medications have been instituted within managed care programs under Medicare (as well as Medicare Part D, for medications) and Medicaid.

5. Complex multi-payer and multi-payment financing. Financial flows under neoliberal health policies are very complex (Chart 1). The costs of administering these flows and other components of neoliberal policies also are quite high (about 25 to 28 percent of total health care expenditures) and keep increasing. Under Obamacare, administrative overhead—also referred to administrative "waste," since the costs do not contribute to direct patient services—grew 10.6 percent in 2014, faster than any other component of health care except medications. Private insurance overhead is projected to increase by $273.6 billion from 2014 through 2022.22 Below, we describe the structure and sources of these various financial flows.

Chart 1. Financial Flows Under Neoliberal Health Reforms
<img alt="Chart 1. Financial Flows Under Neoliberal Health Reforms" class="aligncenter wp-image-71810 size-large lazyloaded" data-lazy-src="http://monthlyreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/watzkin_figure_1_financial_flows-500x375.jpg" data-lazy-srcset="https://monthlyreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/watzkin_figure_1_financial_flows-500x375.jpg 500w, https://monthlyreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/watzkin_figure_1_financial_flows-200x150.jpg 200w, https://monthlyreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/watzkin_figure_1_financial_flows-400x300.jpg 400w, https://monthlyreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/watzkin_figure_1_financial_flows-300x225.jpg 300w, https://monthlyreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/watzkin_figure_1_financial_flows-80x60.jpg 80w, https://monthlyreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/watzkin_figure_1_financial_flows-100x75.jpg 100w, https://monthlyreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/watzkin_figure_1_financial_flows.jpg 1000w" src="http://monthlyreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/watzkin_figure_1_financial_flows-500x375.jpg" height="375" width="500" />

* Purchase of insurance policies for employers and patients mediated by large organizations of health care purchasers.

Outflow of payments: Each insured person is considered a "head," for whom a "capitation" must be paid to an insurance company or MCO. Capitated payments have historically been justified on the theory that organizations receiving the payments would encourage prevention, so their costs for providing expensive services would decrease, and their earnings increase. In practice, the prepaid capitation payments became a source of capital that MCOs could invest in the global financial marketplace, leading to an estimated return on equity of about 16 percent.23
Inflow of funds: Funds for capitation payments come from several sources. One source involves premiums paid by workers and their families. Contributions from employers comprise a second source. The proportion of premiums paid by workers and their families versus that paid by employers differs according to the benefit package selected by employers.

Public-sector trust funds provide a third source of capitated payments. Low-income individuals and families, the unemployed, and those without employer-provided health insurance are subjected to a "means test" requiring full documentation of their financial resources and expenses. Those with incomes below this means-tested limit, after other resources such as homes, cars, and prior savings are considered, receive a subsidy from a public-sector trust fund. Under the Clinton plan and Obamacare, the trusts funds have involved Medicaid and Medicare.

Medicaid trust funds include federal and state components that vary widely according to state-level decisions about using state revenues to improve eligibility and covered services under Medicaid. In the Colombian health program, the national social security system into which employees and employers contribute for health and retirement benefits became a public-sector trust fund (Fondo de Solidaridad y Garantía [Fund of Solidarity and Gaurantee], or FOSYGA), used for capitated payments to private MCOs. Another trust fund, intended for the poor and uninsured, was created from the tax-generated budgets of the national Ministry of Health as well as the regional, state, and municipal health authorities (Fondo de Solidaridad del Régimen Subsidiado [Solidarity Fund of the Subsidized Regime]).

Copayments and deductibles comprise a fourth source of payments. Copayments require out-of-pocket payments that patients make at the time that they receive services. The rationale for copayments rests on the largely untested assumption that people are less likely to use unneeded services if they must pay something when services are provided (the "point of delivery"). For the insured, the size of the copayments usually decreases as premiums increase. Under Obamacare, for instance, those who pay higher premiums for the more precious metal plans usually pay lower copayments at the point of delivery. The evidence that copayments reduce unnecessary utilization for the non-poor is very limited; for the poor, there is strong evidence that copayments of any size reduce necessary care.24 Deductibles are payments that patients must make at the beginning of each period of insurance coverage, before the insurance will begin to pay. In principle, deductibles are likewise intended to reduce unnecessary utilization, but like copayments, actually can become barriers to obtaining needed care. For instance, the least precious metal tiers of Obamacare require deductibles as large as $6,000 per person per year, inhibiting patients from seeking anything other than catastrophic care.

Taxes are a fifth source for the inflow of capitated funds to insurance corporations. Workers pay such taxes as a deduction from their pay, and employers pay taxes as a proportion of their payrolls. In neoliberal programs, these payroll taxes shift to public-sector trusts funds and then enter the flow of funds that MCOs receive for capitated services. But most neoliberal health programs also depend on additional taxes, usually general income taxes, to create and maintain the public-sector trust funds devoted to care for the poor. In the United States and Colombia, the income tax system remains regressive overall, as the rich pay a proportionately much smaller part of their income as taxes, exploiting the tax code's myriad loopholes and exemptions. As a result, the non-rich contribute proportionally more to neoliberal health programs through taxes, on top of their premiums, copayments, and deductibles.

6. Changes in tax code. Partly because they increase administrative costs and profits, neoliberal reforms usually lead to higher taxes. In Colombia, payroll taxes for employers and employees have increased substantially, to approximately 11 percent.25 Under the Clinton proposal, changes in the tax code would have restricted corporate and individual tax deductions for health insurance, therefore providing incentives to purchase less expensive coverage overall. Obamacare reduces tax deductions and imposes a tax for so-called Cadillac insurance plans that go beyond the specified minimum coverage standards.

In addition, Obamacare calls for penalties, administered by the Internal Revenue Service, for those who do not purchase mandatory insurance coverage. One rationale for tax code changes usually involves claims that reduced tax deductions and tax penalties for non-adherence will lead to decreased overall costs for health care. However, the increased administrative costs of restructuring the tax code and then enforcing those changes generally go unrecognized.

Appraisals of Neoliberal Health Reforms
Advocates of neoliberal health reform have produced evaluations that, as expected, show favorable results. For instance, the 2000 World Health Report of the World Health Organization (WHO), supported in part by the World Bank, ranked the world's health systems using a conceptual orientation and methodology that received criticism worldwide.26 In the rankings, "choice" of insurance plan was a defining criterion in evaluating health system performance. From this perspective, universal, publicly delivered health systems that covered everyone but did not encourage choice among private insurers ranked lower than those that did.

As a result, Colombia (ranked 22nd in the world and first in Latin America), Chile (33rd), Costa Rica (36th), and even the United States (37th) ranked higher than Cuba (39th), despite Cuba's much admired, accessible health system and outstanding health indicators. Brazil ranked very low, 125th, due to its attempt to achieve a unified health system, codified in the Brazilian constitution of 1988.

The co-director of the WHO's ranking project, Julio Frenk, later became an architect of neoliberal reform as Mexico's minister of health. He and his colleagues described Mexico's reform in The Lancet, again prompting complaints for their unsubstantiated claims of success.27 Despite wide criticism of the WHO ranking project and of the reforms in Mexico, Frenk and his coworkers have become leading proponents of the neoliberal approach, which in recent years has taken on the misleading name, "universal health coverage" (UHC)—referring to private or public insurance coverage.28 UHC does not mean "health care for all"—a delivery system that provides equal services for the entire population, regardless of an individual's or family's financial resources.29

As leaders of Latin American social medicine have pointed out, the UHC orientation has become "hegemonic" in global health policy circles.30 Those limited studies that have analyzed UHC's outcomes in countries such as Colombia, Chile, and Mexico, based on data rather than mere assertions of success, have not confirmed the ideological claims favoring managed care, market competition, efficiency, cost reduction, or quality. Under UHC, access barriers persist or worsen as costs and corporate profits expand.31

Such contrasts became clear in the case of Colombia, which was considered pathbreaking by the neoliberal powers that be. The World Bank sponsored the reform and also evaluated it favorably, despite acknowledging a few methodological weaknesses, such as a lack of randomized data or ability to infer causality.32 The ideological assumption underlying such appraisals—that the public sector only interferes with the market—emerged from a study of Colombia's reform released in 2009 by the Inter-American Development Bank: "Achieving universal coverage faces several hurdles…because of the existence of safety-net providers that act as substitutes for insurance and provide incentives to ride the system for free…. The resistance of public hospitals to forgoing supply-side subsidies cannot be underestimated."33

By contrast, evaluations of the Colombian reform not tied to its sponsors have found mostly adverse effects. An influential study by Thomas Tsai published in The Lancet determined that in 2008 alone, Colombian citizens initiated approximately 143,000 lawsuits (tutelas) due to denial of treatment by private insurance companies, costs outstripped public funding, and there was inadequate "citizen consultation" in improving the program.34 Other research showed that profit-seeking permeated the system, that insurance covered too few services, and that the system was unable to address the health impacts of poor living conditions.35 An ethnographic study analyzed attempts to protect the system's market structure in the courts.36 A prominent senator, Jorge Robledo, documented monopolistic practices, delayed payments, corruption, high overhead, increasing legal actions due to denial of care, and illegal investment of health funds by for-profit insurance companies. Robledo concluded: "Statute 100 [the reform's legal name] does not work, because it is not a law intended for the health of Colombians, but rather a law intended to finance the business of the health of Colombians."37

Many countries have rejected the neoliberal model, and have instead constructed health systems based on the goal of "health care for all" (HCA). Such countries strive to provide universal access to care without tiers of differing benefit packages for rich and poor. For instance, Canada prohibits private insurance coverage for services provided by its national health program.

Because Canada's wealthy must participate in the publicly financed system, the presence of the entire population in a unitary system assures a high-quality national program. In Latin America, countries trying to advance the HCA model include Bolivia, Brazil, Cuba, Ecuador, Uruguay, and Venezuela. The inevitable failure of Obamacare may open a space, finally, for even the United States to pursue a national health program that does not follow the neoliberal model.

The Single-Payer Proposal

As a non-neoliberal model, a single-payer national health program (NHP) in the United States essentially would create "Medicare for all." Under such a plan, the government collects payments from workers, employers, and Medicare recipients, and then distributes funds to health care providers for the services that Medicare patients receive. Because it is such a simple system, the administrative costs under traditional Medicare average just 1 to 2 percent.38 The vast majority of Medicare expenditures pay for clinical services. Such a structure has achieved substantial savings by reducing administrative waste in Canada, Taiwan, and other countries.

The following features of a single-payer option come from the proposals of Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP), a group of more than 20,000 medical professionals, spanning all specialties, states, age groups, and practice settings.39 According to the PNHP proposals, coverage would be universal for all needed services, including medications and long-term care.

There would be no out-of-pocket premiums, copayments, or deductibles. Costs would be controlled by "monopsony" financing from a single, public source. The NHP would not permit competing private insurance and would eliminate multiple tiers of care for different income groups. Practitioners and clinics would be paid predetermined fees for services, without any need for costly billing procedures. Hospitals would negotiate an annual global budget for all operating costs. For-profit, investor-owned facilities would be prohibited from participation. Most non-profit hospitals would remain privately owned. To reduce overlapping and redundant facilities, capital purchases and expansion would be budgeted separately, based on regional health planning goals.

Funding sources would include current federal spending for Medicare and Medicaid, a payroll tax on private businesses less than what businesses currently pay for coverage, and an income tax on households, with a surtax on high incomes and capital gains. A small tax on stock transactions would be implemented, while state and local taxes for health care would be eliminated.40 Under this financing plan, 95 percent of families would pay less for health care than they previously paid in insurance premiums, deductibles, copayments, other out-of-pocket spending, and reduced wages.

From the corporate viewpoint, the insurance and financial sectors would lose a major source of capital accumulation. At the same time, other large and small businesses would experience a stabilization or reduction in health care costs. Companies that do not currently provide health insurance would pay more, but far less than the cost of buying private coverage.

National polls have consistently shown that about two-thirds of people in the United States favor the single-payer approach.41 Ninety-three members of Congress, led by Representative John Conyers and Senator Bernie Sanders, have co-sponsored single-payer legislation.42 What, then, are the obstacles to a single-payer plan, and should such a program be the ultimate goal for the U.S. health system?

Moving Beyond Single Payer
The coming failure of Obamacare will mark a moment of transformation in the United States, where neoliberalism has come home to roost. For that moment, those struggling for a just and accessible health system will need to address some profound changes that have occurred during the era of neoliberalism. These changes pertain to the shifting social class position of health professionals, and to the increasingly oligopolistic and financialized character of the health insurance industry.

First, the social class position of physicians and other health professionals has changed drastically. Previously, most physicians worked in individual or group practices. Although some were employees receiving relatively high salaries and benefits, most were small entrepreneurs. In the "fee-for-service" system, they seldom accumulated capital on the scale of industrialists or financiers, but they still saw themselves and others saw them as members of an "upper class." Some Marxist-oriented theorists viewed them as members of a "professional managerial class."43

Physicians increasingly have become employees of hospitals or practices at least partially owned by large health systems. In a large 2015 survey, 63 percent of all physicians reported being employed, including 72 percent of women physicians.44 These changes mainly reflect the increased costs of owning a private practice, due to billing and other administrative requirements. In the average practice, annual overhead costs have reached about $83,000 per physician in the United States, compared to $22,000 in Canada.45 As a result, doctors mostly have become employees of hospital and health system corporations, where relatively high salaries tend to mask the reality of their employee status.

Before neoliberalism, physicians for the most part owned or controlled their own means of production and conditions of practice. Although their work was often challenging, they could decide their own hours, staff members, how much time to spend with patients, what to record about their visits in medical records, and how much to charge for their services. Today, the corporations for which physicians work control all of these decisions. This loss of control over the conditions of work has caused much unhappiness in the profession. An esteemed clinician described the change as "working on the factory floor."46

With loss of control over the work process and a reduced ability to generate very high incomes, the medical profession has become proletarianized.47 Due to their lingering mystique of professionalism and relatively high incomes, physicians often do not realize that their malaise reflects in large part their changing social class position. In a way, they have joined that highest stratum of workers which Lenin and others referred to as the "aristocracy of labor."48 From Samir Amin's perspective, the current wave of "generalized proletarianization" has engulfed the medical profession: "A rapidly growing proportion of workers are no more than sellers of their labor power to capital…a reality that should not be obscured by the apparent autonomy conferred on them by their legal status."49

Beyond the changing class position of health professionals, the transition as Obamacare collapses will need to address the oligopolistic character of the insurance industry, alongside the consolidation of large health systems. Obamacare has increased the flow of capitated public and private funds into the insurance industry and thus has extended the overall financialization of the global economy.50

In this context, it is important to reconsider the distinction between national health insurance (NHI) and a national health service (NHS). NHI involves socialization of payments for health services but usually leaves intact private ownership at the level of infrastructure. Except for a small proportion of institutions like public hospitals and clinics, under NHI the means of production in health care remain privately owned. Canada is the best-known model of NHI. The PNHP proposal and Congressional legislation that embodies the singer-payer approach are based on the Canadian model of NHI.

An NHS, by comparison, involves socialization of both payment for health services and the infrastructure through which services are provided. Under an NHS, the state generally owns and operates hospitals, clinics, and other health institutions, which become part of the public sector rather than remaining under private control. In the capitalist world, Scotland and Sweden provide examples of NHSs, where most health infrastructure exists within the public sector and most health professionals are employees of the state. For such countries, the state apparatus includes elements that provide "welfare state" services, including health care, that, however vital, ultimately protect the capitalist system. In the socialist world, Cuba offers the clearest remaining model of an NHS where a private sector does not exist. In the United States, a legislative proposal introduced during the 1970s and 1980s by Representative Ronald Dellums explicitly adopted the goal of an NHS.

The PNHP single-payer proposal emerged from a retreat in New Hampshire during 1986, where activists struggled with these distinctions. Although most participants at the retreat had worked hard for the Dellums NHS proposal, they reached a consensus—albeit with some ambivalence—to shift their work to an NHI proposal based on Canada. The rationale for this shift involved two main considerations. First, Canada's proximity and cultural similarity to the United States would make it more palatable for the U.S. population, and especially its Congressional representatives. Secondly, a Canadian-style NHI proposal could be "doctor-friendly." Under the PNHP proposal, physicians could continue to work in private practice, clinics, or hospitals. The main difference for physicians was that payments would be socialized, so that the physicians would not have to worry about billing and collecting their fees for services provided.

While PNHP has achieved great success in its research and policy work, these efforts, and those of many other organizations supporting single payer, have not yet generated a broad social movement working toward a Canadian-style NHI. Meanwhile, the neoliberal model, with all its benefits for the ruling class and drawbacks for everyone else, has solidified its hegemony. Partly as a result, physicians and other health professionals are becoming proletarianized employees of an increasingly consolidated, profit-driven, financialized health care system. And under Obamacare, the state has continued to prioritize protection of the capitalist economic system, in this case by overseeing huge subsidies for private insurance and pharmaceutical corporations.
Under these circumstances, it is no longer evident that socialization of payments for health services under a single payer NHI is the only goal toward which progressive forces should struggle.51 PNHP calls for the removal of for-profit corporations from U.S. health care. But that change will not occur within the context of capitalism as we know it. As neoliberalism draws to a close and as Obamacare collapses, a much more fundamental, socialist transformation needs to reshape not just health care, but also the capitalist state and capitalist society.

Notes

Congressional Budget Office, "," March 2015, ; Rachel Nardin et al., "The Uninsured after Implementation of the Affordable Care Act: A Demographic and Geographic Analysis,"Health Affairs blog, June 6, 2013, http://healthaffairs.org.

Robert Pear, "Many Say High Deductibles Make Their Health Law Insurance All but Useless,"New York Times, November 14, 2015.

David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler, "The Post-Launch Problem: The Affordable Care Act's Persistently High Administrative Costs,"Health Affairs blog, May 27, 2015, http://healthaffairs.org; David U. Himmelstein et al., "A Comparison Of Hospital Administrative Costs In Eight Nations: US Costs Exceed All Others By Far,"Health Affairs 33, no. 9 (2014): 1586–94; Steffie Woolhandler, Terry Campbell, and David U. Himmelstein, "Costs of Health Care Administration in the United States and Canada,"New England Journal of Medicine 349, no. 8 (2003): 768–75.

"Health Insurance CEO Pay Skyrockets in 2013," Health Care-NOW!, May 5, 2014, http://healthcare-now.org.

"National Health Expenditure Projections 2012–2022," Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, http://cms.gov.

Richard A. Young and Jennifer E. DeVoe, "Who Will Have Health Insurance in the Future? An Updated Projection,"Annals of Family Medicine 10, no. 2 (2012): 156–62.

Howard Waitzkin,Medicine and Public Health at the End of Empire (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2011), chapter 8.

Howard Waitzkin and Celia Iriart, "How the United States Exports Managed Care to Third World Countries,"Monthly Review 52, no. 1 (May 2000): 21–35; Karen Stocker, Howard Waitzkin, and Celia Iriart, "The Exportation of Managed Care to Latin America,"New England Journal of Medicine 340, no. 14 (1999): 1131–36.

Waitzkin and Iriart, "How the United States Exports Managed Care to Third World Countries."

Alain C. Enthoven and K. Wayne Smith, How Much Is Enough? Shaping the Defense Program, 1961–1969 (New York: Harper and Row, 1971).

For more on the sources of neoliberal health reform in the military, see Howard Waitzkin, "The Strange Career of Managed Competition: Military Failure to Medical Success?"American Journal of Public Health 84 (1994): 482–89; Alain C. Enthoven, "Commentary: Setting the Record Straight—A Reply to Howard Waitzkin,"American Journal of Public Health 84 (1994): 490–93; Howard Waitzkin, "A Rejoinder,"American Journal of Public Health 84 (1994): 493–94. For Enthoven's more recent packaging of the same perspective, see Alain C. Enthoven, "Market Forces and Efficient Health Care Systems,"Health Affairs 23, no. 2 (2004): 25–27; Alain C. Enthoven and Wynand P. M. M. van de Ven, "Going Dutch—Managed-Competition Health Insurance in the Netherlands,"New England Journal of Medicine 357, no. 24 (2007): 2421–23.

Waitzkin, "The Strange Career of Managed Competition."

Alain C. Enthoven, "Consumer-Choice Health Plan,"New England Journal of Medicine 298, nos. 12 and 13 (1978): 650–58, 709–20; andHealth Plan: The Only Practical Solution to the Soaring Cost of Medical Care (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1980).

Alain C. Enthoven,Theory and Practice of Managed Competition in Health Care Finance (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1988); Alain C. Enthoven and Richard Kronick, "A Consumer Choice Health Plan for the 1990s,"New England Journal of Medicine 320, nos. 1 and 2 (1989): 29–37, 94–101; Paul Ellwood, Alain Enthoven, and Lynn Etheredge, "The Jackson Hole Initiatives for a Twenty First Century American Health Care System,"Health Economics 1, no. 3 (1992): 149–68.

For information about Obama's switch from single-payer to market-oriented principles and the campaign contributions that supported this conversion, see: "Barack Obama on Single Payer in 2003," http://pnhp.org; Brad Jacobson, "Obama Received $20 Million from Healthcare Industry in 2008 Campaign," The Raw Story, January 12, 2010, http://rawstory.com. Obama's support from the insurance industry deteriorated slightly in 2012: Center for Responsive Politics, "2012 Presidential Race," http://opensecrets.org.

Deborah Levine and Jessica Mulligan, "Overutilization, Overutilized,"Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 40, no. 2 (2015): 421–37.

"Health Policy Brief: The CO-OP Health Insurance Program (updated)," Health Affairs, updated January 23, 2014, http://healthaffairs.org.

Entidad Promotora de Salud Organismo Cooperativo, Directorio de Empesas, Colombia, http://informacion-empresas.co.

Kip Sullivan, "How to Think Clearly about Medicare Administrative Costs: Data Sources and Measurement,"Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 38 , no. 3 (2013): 479–504.

Sharita R. Thomas et al., "A Comparison of Closed Rural Hospitals and Perceived Impact," North Carolina Rural Health Research Program, April 2015, http://shepscenter.unc.edu; Chad Terhune, "Closure of Three Southland Hospitals May Be Part of a Trend,"Los Angeles Times, April 3, 2013.

Waitzkin,Medicine and Public Health at the End of Empire, chapters 9–10.

Himmelstein and Woolhandler, "The Post-Launch Problem."

"Are Health Insurers Making Huge Profits?"The Economist, May 5, 2010, http://economist.com.

Nicole Lurie et al., "Termination of Medi-Cal Benefits,"New England Journal of Medicine 314, no. 19 (1986): 1266–68.

Ursula Giedion and Manuela Villar Uribe, "Colombia's Universal Health Insurance System,"Health Affairs 28, no. 3 (2009): 853–63.

World Health Report 2000Geneva: World Health Organization, 2000), http://who.int. For critiques, see Celia Almeida et al., "Methodological Concerns and Recommendations on Policy Consequences of the World Health Report 2000,"Lancet 357, no. 9269 (2001): 1692–97; Vicente Navarro, "Assessment of the World Health Report 2000,"Lancet 356, no. 9241 (2000): 1598–1601.

Felicia M. Knaul et al., "The Quest for Universal Health Coverage: Achieving Social Protection for All in Mexico,"Lancet 380, no. 9849 (2012): 1259–79; Waitzkin,Medicine and Public Health at the End of Empire, chapter 9; Asa Cristina Laurell, "Three Decades of Neoliberalism in Mexico: The Destruction of Society,"International Journal of Health Services 45 , no. 2 (2015): 246–64.

Julio Frenk, "Leading the Way towards Universal Health Coverage: A Call to Action,"Lancet 385, no. 9975 (2015): 1352–58.

Howard Waitzkin, "Universal Health Coverage: The Strange Romance ofThe Lancet, MEDICC, and Cuba,"Social Medicine 9, no. 2 (2015): 93–97.

Nila Heredia et al., "The Right to Health: What Model for Latin America?"Lancet 385, no. 9975 (2015): 34–37.

Waitzkin,Medicine and Public Health at the End of Empire, chapter 9; Asa Cristina Laurell, "Three Decades of Neoliberalism in Mexico"; Amit Sengupta, "Universal Health Coverage: Beyond Rhetoric," International Development Research Centre, Occasional Paper No. 20, November 2013, http://municipalservicesproject.org; David Stuckler et al., "The Political Economy of Universal Health Coverage," background paper for the First Global Symposium on Health Systems Research, Montreux, Switzerland, November 16–19, 2010, http://pacifichealthsummit.org

Giedion and Villar Uribe, "Colombia's Universal Health Insurance System."

Amanda L. Glassman et al.,From Few to Many: Ten Years of Health Insurance Expansion in Colombia (Washington, DC: Inter-American Development Bank, 2009).

Thomas C. Tsai, "Second Chance for Health Reform in Colombia,"Lancet 375, 9709 (2010): 109–10.

Ingrid Vargas et al., "Barriers of Access to Care in a Managed Competition Model: Lessons from Colombia,"BMC Health Services Research 10, no. 297 (2010): 1–12, http://biomedcentral.com.

César E. Abadía-Barrero, "Neoliberal Justice and the Transformation of the Moral: The Privatization of the Right to Health Care in Colombia,"Medical Anthropology Quarterly (October 21, 2014).

Senator Jorge Robledo, "Saludcoop: The Greatest Robbery of Public Assets," speech in a plenary session of the Colombian Senate, September 9, 2014. Published October 15, 2014, http://colombiasupport.net.

Himmelstein and Woolhandler, "The Post-Launch Problem."

Physicians for a National Health Program, "Proposal of the Physicians' Working Group for Single-Payer National Health Insurance," submitted for publication, http://pnhp.org; Himmelstein et al., "A National Health Program for the United States: A Physicians' Proposal"; Kevin Grumbach et al., "Liberal Benefits, Conservative Spending: The Physicians for a National Health Program Proposal,"JAMA 265, no. 19 (1991): 2549–54; Charlene Harrington et al., "A National Long-Term Care Program for the United States: A Caring Vision,"JAMA 266, no. 21 (1991): 3023–29.

Gerald Friedman, "Funding HR 676: The Expanded and Improved Medicare for All Act: How We Can Afford a National Single-Payer Health Plan," http://pnhp.org.

"New Poll on Single Payer and a Medicare Buy-In," survey conducted by GBA Strategies, January 9–15, 2015, http://pnhp.org.

"The Expanded & Improved Medicare For All Act (H.R. 676)," Physicians for a National Health Program, http://pnhp.org.

Barbara Ehrenreich and John Ehrenreich, "The Real Story behind the Crash and Burn of America's Managerial Class," Alternet, February 13, 2013, http://alternet.org; Barbara and John Ehrenreich, "The Professional-Managerial Class,"Radical America 11, no. 2 (March/April 1977): 7–31.

Carol Peckham, "Medscape Physician Compensation Report 2015," http://medscape.com; Elisabeth Rosenthal, "Apprehensive, Many Doctors Shift to Jobs with Salaries,"New York Times, February 13, 2014, http://nytimes.com

Dante Morra et al., "US Physician Practices Versus Canadians: Spending Nearly Four Times As Much Money Interacting with Payers,"Health Affairs 30, no. 8 (2011): 1443–50.

John D. Stoeckle, "Working on the Factory Floor,"Annals of Internal Medicine 107, no. 2 (1987): 250–51.

John B. McKinlay and Joan Arches, "Towards the Proletarianization of Physicians,"International Journal of Health Services 15, no. 2 (1985): 161–95; Adam Reich, "Disciplined Doctors: The Electronic Medical Record and Physicians' Changing Relationship to Medical Knowledge,"Social Science & Medicine 74, no. 7 (2012): 1021–28.

Eric Hobsbawm, "Lenin and the 'Aristocracy of Labor,'"Monthly Review 64, no. 7 (December 2012): 26–34.

Samir Amin, "Contra Hardt and Negri: Multitude or Generalized Proletarianization?"Monthly Review 66, no. 6 (November 2014): 25–36.

In this sense, the financial flows of health insurance cohere with Foster's comment, "At the more stratospheric level represented by contemporary finance, the general formula for capital, or M-C-M′, is being increasingly supplanted by the circuit of speculative capital, M-M′, in which the production of use values disappears altogether and money simply begets more money." John Bellamy Foster, "The Epochal Crisis,"Monthly Review 65, no. 6 (October 2013): 1–12.

Howard Waitzkin, ed.,The Collapse of Capitalist Health Care and the Road Ahead (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016, forthcoming).

black left unity networkhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-6633712709574318123.post-35495574003144959032016-05-01T08:07:00.000-07:002016-05-01T08:07:02.730-07:00Revolutionary Worker's Struggle: North and South with Saladin Muhammad and Dr. Abdul AlkalimatLiberation Film Series/ Panel Discussion on 4-30-16 - Recorded by Charles Wright Museum

The 2015 - 2016 season of the Liberation Film Series continues with a look at the Revolutionary Worker's Struggle: North and South. Special guest speakers include Saladin Muhammad and Dr. Abdul Alkalimat, with a special video presentation of "The Saladin Interviews and Community Work."
black left unity networkhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-6633712709574318123.post-60080322113055076592016-04-28T07:52:00.000-07:002016-05-01T11:33:45.698-07:00CLASS STRUGGLE FOR BEGINNERS- Part 61: Racial Wealth Inequality More Devastating than Racial Income Inequality  Thursday, Apr 28, 2016

 Robert Reich: Wealth inequality is even more devastating than income inequality

 Two thirds of Americans now live paycheck to paycheck. This isn't sustainable, warns the former secretary of labor

Robert Reich, RobertReich.org

This originally appeared on Robert Reich's blog.

Wealth inequality is even more of a problem than income inequality. That's because you have to have enough savings from income to begin to accumulate wealth – buying a house or investing in stocks and bonds, or saving up to send a child to college.

But many Americans have almost no savings, so they have barely any wealth. Two-thirds live paycheck to paycheck.

Once you have wealth, it generates its own income as the value of that wealth increases over time, generating dividends and interest, and then even more when those assets are sold.

This is why wealth inequality is compounding faster than income inequality. The richest top 1% own 40% of the nation's wealth. The bottom 80% own just 7%.

Wealth is also transferred from generation to generation, not only in direct transfers, but also in access to the best schools and universities. Young people who get college degrees are overwhelmingly from wealthier families.

Which is why kids from low-income families, without such wealth, start out at a huge disadvantage. This is especially true for children of color from low-income families. Such families typically rent rather than own a house, and don't earn enough to have any savings.

Throughout much of America's history, the federal government has given families tax breaks in order to help them save and build assets – such as paying no tax on income that's put away for retirement, and being able to deduct interest on home mortgages.

But these tax breaks mainly help those with high income and lots of wealth in the first place, who can afford to put away lots for retirement or get a large mortgage on a huge home. They don't much help those with low incomes and minimal savings.

Families of color are especially disadvantaged because they're less likely to have savings or inherit wealth, and face significant barriers to building wealth, such as discriminatory policies and practices that thwart home ownership.

These structural disadvantages have built up to the point where the median net worth of white families is now more than 10 times greater than that of African-American or Latino families.

So what can we do to help all Americans accumulate wealth?

First, reform the tax system so capital gains – increases in the value of assets – are taxed at the same rate as ordinary income.

Second, limit how much mortgage interest the wealthy can deduct from their incomes.
Then use the tax savings from these changes to help lower-income people gain a foothold in building their own wealth.

For example:

1. Provide every newborn child with a savings account consisting of at least $1,250 — and more if a child is from a low-income family. This sum will compound over the years into a solid nest egg.

Research shows it could reduce the racial wealth gap by nearly 20% — more if deposits are larger. At age 18, that young person could use the money for tuition or training, a business or a home. Studies show such accounts can change children's behavior and increase the likelihood they'll attend college.

2. Allow families receiving public benefits to save. Today a family receiving public assistance can be cut off for having saved just $1,000. Raise the limits on what a family can save to at least $12,000—roughly three months' income for a low-income family of four—and thereby put that family on the road to self-sufficiency.

All these steps would allow families to invest in their own futures – which is the surest way out of poverty. All of us benefit when everyone has the opportunity to accumulate wealth.

Robert Reich, one of the nation's leading experts on work and the economy, is Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. Time Magazine has named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the last century. He has written 13 books, including his latest best-seller, "Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future;" "The Work of Nations," which has been translated into 22 languages; and his newest, an e-book, "Beyond Outrage." His syndicated columns, television appearances, and public radio commentaries reach millions of people each week. He is also a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine, and Chairman of the citizen's group Common Cause. His new movie "Inequality for All" is in Theaters. His widely-read blog can be found at www.robertreich.org.
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black left unity networkhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-6633712709574318123.post-78381914604729667672016-04-23T12:25:00.003-07:002016-04-23T12:25:48.861-07:0050 year of Black Panther Party Activism Honored by SanFran Chronicle

 50 years on, Black Panthers honored

Steve McCutchen, left, who joined the party in 1968; Timothy Thompson, who joined in 1970; Elaine Brown, former chair; Melvin Dickson, who joined in 1969;

Bobby McCall, who joined in 1970; and Malik Edwards.

As a high school senior in Sacramento, James Mott cut class to watch the Black Panthers march into the state Capitol in their leather jackets and berets, carrying shotguns.

Mott couldn't resist falling in behind them, and now he is at the front of the line as the Black Panther Party cranks up to mark its 50th anniversary celebration, beginning with an all-day symposium Saturday at Laney College. "

The Black Panthers were the single greatest effort by blacks in the United States for freedom and self-determination," he said, as keynote speaker for a news conference Friday at the Oakland Museum of California. The museum will be the site of a three-day conference on the Panthers that will take over the entire 7.5-acre museum compound for three days, Oct. 20-23. The symposium will coincide with the museum exhibit "All Power to the People: Black Panthers at 50," which will include original Panther berets and rarely seen photographs of day-to-day life among the Panthers, taken by party members. The marquee item, borrowed from Stanford, will be the original draft of the Panther "10 Point Platform and Program" written by hand by party co-founder Bobby Seale. Seale noticeably absent

Seale, who has written a screenplay about his life in the Panthers, was noticeably absent from Friday's event. That's because he is putting on his own 50th anniversary events on behalf of the National Alumni Association of the Black Panther Party, which he says will draw more than 200 Panthers to the Bay Area in October. Also absent was David Hilliard, founding member and chief of staff of the Panthers. He was on the schedule but called in sick. This left it to several later members, led by Mott, who now goes by the name Saturu Ned, 67, and Elaine Brown, 73-year-old former chairwoman of the Black Panther Party. Brown, an activist and one-time presidential candidate, arrived with her right arm in a sling, the result of a much-publicized dustup with Oakland City Councilwoman Desley Brooks, in an Oakland soul food joint. Brown has filed suit against the city and Brooks for $7 million, claiming injuries that required surgery.

Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf was on hand for the news conference to claim her own link to the Panthers. This is based on the fact that Schaaf is also 50 and is the 50th mayor of Oakland. "Growing up in Oakland with the Black Panther Party gave me a skeptical eye," Schaaf began her remarks, later concluding them by declaring October to be Black Panther History Month in the city of Oakland.

There was no specific event that launched the Black Panther Party, but the generally agreed-upon date is Oct. 15, 1966. The one person who does not agree on that date is Seale, who was reached by phone Friday, as his plane landed after a speech at the University of Oregon. Seale said the founding date was Oct. 22, 1966, which was his 30th birthday and the day he and the late Huey Newton finished the "10 Point Platform and Program" for the Black Panther Party for Self Defense (as it was originally called). Breakfasts for kids

The call to action was to patrol the streets in uniforms of black leather jackets and turtlenecks and berets, but those uniforms and military marches were mostly theatrics, Ned said Friday. The more effective action was to distribute food and medical treatment to the poor. The party launched a free breakfast program for neighborhood schoolchildren. Soon enough, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover called the Panthers "the greatest threat to the internal security of the country." This only aided the lore, and probably helped with recruiting. At their peak, the Panthers had thousands of members and offices in 68 cities.

Nationwide, the single act that most boosted Panther membership was probably the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., on April 4, 1968.

"That was our 9/11," said Ned. But there was also an assassination two days later and closer to home, the death of original Panther Bobby Hutton, in a shootout with Oakland police. Hutton was 17, and since then, DeFremery Park in West Oakland has been commonly known as "Bobby Hutton Park." Now the city will officially rename a portion of the park as Bobby Hutton Grove. It will be dedicated April 23, and 500 bags of groceries will be distributed in the community in honor of the Black Panther Party.

16 years with long legacy

As an organization, the Black Panthers lasted just 16 years, from 1966 to 1982, but the legacy is still going strong at 50, and for those three days in October, "people will be coming from all over the world," predicted Brown. It won't be for nostalgia. The title of the conference, "Where Do We Go From Here?" suggests the goal will be to recapture that momentum, which was sparked in 1966 and is waiting to be rekindled. "Without the Black Panther Party, Congresswoman (Barbara) Lee would not be in office and Obama wouldn't be president," said Ned. "Our ideology hasn't changed, the concept of our work hasn't changed, and now we've come full circle."

By Sam Whiting

 Photos by Michael Short / Special to The Chronicle

Sam Whiting is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: firstname.lastname@example.com Instagram:sfchronicle_art.

 Above left: Saturu Ned was known as James Mott when he joined the Black Panthers in   1968.

  RBill Jennings, who also joined the party in '68.

  Bobby Seale, chairman of the Black Panther Party, addresses a rally outside the party headquarters in

Oakland in 1971, calling for a boycott of certain liquor stores.

black left unity networkhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-6633712709574318123.post-83455327030219061392016-04-02T09:09:00.000-07:002016-04-02T09:24:39.564-07:00The Movement for Black Lives: Class struggle and national liberation

Class struggle and national liberation in the Movement for Black Lives

DANI-ELLE DUBE/OTTAWA SUN

Benjamin Woods

Mar 31, 2016- pambazuka.org

Black people in the US are a domestic colony. The contradictions arising from this status can only be resolved through explicit, conscious class struggle. The class struggle in this period will take the form of a fight for community control of institutions and demanding more than the minimum civil rights advanced by the Black Liberal Establishment.

[Dedicated to and Inspired by Kwame Nkrumah & Jalil Muntaqim]

One year ago the city of Baltimore in the United States of America rose up in righteous rebellion. Although the murder of Freddie Gray and police instigating Black youth at Mondawmin Mall was the catalyst, generations of structural racism and economic underdevelopment were the root causes of the insurrection. "Bmore" is an excellent illustration of the current contradictions within Black America. On the one hand the city is governed by a Black elite (including a Black mayor, police commissioner, state's attorney, national guard commander, all the way up to a Black President), but is still unable to end the police killings and economic exclusion of a large section of Black Baltimore.

At the same time, there are numerous examples of how racism impacts Black people of all social classes. For instance, Trayvon Martin was gunned down by a white vigilante with no consequences in a middle-class neighborhood. While this contradiction is often presented as race versus class in Black political circles, the two should instead be seen as having a dynamic relationship. This article seeks to contribute to the developing theory and practice of the Movement for Black Lives (MB4L).

Black people in the US are a domestic colony. Similar to former colonies on the African continent and the Caribbean, we transitioned from classic colonialism to neocolonialism. Following the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 Black Elected Officials (BEO) grew exponentially from 350 in 1964 to about 10,500 in 2011. Most of the BEOs are affiliated with the Democratic Party (i.e. the party of financial capital.) Kwame Nkrumah defined neocolonialism as a nation that ostensibly has political independence but, in fact, is economically dependent. Furthermore, due to increased economic opportunities for a small sector of Black folk, studies show there is greater inequality within Black America than between White and Black America.

In short, these contradictions can only be resolved through explicit, conscious class struggle. By class struggle we mean the attempt of a class, or at least a section of it, to make a conscious assertion to win and hold political power. The class struggle in this period will take the form of a fight for community control of institutions and demanding more than the minimum civil rights advanced by the Black Liberal Establishment. The class struggle has five purposes: 1) to erode the legitimacy of the Black Bourgeoisie 2) discrediting integration into the capitalist system 3) removing the means to control the Black colony (i.e. Black bourgeoisie) 4) to win the Black masses to Nationalism and 5) raising political consciousness.

While class conflict contributes to the forward motion and development of the Black nation, the primary contradiction in the world is that between oppressed and oppressor nations or the colonizer and the colonized. The US settler state is a prison house of nations. This means that Blacks, Chicano's, Puerto Ricans, and Native Americans are oppressed nations and must be liberated as nations! We reject Stalin's definition of nation in favor of that provided by Kwame Nkrumah in his book Class Struggle in Africa "It is around the African peoples struggle for liberation and unification that African and Black culture will take shape and substance." In short, in the course of the Black movement we have created organizations and institutions which have in turned shaped the character of our identity, culture, and movement.

Racism has played such a crucial role in the oppression of Black people that even many of our White Left 'allies' have accepted it assumptions. For example, in the early 20th century, Hubert Harrison, a leading figure in the American Left, quit the Socialist Party, U.S.A. because in their own words 'We have nothing special to offer the Negro.'  Later in 1959, Harry Haywood, the chief theoretician of Black Liberation in the Communist Party, USA was expelled for trying make the right of self-determination and white chauvinism (i.e. racism) central issues in the party. So, it isn't only right wingers like Donald Trump or Bill O' Reilly that isolate and attack the Black Nation but the White Left as well.

Therefore, we must principally, though not exclusively, organize along national lines for dual power. Dual power means creating popular assemblies that operate democratically-controlled institutions that fulfill the functions of the state. Of course, the state will not allow parallel institutions to exist for too long (see Tulsa, OK in 1921 & BPP survival programs) so at some point, there will be a confrontation. This will bring the oppressed and oppressor nations into direct conflict.

Arguably, the greatest contribution of the M4BL to the larger Black Liberation Movement is its Women and Queer leadership. But at the same time, M4BL is often accused of postmodern identity politics which views the problems of working class Black folks as secondary. In order to overcome these criticisms the M4BL can integrate class struggle and national liberation into its theory and practice. The means to carry out the class struggle and national liberation is a Black Workers Party (BWP). The BWP would be a socialist, mass party that replaces the neoliberalism of the Black Bourgeoisie with the hegemony of the Black working class. In a great tradition of Black freedom fighters, BWP can use Nationalism as a springboard to internationalism. Class Struggle for National Unity. National Unity for Self-Government.

 * Benjamin Woods is a PhD candidate at Howard University and co-founder of Students Against Mass Incarceration. He is an organizer in Washington D.C. Benjamin can be contacted at email@example.com, or through his website FreeTheLand.
black left unity networkhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-6633712709574318123.post-50286934338955529562016-03-25T11:22:00.000-07:002016-03-25T11:35:01.465-07:00Prison Nation USA: What Mass Incarceration Looks Like Today
Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2016

This new report by the Prison Policy Initiative offers some much needed clarity by piecing together this country's disparate systems of confinement.

Peter Wagner and Bernadette Rabuy

Prison Policy Initiative

March 14, 2016

Wait, does the United States have 1.4 million or more than 2 million people in prison? Are most people in state and federal prisons locked up for drug offenses? Frustrating questions like these abound because our systems of confinement are so fragmented and controlled by various entities. There is a lot of interesting and valuable research out there, but varying definitions make it hard — for both people new to criminal justice and for experienced policy wonks — to get the big picture.

This report offers some much needed clarity by piecing together this country's disparate systems of confinement. The American criminal justice system holds more than 2.3 million people in 1,719 state prisons, 102 federal prisons, 942 juvenile correctional facilities, 3,283 local jails, and 79 Indian Country jails as well as in military prisons, immigration detention facilities, civil commitment centers, and prisons in the U.S. territories. And we go deeper to provide further detail on why convicted and not convicted people are locked up in local jails.

While this pie chart provides a comprehensive snapshot of our correctional system, the graphic does not capture the enormous churn in and out of our correctional facilities and the far larger universe of people whose lives are affected by the criminal justice system. Every year, 636,000 people walk out ofprison gates, but people go to jail over 11 million times each year.

Jail churn is particularly high because most people in jails have not been convicted. Some have just been arrested and will make bail in the next few hours or days, and others are too poor to make bail and must remain behind bars until their trial. Only a small number (195,000) have been convicted, generally serving misdemeanors sentences under a year.With a sense of the big picture, a common follow-up question might be: how many people are locked up for a drug offense?

We know that almost half a million people are locked up because of a drug offense. The data confirms that nonviolent drug convictions are a defining characteristic of the federalprison system, but play only a supporting role at the state and local levels. While most people in state and local facilities are not locked up for drug offenses, most states' continued practice of arresting people for drug possessiondestabilizes individual lives and communities. Drug arrests give residents of over-policed communities criminal records, which then reduce employment prospects and increase the likelihood of longer sentences for any future offenses.

All of the offense data presented comes with an important set of caveats. A person in prison for multiple offenses is reported only for the most serious offense so, for example, there are people in prison for "violent" offenseswho might have also been convicted of a drug offense. Further, almost all convictions are the result of plea bargains, where people plead guilty to a lesser offense, perhaps of a different category or one that they may not have actually committed.

And many of these categories group together people convicted of a wide range of offenses. For example, "murder" is generally considered to be an extremely serious offense, but "murder" groups together the rare group of serial killers, with people who committed acts that are unlikely for reasons of circumstance oradvanced age to ever happen again, with offenses that the average American may not consider to be murder at all. For example, the felony murder rule says that if someone dies during the commission of a felony, everyone involved is as guilty of murder as the person who pulled the trigger. Driving a getaway car during a bank robbery where someone was accidentally killed is indeed a serious offense, but few people would really consider that to be murder.

This "whole pie" methodology also exposes some disturbing facts about the youth entrapped in our juvenile justice system: Too many are there for a "most serious offense" that is not even a crime. For example, there are almost 7,000 youth behind bars for "technical violations" of the requirements of their probation, rather than for a new offense. Further, 600 youth are behind bars for"status" offenses, which are "behaviors that are not law violations for adults, such as running away, truancy, and incorrigibility."

Turning finally to the people who are locked up criminally and civilly forimmigration-related issues, we find that 19,000 people are in federal prison for criminal convictions of violating federal immigration laws. A separate 33,000 are civilly detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) separate from any criminal proceedings and are physically confined in special immigration detention facilities or in local jails under contract with ICE. (Notably, these categories do not include immigrants represented in other pie slices because of non-immigration related criminal convictions.)

Now, armed with the big picture of how many people are locked up in the United States, where, and why, we have a better foundation for the long overdue conversation about criminal justice reform. For example, the data makes it clear that ending the War on Drugs will not alone end mass incarceration, but that the federal government and some states have effectively reduced their incarcerated populations by turning to drug policy reform. Looking at the "whole pie" also opens up other conversations about where we should focus our energies:

 What is the role of the federal government in ending mass incarceration? The federal prison system is just a small slice of the total pie, but the federal government can certainly use its financial and ideological power to incentivize and illuminate better paths forward. At the same time, how can elected sheriffs, district attorneys, and judges slow the flow of people into the criminal justice system?

 Are state officials and prosecutors willing to rethink both the War on Drugs and the reflexive policies that have served to increase both the odds of incarceration and length of stay for "violent" offenses?

 Do policymakers and the public have the focus to confront the second largest slice of the pie: the thousands of locally administered jails? And does it even make sense to arrest millions of poor people each year for minor offenses, make them post cash bail, and then lock them up when they can't afford to pay it? Will our leaders be brave enough to redirect corrections spending to smarter investments like community-based drug treatment and job training?

 Can we implement reforms that both reduce the number of people incarcerated in the U.S. and the well-known racial and ethnic disparities in the criminal justice system?

And once we have wrapped our minds around the "whole pie" of mass incarceration, we should zoom out and note that being locked up is just one piece of the larger pie of correctional control. There are another 820,000 people on parole (a type of conditional release from prison) and a staggering 3.8 million people on probation (what is typically an alternative sentence). Particularly given the often onerous conditions of probation, policymakers should be cautious of "alternatives to incarceration" that sometimes widen the net of criminalization to people who are not a threat to public safety.

Now that we can see the big picture of how many people are locked up in the United States in the various types of facilities, we can see that something needs to change. Looking at the big picture requires us to ask if it really makes sense to lock up 2.3 million people on any given day, giving this nation the dubious distinction of having the highest incarceration rate in the world. Both policymakers and the public have the responsibility to carefully consider each individual slice in turn to ask whether legitimate social goals are served by putting each category behind bars, and whether any benefit really outweighs the social and fiscal costs.

We're optimistic that this "whole pie" approach can give Americans, who are ready for a fresh look at the criminal justice system, some of the tools they need to demand meaningful changes to how we do justice.

black left unity networkhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-6633712709574318123.post-42712341859957564312016-03-22T06:56:00.003-07:002016-03-22T06:56:40.414-07:00CLASS STRUGGLE FOR BEGINNERS- Part 60: Race & Wealth In Los Angeles TodayRACE & WEALTH IN LOS ANGELES TODAY

Racial and ethnic differences in wealth show extreme vulnerability of some nonwhite households in Los Angeles. The authors estimate that the typical U.S.-born black or Mexican family has just 1 percent of the wealth of a typical white family in Los Angeles -- or one cent for every dollar of wealth held by the average white family in the metro area. Koreans hold 7 cents and Vietnamese possess 17 cents for every dollar of wealth owned by comparable white families.

 For Immediate Use | Contact: Ricardo Vazquez, UCLA | 310.206.3986
 March 10, 2016

The Color of Wealth in Los Angeles
 New study reveals nuanced story of race and wealth in LA

A report released today examining wealth inequality across racial and ethnic groups in Los Angeles shows substantial disparity with Japanese, Asian Indians, Chinese and whites ranking among the top, while blacks, Mexicans, other Latinos, Koreans and Vietnamese rank far behind.

 "The Color of Wealth in Los Angeles" is the first report to compile detailed data on assets and debts among people of different races, ethnicities and countries of origin residing in the Los Angeles area. Researchers from UCLA, Duke University and The New School, with support from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and the Insight Center for Community Economic Development, analyzed data on assets and debts. Assets included savings and checking accounts, stocks, retirement accounts, houses and vehicles, while debts, included credit card debt, student loans, medical debt, mortgages and vehicle debt.

 "Data that truly reflect the diverse and emerging patterns of wealth inequality across specific ethnic and racial groups has been hard to come by," said William "Sandy" Darity, co-author and director of the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke. "The patterns we were able to document may well be the first in-depth study of wealth, ethnicity and race in Los Angeles, especially for Mexicans and particular Asian national origin groups."

 Although much of the inequality discourse has focused on income, wealth is a better indicator of economic well-being and metric for understanding economic inequality. The accumulation of wealth is more likely to ensure financial security and opportunity for American families in the future, the authors said.

 The report provides estimates for U.S.-born blacks, blacks who are recent immigrants from Africa, Mexicans, other Latinos, Asian Indians, Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese and non-Hispanic whites in the Los Angeles Metropolitan Statistical Area (Los Angeles and Orange counties) using new data from the National Asset Scorecard and Communities of Color survey.

Racial and ethnic differences in wealth show the extreme vulnerability of some nonwhite households in Los Angeles. The authors estimate that the typical U.S.-born black or Mexican family, for example, has just 1 percent of the wealth of a typical white family in Los Angeles -- or one cent for every dollar of wealth held by the average white family in the metro area. Koreans hold 7 cents and Vietnamese possess 17 cents for every dollar of wealth owned by comparable white families.

 The median value of liquid assets -- those assets that quickly can be converted to cash -- for Mexicans and other Latinos is striking, zero dollars and only $7, respectively, while the median value of liquid assets for white households is $110,000. This not only implies financial hardship in the long term, but it also makes families particularly vulnerable to short-term financial disruption, the report states.

 White households in Los Angeles have an estimated median net worth of $355,000. By comparison, Mexicans and U.S.-born blacks are estimated to have a median net worth of $3,500 and $4,000, respectively.

Additionally, among nonwhite groups, Japanese ($592,000), Asian Indian ($460,000), Chinese ($408,200) and Filipino ($243,000) households had estimated median wealth values far in excess of blacks who recently emigrated from Africa ($72,000), other Latinos ($42,500), Koreans ($23,400) and Vietnamese ($61,500).

 "The socioeconomic status of immigrants prior to entering the U.S. plays an important role in influencing the wealth position of particular groups," said Melany De La Cruz-Viesca of the Asian American Studies Center at UCLA and lead author of the report. "This report not only reveals a nuanced story of racial wealth differences in L.A., perhaps more importantly, it also explores the local nature of asset markets and what factors influence the wealth status of communities of color."

 The majority of immigrants who came to the United States after the passage of the 1965 Immigration Act are highly educated, possess higher levels of wealth than the average American, and are highly skilled professionals who are more likely to hold jobs that pay more. One exception is Vietnamese immigrants, many of whom came to the United States as refugees generally with limited financial resources. The National Asset Scorecard and Communities of Color survey findings are consistent with this general pattern.

 The NASCC survey findings reveal staggering disparities that should serve to urge lawmakers to identify and pursue policies that can help narrow racial wealth differences, the authors said. In particular, there's a need to develop policies that address structural discrimination in asset and credit markets and the inherited inequalities associated with vast differences in parental wealth.

"The wealth disparities uncovered in this report are enormous, likewise it will take bold initiatives to address them," said co-author Darrick Hamilton, associate professor of economics and urban policy and director of the Ph.D. program in policy at The New School. "'Baby Bonds' provide an example of a bold policy proposal that addresses the racial wealth gap, which locks in inequality at birth."

 Hamilton said that these government-provided trusts would take into account a person's family wealth at birth. "The accounts would be used to seed a down payment on an asset like a home or a new business, so that everyone would have an opportunity to attain the economic security and wealth building mechanism of an asset that will appreciate over their lifetime."

DOWNLOAD THE PDF: http://www.aasc.ucla.edu/besol/Color_of_Wealth_Report.pdf

black left unity networkhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-6633712709574318123.post-64300147598056655932016-03-18T08:02:00.002-07:002016-03-18T08:13:04.525-07:00US Human Rights Hypocrisy on the Eve of the Obama Cuba Visit

Human Rights Hypocrisy: U.S. Criticizes Cuba

Marjorie CohnProfessor, Thomas Jefferson School of Law
03/18/2016 --In advance of President Barack Obama's historic visit to Cuba on March 20, there is speculation about whether he can pressure Cuba to improve its human rights. But a comparison of Cuba's human rights record with that of the United States shows that the U.S. should be taking lessons from Cuba.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights contains two different categories of human rights — civil and political rights on the one hand; and economic, social and cultural rights on the other.

Civil and political rights include the rights to life, free expression, freedom of religion, fair trial, self-determination; and to be free from torture, cruel treatment, and arbitrary detention.
Economic, social and cultural rights comprise the rights to education, health care, social security, unemployment insurance, paid maternity leave, equal pay for equal work, reduction of infant mortality; prevention, treatment and control of diseases; and to form and join unions and strike.
These human rights are enshrined in two treaties — the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). The United States has ratified the ICCPR.

But the U.S. refuses to ratify the ICESCR. Since the Reagan administration, it has been U.S. policy to define human rights only as civil and political rights. Economic, social and cultural rights are dismissed as akin to social welfare, or socialism.

The U.S. government criticizes civil and political rights in Cuba while disregarding Cubans' superior access to universal housing, health care, education, and its guarantee of paid maternity leave and equal pay rates.

Meanwhile, the U.S. government has committed serious human rights violations on Cuban soil, including torture, cruel treatment, and arbitrary detention at Guantanamo. And since 1960, the United States has expressly interfered with Cuba's economic rights and its right to self-determination through the economic embargo.

The U.S. embargo of Cuba, now a blockade, was initiated by President Dwight D. Eisenhower during the Cold War in response to a 1960 memo written by a senior State Department official. The memo proposed "a line of action that makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and the overthrow of the [Castro] government."

That goal has failed, but the punishing blockade has made life difficult in Cuba. In spite of that inhumane effort, however, Cuba guarantees its people a remarkable panoply of human rights.

Health care
Unlike in the United States, health care is considered a right in Cuba. Universal health care is free to all. Cuba has the highest ratio of doctors to patients in the world at 6.7 per 1,000 people. The 2014 infant mortality rate was 4.2 per 1,000 live births - one of the lowest in the world.
Health care in Cuba emphasizes prevention, rather than relying only on medicine, partly due to the limited access to medicines occasioned by the US blockade. In 2014, the Lancet Journal said, "If the accomplishments of Cuba could be reproduced across a broad range of poor and middle-income countries the health of the world's population would be transformed." Cuba has developed pioneering medicines to treat and prevent lung cancer, and prevent diabetic amputations. Because of the blockade, however, we in the United States cannot take advantage of them.

Education

 Free education is a universal right up to and including higher education. Cuba spends a larger proportion of its GDP on education than any other country in the world. "Mobile teachers" are deployed to homes if children are unable to attend school. Many schools provide free morning and after-school care for working parents who have no extended family. It is free to train to be a doctor in Cuba. There are 22 medical schools in Cuba, up from only 3 in 1959 before the Cuban Revolution.

Elections

Elections to Cuba's national parliament (the National Assembly) take place every five years and elections to regional Municipal Assemblies every 2.5 years. Delegates to the National Assembly then elect the Council of State, which in turn appoints the Council of Ministers from which the President is elected.

As of 2018 (the date of the next general election in Cuba), there will be a limit of no more than two five-year terms for all senior elected positions, including the President. Anyone can be nominated to be a candidate. It is not required that one be a member of the Communist Party (CP). No money can be spent promoting candidates and no political parties (including the CP) are permitted to campaign during elections. Military personnel are not on duty at polling stations; school children guard the ballot boxes.

Labor Rights

Cuban law guarantees the right to voluntarily form and join trade unions. Unions are legally independent and financially autonomous, independent of the CP and the state, funded by members' subscriptions. Workers' rights protected by unions include a written contract, a 40-44-hour week, and 30 days' paid annual leave in the state sector.

Unions have the right to stop work they consider dangerous. They have the right to participate in company management, to receive management information, to office space and materials, and to facility time for representatives. Union agreement is required for lay-offs, changes in patterns of working hours, overtime, and the annual safety report. Unions also have a political role in Cuba and have a constitutional right to be consulted about employment law. They also have the right to propose new laws to the National Assembly.

Women

Women make up the majority of Cuban judges, attorneys, lawyers, scientists, technical workers, public health workers and professionals. Cuba is ranked first in Save the Children's 'Lesser Developed Countries' Mother's Index. With over 48% women MPs, Cuba has the third highest percentage of female parliamentarians in the world. Women receive 9 months of full salary during paid maternity leave, followed by 3 months at 75% of full salary. The government subsidizes abortion and family planning, places a high value on pre-natal care, and offers 'maternity housing' to women before giving birth.

Life Expectancy

In 2013, the World Health Organization listed life expectancy for women in Cuba at 80; the figure was 77 for men. The probability of dying between ages 15 and 60 years per 1,000 people in the population was 115 for men and 73 for women in Cuba.

During the same period, life expectancy for women in the United States was 81 for women and 76 for men. The probability of dying between 15 and 60 per 1,000 people was 128 for men and 76 for women in the United States.

Death Penalty
A study by Cornell Law School found no one under sentence of death in Cuba and no one on death row in October 2015. On December 28, 2010, Cuba's Supreme Court commuted the death sentence of Cuba's last remaining death row inmate, a Cuban-American convicted of a murder carried out during a 1994 terrorist invasion of the island. No new death sentences are known to have been imposed since that time.

By contrast, as of January 1, 2016, 2,949 people were on death row in state facilities in the United States. And 62 were on federal death row as of March 16, 2016, according to Death Penalty Information.

Sustainable Development
In 2016, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), a leading global environmental organization, found that Cuba was the only country in the world to have achieved sustainable development. Jonathan Loh, one of the authors of the WWF report, said, "Cuba has reached a good level of development according to United Nations' criteria, thanks to its high literacy level and a very high life expectancy, while the ecological footprint is not large since it is a country with low energy consumption."

Stop Lecturing Cuba and Lift the Blockade
When Cuba and the U.S. held talks about human rights a year ago, Pedro Luis Pedroso, head of the Cuban delegation, said, "We expressed our concerns regarding discrimination and racism patterns in US society, the worsening of police brutality, torture acts and extrajudicial executions in the fight on terror and the legal limbo of prisoners at the US prison camp in Guantanamo."
The hypocrisy of the U.S. government in lecturing Cuba about its human rights while denying many basic human rights to the American people is glaring. The United States should lift the blockade. Obama should close Guantanamo and return it to Cuba.

 ---------------
Marjorie Cohn is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, former president of the National Lawyers Guild, and deputy secretary general of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers. Her most recent book is Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral, and Geopolitical Issues. Follow her on Twitter at @marjoriecohn.black left unity networkhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-6633712709574318123.post-38491841629558886612016-03-15T07:05:00.000-07:002016-03-15T07:08:41.056-07:00A Call to Action: We Must Utilize the International Decade for People of African Descent
Utilizing the International Decade for People of African Descent:
A Call to Action

The Movements for the Liberation of African people, on the continent and throughout the diaspora, have a valuable tool in their possession that they are sorely underutilizing. This tool is the International Decade for People of African Descent, also known as "the International Decade".

The International Decade for People of African Descent is officially a vehicle of the United Nations (UN), intended to foster collaboration and cooperation amongst the nation-states of the world to honor the contributions of people of African descent to world civilization and to address the ongoing problems confronting them the world over. The International Decade for People of African Descent is a prolonged outcome of the 3rd World Conference Against Racism (WCAR) held in Durban, South Africa in 2001.

After more than a decade of advocacy and pressure applied by the forces of civil society specializing on issues pertaining to people of African descent and the Pan-African social movements, the International Decade was officially adopted and approved by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 2012 and launched on December 10, 2014.

The International Decade for People of African Descent as noted, would not have been adopted without the persistent advocacy of civil society organizations and the social movements. It is therefore as much a people's instrument as it is an inter-governmental instrument, and it should be utilized to the fullest extent possible to advance the demands of African descendants and Africans throughout the world as they manifest themselves internationally and in individual national-state contexts.

Our liberation movements must use the opportunity of the decade to press our demands, educate our communities and allies, organize our communities, and mobilize all those who stand against racism, white supremacy, Afrophobia, and xenophobia to action to advance on our strategic vision(s) and program(s) of liberation by decolonizing power and knowledge. While the recognition of the United Nations provides a level of legitimacy and opportunity, it is not without conflict and struggle. The thematic focus of the International Decade, as determined by compromises within the General Assembly of the United Nations is: "recognition, justice, and development". While these broad themes enable a degree of political flexibility to both the governments and the social movements, it should be noted that these themes and focal points are considerably weaker than what the forces of civil society and the social movements fought for.

The primary thing that was fought for was reparations for the trans-Atlantic slave trade, enslavement, and the discriminatory policies aimed at people of African descent that were adopted in countless nations after the formal abolition of chattel slavery.

Although the United Nations passed and launched the International Decade, it has done so in a rather lackluster fashion. The official United Nations program has not been printed, and thus not distributed in a wide manner to raise awareness of the Decade. And there is essentially no budget for the implementation of the program they collectively devised, nor any of its activities. This shortcoming has two sources: One, the deliberate sabotage of key players within the United Nations, in particular the United States, Canada, the European Union and Israel, who have fought tooth and nail against the implementation of any aspect of the Durban Declaration and Program of Action, or anything strongly supporting reparations. The other is the failure of civil society organizations and the social movements in forcing the issue hard enough.

This is a call to action to the social movements and the forces of civil society concerned about the fundamental issues germane to people of African descent to come together and seize the opportunity presented by the International Decade for People of African Descent. Let us make the decade what we need and want it to be. Let us make it the "Reparations Decade", to rectify the injustices of the slave trade, enslavement, colonial subjugation, and racial discrimination worldwide.

The proposed first step is for us to gather our forces and develop a "people's program" for the reminder of the International Decade (which ends December 31st, 2024) and beyond. We have to put reparations firmly back on the world's agenda. And we have to deal with the rise in anti-African or anti-Black racism throughout the world, systemic attacks on migrants of African descent, the persistence of economic inequality and inequity confronting African descendants throughout the world, ongoing imperialist imposition, exploitation and colonization of nation-states with high concentrations of people of African descent, and the threat of climate change, which is and will have a major impact on Africa and the nations of the Caribbean and South American with significant numbers of people of African descent.

We want to propose that we use the occasion of the upcoming World Social Forum (WSF) being held in Montreal, Canada August 9th – 14th, 2016 as a first rallying point. We propose that we focus on organizing the following at this WSF: a thematic programming track to highlight our issues and programs and to educate existing and potential allies, organize a thematic tent to use as a meeting and planning space, and organize a series of plenaries to give central focus to our issues and demands before an international audience existing and potential allies.

We further propose that following the WSF, we organize a series of international gatherings over the course of the next 4 years to sharpen our collective program and continue to elevate and advance the demands of the "Reparations Decade." We propose that one meeting be held in the Caribbean, one in South America, one in Europe and one on the African continent.

If you agree with this general call to action, we ask that you do the following:

1. • Join us for an international organizing process commencing in March.

2. • Plan to attend and make a programmatic contribution at the WSF in Montreal.

3. • Make a preliminary commitment to join in the continuation processes and projects that emerge from the Montreal gathering.

For more information please contact Kali Akuno at email@example.com or https://www.facebook.com/kali.akuno.

black left unity networkhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-6633712709574318123.post-43665338970422403782016-03-13T07:36:00.001-07:002016-03-13T07:52:22.870-07:00 Racist Neoliberalism on Steriods: Assaulting Black Political Power in Jackson, MS
 Assault on Black Political Power in Jackson, MS

Sister June Hardwick- Coalition for Economic Justice/Malcolm X Grassroots Movement

Brother Akil Bakari- Coalition for Economic Justice/Malcolm X Grassroots Movement

Video:
March 11, 2016black left unity networkhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-6633712709574318123.post-79578371847865635372016-03-06T06:25:00.005-08:002016-03-06T06:25:56.624-08:00CARTOON: Donald Trump researches the KKKWhat Donald Trump finds out when he researches the KKK

By RubenBolling
Thursday Mar 03, 2016
dailykos.com

black left unity networkhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-6633712709574318123.post-41519733158046595752016-03-01T14:33:00.000-08:002016-03-01T14:33:03.365-08:00CLASS STRUGGLE FOR BEGINNERS- PART 59: Obama Presidency Widened Inequality GapFebruary 26, 2016

During Obama's Presidency Wealth Inequality has Increased and Poverty Levels are Higher

 by Rick Baum
counterpunch.org

Troubling and significant statistics produced by the government indicate important facts about our political system and its priorities. Unfortunately, these statistics often get little coverage in the media. What coverage is provided usually only focuses on the current year and might include comparison with the previous year.
 Two such sets of government statistics cover wealth distribution and poverty. These statistics have a margin of error and do not account for the up and down fluctuations in the economy nor changing historical conditions or limitations of what any president can do.
 What is perhaps most critical are the trends. These trends show that wealth has become more concentrated and more people are deemed by the government to be poor.

 Wealth Inequality
 Below are government figures that show the trend of growing wealth inequality.1

Share of Total Net Worth by Percentile of Wealth Owners, 1989-2013

 These figures show that during the presidencies of Bush Sr., Clinton, G. W. Bush, and Obama so far, a greater portion of the nation's wealth has become more concentrated in the hands of the rich as indicated by the share of wealth held by the top 1%. From 1989 to 2010, it increased from 30.1% to 34.5% and, under another methodology, to 36.6% in 2013.
 From 1989 to 2013, the share of the top 10% went from 67.2% to 75.2% or from slightly over 2/3 to more than 3/4 of the nations' total wealth. This means that from 1989 to 2013, the drop in the share of wealth held by the bottom 90% went from 32.9%, almost a third, to 24.8%, less than one-fourth.
 Even more striking is that from 1995 to 2013, the poorest half of the population, after experiencing its share of the nation's wealth peaking in 1995 at 3.6%, underwent a more than 2/3 decline in their portion. It fell in 2013 to a paltry 1.05% of all wealth.
 Despite the last few years of "recovery," the share of wealth held by the bottom 50% of the U.S. population declined from 1.15% in 2010 to 1.05% in 2013. This is less than half of where it stood in 2007, before the great recession, when the share of the country's wealth held by the poorest 50% of the population was at 2.5%.
 In 2008, Obama spoke of hope for a better future. If the wealthy hoped for a greater share of the nation's wealth, their hope was fulfilled while the wealth conditions of most everyone else have declined.
 These changes in wealth holdings were clearly described by Federal Reserve Board head Janet Yellen who began a speech on October 17, 2014 noting:
 "The distribution of income and wealth in the United States has been widening more or less steadily for several decades… This trend paused during the Great Recession because of larger wealth losses for those at the top of the distribution and because increased safety-net spending helped offset some income losses for those below the top. But widening inequality resumed in the recovery…" (emphasis added). 2
 This widening inequality and greater concentration at the top was presumably more pronounced after 2013 when the value of the stock market rose with the Dow Jones Industrial Average reaching its peak at over $18,300 in May of 2015. Today, wealth inequality is probably back to where it was in 2013 since the stock market has recently gone down to 2013 levels.
 Poverty
 While wealth inequality has increased, the number of people living in poverty has also generally increased. Below are figures from 1981 to 2014 for the number of people deemed to be poor and their percentage of the population.3 This percentage has been 15% or higher for three years of Obama's presidency, from 2010-2012. It had reached that level only three other times since 1981.

 These numbers show that the rate of poverty since 1981 was lowest in 2000 at 11.3%. During the time George W. Bush was president, with exceptions, it steadily increased from 11.7% in 2001 to 13.2% in 2008. 5 As might be expected, the rate increased during the great recession peaking at 15.1% in 2010.

As of 2014, some six years after the beginning of the recession and during a period of "recovery," the rate of poverty remains high at 14.8%. In fact, according to these government statistics, the rate of poverty for every year Obama has been president is higher than it was for every year during George W. Bush's presidency.
 The percent of people below 125% of the official poverty rate has also been higher every year under Obama than during Bush's presidency, and has been over 19% every year from 2010 through 2014. The highest level it reached under Bush was during the start of the recession in 2008 when it was at 17.9%.
 What is most disturbing is the percent of the population living in extreme poverty, or having an income at 50% or lower than the poverty level.5 Every year that Obama has been president, the percent of the population at that level of income has been over 6% and, as of 2014, consisted of over 20 million people. When George W. Bush was president, the percent was always under 6%. The last time it was over 6% was during the first year of the Clinton presidency. 6
 Even the record during Reagan's presidency may be viewed as more favorable than Obama's. During the time Reagan was president, the official rate of poverty peaked at 15.2% in 1983. Thereafter, it gradually declined to 13.0% in 1988.7 By contrast, the rate of poverty during Obama's time in office has always been more than 14.3% and was 14.8% in 2014, or almost 2% higher than it was at the end of Reagan's presidency.
 A quip that was made about Reagan is that he liked poor people so much that he acted to increase their numbers. During his first three years, the poverty rate and the number of people deemed to be impoverished increased, reaching its peak in 1983. Thereafter, from 1983 to the end of Reagan's presidency in 1988, the number of people deemed to be poor declined by over 3.5 million ending at slightly below the total during the first year of his presidency.
 In contrast to the record of Reagan's presidency, during the time Obama has been president and statistics are available, 2009-2014, the population has grown by 11.98 million. This is close to its growth for the last six years of Reagan's presidency. Yet, the number of people deemed to be living in poverty has not declined, but has increased by more than 3 million. For comparison, see this table extrapolated from previous figures:

 If, in 2008, one hoped for the presence of more poor people and for a greater concentration of wealth in the hands of the rich, so far, during Obama's presidency, these hopes have been fulfilled. They will presumably continue were a Republican elected president. Should one also expect more of the same from Hillary Clinton who wants to build "on the progress the president has made," or Bernie Sanders who thinks Obama "has done an excellent job?"8

Footnotes
1. Wealth is the value of what one possesses minus what is owed. Unlike income, it is not subject to a yearly tax. It is also distributed more unequally than income. See the last tables in the links at the end of this footnote.
see page 4 in An Analysis of the Distribution of Wealth Across Households at https://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL33433.pdf and
For 2013, a figure for the top 1% is not provided. See the next two sites.http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/bulletin/2014/articles/scf/accessible.htm#box3figA
another table with historical trends: see Figure 3 at: It is source for bottom 50% figure of 1.15% in 2010 and 1.05% in 2013. http://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/95BF8144CFB24C649FAEF51B056738B9.htm
The source for the 2013 figures for the top 1% and the 90-98.9% whose figures from 1989-2010 are slightly different are in Table A1C on page 34 at: http://www.federalreserve.gov/econresdata/feds/2015/files/2015058pap.pdf
According to one study, as of 2012, the top .01% of the population or about 16,070 families whose average wealth is about $371 million, possess 11.2% of all wealth and the top .1% possess about 22% of all of the country's wealth. See table 1 at the end of the paper after references at: http://gabriel-zucman.eu/files/SaezZucman2016QJE.pdf
Figure 1 in the same location shows the share of wealth holdings of the top .1% from 1913-2012. It was below 10% in 1989 which means it more than doubled during the subsequent years.
For income inequality see https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2015/demo/p60-252.html tables:
Income Distribution Measures Using Money Income and Equivalence Adjusted Income: 2013 and 2014 [PDF – 46k] and
Selected Measures of Household Income Dispersion: 1967 to 2014 [PDF – 402k]
2. http://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/yellen20141017a.htm
3. https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2015/demo/p60-252.html see table under Poverty title
Impact on Poverty of Alternative Resource Measure by Age: 1981 to 2014
Those with income at 125% of poverty rate see https://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/data/historical/people.html
Table 6. People Below 125 Percent of Poverty Level and the Near Poor
Those with income at 50% of poverty rate see
Table 22. Number of People Below 50 Percent of Poverty Level
Noteworthy about poverty in the U.S. is that in 2014, 21.1% or 15.5 million children under 18 years of age were deemed impoverished by the government, and some 6.8 million of them lived at one-half the official poverty rate. The rate of poverty among Blacks (26.2%) and those who are "Hispanic any race" (23.6%) is much higher than that of the general population. See https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2015/demo/p60-252.html see tables under Poverty title
People and Families in Poverty by Selected Characteristics: 2013 and 2014 and People With Income Below Specified Ratios of Their Poverty Thresholds by Selected Characteristics
4. see https://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/data/historical/people.html
Table 1. Weighted Average Poverty Thresholds for Families of Specified Sizes
5. During the Clinton administration, the rate of poverty and the number of people deemed to be poor remained high as both steadily declined.
During the Clinton years and continuing thereafter, wealth became more concentrated at the top in part due to the dot-com boom and from policies enacted including NAFTA, the repeal of
Glass Steagell and reduced taxes on some forms of investment income.
6. A single person with a level of income at 50% of the poverty threshold lives on less than $17/day. A couple would be having to get by on less than $22/day.
7. The rate and number of people living in poverty increased during all four years of the presidency of Bush Sr.
8. Clinton quote: see http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/hillary-clinton-i-want-build-obama-era-progress
Sanders quote at: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/05/us/politics/democratic-debate.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

  Join the debate on Facebook

 Rick Baum teaches Political Science at City College of San Francisco.

black left unity networkhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-6633712709574318123.post-53989840419740773062016-02-27T15:11:00.004-08:002016-02-27T15:11:51.348-08:00CLASS STRUGGLE FOR BEGINNERS- Part 58: Even $20/Hour is Not Enough to Get You Out of PovertyNickel and Dimed in 2016: Living on the Minimum Wage

 Posted by Peter Van Buren

February 16, 2016.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter @TomDispatch.

To say that we live on a 1% planet isn't just a turn of phrase. In fact, it would undoubtedly be more accurate to speak of a .1% or a .01% planet. In recent years, wealth and income inequalities have grown in a notorious fashion in the United States -- and, as it turns out, globally as well. In January, Oxfam released a report on the widening gap between global wealth and poverty. It found that, between 2010 and today, the wealth of the poorest half of the planet's population fell by a trillion dollars, a drop of 41%, while that of the richest 62 people (53 men and nine women) increased by half a trillion dollars. Put another way, those 62 billionaires were wealthier than the bottom 50% of the world's people, while the richest 1% owned more than the other 99% combined. The direction in which we're heading is obvious. Just consider that, in 2010, it took 388 of the super-rich to equal the holdings of the bottom 50%; now, that number is 326 people smaller.
 Keep that trend line in mind as you read about TomDispatch regular Peter Van Buren's latest adventures in the minimum-wage economy. Back in 2014, he described for this site how, having lost his State Department job for being a whistleblower on the Iraq War, he fell for a time into the low-wage world. As he wrote, "And soon enough, I did indeed find myself working in exactly that economy and, worse yet, trying to live on the money I made. But it wasn't just the money. There's this American thing in which jobs define us, and those definitions tell us what our individual futures and the future of our society is likely to be. And believe me, rock bottom is a miserable base for any future." His experiences in a big-box retail store inspired him to write his novel, Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the #99Percent. As last year ended, he returned to the minimum-wage world, now -- thanks in particular to Bernie Sanders -- part of the national conversation. And here's what he found. Tom

Nickel and Dimed in 2016
You Can't Earn a Living on the Minimum Wage
By Peter Van Buren
 When presidential candidate Bernie Sanders talks about income inequality, and when other candidates speak about the minimum wage and food stamps, what are they really talking about?
 Whether they know it or not, it's something like this.

My Working Life Then
 A few years ago, I wrote about my experience enmeshed in the minimum-wage economy, chronicling the collapse of good people who could not earn enough money, often working 60-plus hours a week at multiple jobs, to feed their families. I saw that, in this country, people trying to make ends meet in such a fashion still had to resort to food benefit programs and charity. I saw an employee fired for stealing lunches from the break room refrigerator to feed himself. I watched as a co-worker secretly brought her two kids into the store and left them to wander alone for hours because she couldn't afford childcare. (As it happens, 29% of low-wage employees are single parents.)
 At that point, having worked at the State Department for 24 years, I had been booted out for being a whistleblower. I wasn't sure what would happen to me next and so took a series of minimum wage jobs. Finding myself plunged into the low-wage economy was a sobering, even frightening, experience that made me realize just how ignorant I had been about the lives of the people who rang me up at stores or served me food in restaurants. Though millions of adults work for minimum wage, until I did it myself I knew nothing about what that involved, which meant I knew next to nothing about twenty-first-century America.

 I was lucky. I didn't become one of those millions of people trapped as the "working poor." I made it out. But with all the election talk about the economy, I decided it was time to go back and take another look at where I had been, and where too many others still are.

 My Working Life Now
 I found things were pretty much the same in 2016 as they were in 2012, which meant -- because there was no real improvement -- that things were actually worse.
 This time around, I worked for a month and a half at a national retail chain in New York City. While mine was hardly a scientific experiment, I'd be willing to bet an hour of my minimum-wage salary ($9 before taxes) that what follows is pretty typical of the New Economy.
 Just getting hired wasn't easy for this 56-year-old guy. To become a sales clerk, peddling items that were generally well under $50 a pop, I needed two previous employment references and I had to pass a credit check. Unlike some low-wage jobs, a mandatory drug test wasn't part of the process, but there was a criminal background check and I was told drug offenses would disqualify me. I was given an exam twice, by two different managers, designed to see how I'd respond to various customer situations. In other words, anyone without some education, good English, a decent work history, and a clean record wouldn't even qualify for minimum-wage money at this chain.
 And believe me, I earned that money. Any shift under six hours involved only a 15-minute break (which cost the company just $2.25). Trust me, at my age, after hours standing, I needed that break and I wasn't even the oldest or least fit employee. After six hours, you did get a 45-minute break, but were only paid for 15 minutes of it.
 The hardest part of the job remained dealing with... well, some of you. Customers felt entitled to raise their voices, use profanity, and commit Trumpian acts of rudeness toward my fellow employees and me. Most of our "valued guests" would never act that way in other public situations or with their own coworkers, no less friends. But inside that store, shoppers seemed to interpret "the customer is always right" to mean that they could do any damn thing they wished. It often felt as if we were penned animals who could be poked with a stick for sport, and without penalty. No matter what was said or done, store management tolerated no response from us other than a smile and a "Yes, sir" (or ma'am).
 The store showed no more mercy in its treatment of workers than did the customers. My schedule, for instance, changed constantly. There was simply no way to plan things more than a week in advance. (Forget accepting a party invitation. I'm talking about childcare and medical appointments.) If you were on the closing shift, you stayed until the manager agreed that the store was clean enough for you to go home. You never quite knew when work was going to be over and no cell phone calls were allowed to alert babysitters of any delay.
 And keep in mind that I was lucky. I was holding down only one job in one store. Most of my fellow workers were trying to juggle two or three jobs, each with constantly changing schedules, in order to stitch together something like a half-decent paycheck.
 In New York City, that store was required to give us sick leave only after we'd worked there for a full year -- and that was generous compared to practices in many other locales. Until then, you either went to work sick or stayed home unpaid. Unlike New York, most states do not require such a store to offer any sick leave, ever, to employees who work less than 40 hours a week. Think about that the next time your waitress coughs.

 Minimum Wages and Minimum Hours
 Much is said these days about raising the minimum wage (and it should be raised), and indeed, on January 1, 2016, 13 states did raise theirs. But what sounds like good news is unlikely to have much effect on the working poor.
 In New York, for instance, the minimum went from $8.75 an hour to the $9.00 I was making. New York is relatively generous. The current federal minimum wage is $7.25 and 21 states require only that federal standard. Presumably to prove some grim point or other, Georgia and Wyoming officially mandate an even lower minimum wage and then unofficially require the payment of $7.25 to avoid Department of Labor penalties. Some Southern states set no basement figure, presumably for similar reasons.
 Don't forget: any minimum wage figure mentioned is before taxes. Brackets vary, but let's knock an even 10% off that hourly wage just as a reasonable guess about what is taken out of a minimum-wage worker's salary. And there are expenses to consider, too. My round-trip bus fare every day, for instance, was $5.50. That meant I worked most of my first hour for bus fare and taxes. Keep in mind that some workers have to pay for childcare as well, which means that it's not impossible to imagine a scenario in which someone could actually come close to losing money by going to work for short shifts at minimum wage.
 In addition to the fundamental problem of simply not paying people enough, there's the additional problem of not giving them enough hours to work. The two unfortunately go together, which means that raising the minimum rate is only part of any solution to improving life in the low-wage world.
 At the store where I worked for minimum wage a few years ago, for instance, hours were capped at 39 a week. The company did that as a way to avoid providing the benefits that would kick in once one became a "full time" employee. Things have changed since 2012 -- and not for the better.
 Four years later, the hours of most minimum-wage workers are capped at 29. That's the threshold after which most companies with 50 or more employees are required to pay into the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) fund on behalf of their workers. Of course, some minimum wage workers get fewer than 29 hours for reasons specific to the businesses they work for.

 It's Math Time

 While a lot of numbers follow, remember that they all add up to a picture of how people around us are living every day.
 In New York, under the old minimum wage system, $8.75 multiplied by 39 hours equaled $341.25 a week before taxes. Under the new minimum wage, $9.00 times 29 hours equals $261 a week. At a cap of 29 hours, the minimum wage would have to be raised to $11.77 just to get many workers back to the same level of take-home pay that I got in 2012, given the drop in hours due to the Affordable Care Act. Health insurance is important, but so is food.
 In other words, a rise in the minimum wage is only half the battle; employees need enough hours of work to make a living.
 About food: if a minimum wage worker in New York manages to work two jobs (to reach 40 hours a week) without missing any days due to illness, his or her yearly salary would be $18,720. In other words, it would fall well below the Federal Poverty Line of $21,775. That's food stamp territory. To get above the poverty line with a 40-hour week, the minimum wage would need to go above $10. At 29 hours a week, it would need to make it to $15 an hour. Right now, the highest minimum wage at a state level is in the District of Columbia at $11.50. As of now, no state is slated to go higher than that before 2018. (Some cities do set their own higher minimum wages.)
 So add it up: The idea of raising the minimum wage ("the fight for $15") is great, but even with that $15 in such hours-restrictive circumstances, you can't make a loaf of bread out of a small handful of crumbs. In short, no matter how you do the math, it's nearly impossible to feed yourself, never mind a family, on the minimum wage. It's like being trapped on an M.C. Escher staircase.
 The federal minimum wage hit its high point in 1968 at $8.54 in today's dollars and while this country has been a paradise in the ensuing decades for what we now call the "One Percent," it's been downhill for low-wage workers ever since. In fact, since it was last raised in 2009 at the federal level to $7.25 per hour, the minimum has lost about 8.1% of its purchasing power to inflation. In other words, minimum-wage workers actually make less now than they did in 1968, when most of them were probably kids earning pocket money and not adults feeding their own children.
 In adjusted dollars, the minimum wage peaked when the Beatles were still together and the Vietnam War raged.

 Who Pays?

Many of the arguments against raising the minimum wage focus on the possibility that doing so would put small businesses in the red. This is disingenuous indeed, since 20 mega-companies dominate the minimum-wage world. Walmart alone employs 1.4 million minimum-wage workers; Yum Brands (Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, KFC) is in second place; and McDonald's takes third. Overall, 60% of minimum-wage workers are employed by businesses not officially considered "small" by government standards, and of course carve-outs for really small businesses are possible, as was done with Obamacare.
Keep in mind that not raising wages costs you money.
 Those minimum wage workers who can't make enough and need to go on food assistance? Well, Walmart isn't paying for those food stamps (now called SNAP), you are. The annual bill that states and the federal government foot for working families making poverty-level wages is $153 billion. A single Walmart Supercenter costs taxpayers between $904,542 and $1.75 million per year in public assistance money. According to Florida Congressman Alan Grayson, in many states Walmart employees are the largest group of Medicaid recipients. They are also the single biggest group of food stamp recipients. In other words, those everyday low prices at the chain are, in part, subsidized by your tax money. Meanwhile, an estimated 18% of food stamps (SNAP) are spent at Walmart.
 If the minimum wage goes up, will spending on food benefits programs go down? Almost certainly. But won't stores raise prices to compensate for the extra money they will be shelling out for wages? Possibly. But don't worry -- raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour would mean a Big Mac would cost all of 17 cents more.

 Time Theft
 My retail job ended a little earlier than I had planned, because I committed time theft.
 You probably don't even know what time theft is. It may sound like something from a sci-fi novel, but minimum-wage employers take time theft seriously. The basic idea is simple enough: if they're paying you, you'd better be working. While the concept is not invalid per se, the way it's used by the mega-companies reveals much about how the lowest wage workers are seen by their employers in 2016.
 The problem at my chain store was that its in-store cafe was a lot closer to my work area than the time clock where I had to punch out whenever I was going on a scheduled break. One day, when break time on my shift came around, I only had 15 minutes. So I decided to walk over to that cafe, order a cup of coffee, and then head for the place where I could punch out and sit down (on a different floor at the other end of the store).
 We're talking an extra minute or two, no more, but in such operations every minute is tabulated and accounted for. As it happened, a manager saw me and stepped in to tell the cafe clerk to cancel my order. Then, in front of whoever happened to be around, she accused me of committing time theft -- that is, of ordering on the clock. We're talking about the time it takes to say, "Grande, milk, no sugar, please." But no matter, and getting chastised on company time was considered part of the job, so the five minutes we stood there counted as paid work.
 At $9 an hour, my per-minute pay rate was 15 cents, which meant that I had time-stolen perhaps 30 cents. I was, that is, being nickel and dimed to death.

 Economics Is About People

It seems wrong in a society as wealthy as ours that a person working full-time can't get above the poverty line. It seems no less wrong that someone who is willing to work for the lowest wage legally payable must also give up so much of his or her self-respect and dignity as a kind of tariff. Holding a job should not be a test of how to manage life as one of the working poor.
 I didn't actually get fired for my time theft. Instead, I quit on the spot. Whatever the price is for my sense of self-worth, it isn't 30 cents. Unlike most of this country's working poor, I could afford to make such a decision. My life didn't depend on it. When the manager told a handful of my coworkers watching the scene to get back to work, they did. They couldn't afford not to.

 Peter Van Buren blew the whistle on State Department waste and mismanagement during the "reconstruction" of Iraq in his book We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People. A TomDispatch regular, he writes about current events at We Meant Well. His latest book is Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the #99Percent. His next work will be a novel, Hooper's War.black left unity networkhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-6633712709574318123.post-18256891432353297192016-02-23T05:58:00.003-08:002016-02-23T05:58:35.059-08:00CLASS STRUGGLE FOR BEGINNERS- Part 57: How American tipping grew out of racism

dark past

How American tipping grew out of racism

Servers are employees—give them the same minimum wage as everyone else.

Written by Deena Shanker

February 09, 2016- qz.com

In the US, restaurant servers work under a very different pay system than most people. Beyond a small hourly rate, their employers don't pay their wages—customers do. Essentially, these workers have dozens of different bosses each day that individually decide how they should be compensated. And there's not even a requirement, beyond social mores, that these de-facto bosses pay their servers anything at all.

For years, Saru Jayaraman, co-founder and co-director of the Restaurant Opportunities Center United (ROC United) and director of the Food Labor Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley, has advocated and organized to end this system.

But it wasn't until she started researching her new book, Forked: A New Standard for American Dining, that she discovered that the separate, lower minimum wage for tipped employees comes from a dark part of American history: slavery.

"The original workers that were not paid anything by their employers were newly freed slaves," she tells Quartz. "This whole concept of not paying them anything and letting them live on tips carried over from slavery."

Many Americans in post-slavery America initially resisted tipping, a custom that originated with European aristocrats. To tip was patronizing, Jayaraman writes in her book; it was seen as "despicable, undemocratic and wholly un-American."

But the idea that anyone who accepted tips was in a lower class held on into the early 20th century. Jayaraman quotes an American reporter, John Speed, who reflected on the tipping system in 1902 while traveling to the North for the first time. His words underscore the inherent racism to tipping: "I had never known any but negro servants. Negroes takes tips, of course; one expects that of them—it is a token of their inferiority. But to give money to a white man was embarrassing to me."

Tipping eventually took hold in the hospitality industries, though—at restaurants, hotels, and rail companies with porters who served affluent travelers.

Today, the National Restaurant Association, a trade group representing more than half a million restaurants, encourages tipping. "Tip-earning employees can be among a restaurant's highest earners," the association notes on its website. Its research "shows that on a national level, median hourly earnings for servers range from $16 to $22, depending on experience."

According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, however, the median hourly wage for servers is actually $9.01, with an annual salary of $18,730. (The NRA did not respond to Quartz's inquiry regarding the discrepancy.)

In Europe, tipping has gone mostly out of fashion, with service usually included in the rest of the bill. In the 1920s, US railroad car porters successfully fought for higher wages. But in the US restaurant industry, it remains. And while the standard minimum wage has risen from $4.75 in 1996 to $7.25 in 2009, representing a 53% increase, the national minimum wage for restaurant workers (which is lower to take tips into account) hasn't budged since it was set 20 years ago at $2.13 an hour.

While the discrimination against tipped workers was originally rooted in racism, there is now a different demographic suffering because of it: according to Forked, "66 percent of the almost six million tipped workers in America are women."

A few of the highly skilled and proud pro-union Pullman Porters

============================================

I dare you to read this and still feel good about tipping

By Roberto A. Ferdman

The Washington Post

February 18, 2016

(Amy King/The Washington Post; iStock)

Three years ago, Jay Porter, a former restaurant owner who abolished tipping at his restaurant, made a powerful case against the practice, an industry standard in the United States. Everything at his establishment, he wrote in a 2013 Op-Ed for Slate, improved after he enforced a mandatory 18 percent service charge—the food, the service, the pay, the customer satisfaction. Reflecting on what tipping has done to the restaurant industry as a whole, he penned what I believe is one of the most succinct and yet irrefutable paragraphs about why tipping is wrong:

Studies have shown that tipping is not an effective incentive for performance in servers. It also creates an environment in which people of color, young people, old people, women, and foreigners tend to get worse service than white males. In a tip-based system, nonwhite servers make less than their white peers for equal work. Consider also the power imbalance between tippers, who are typically male, and servers, 70 percent of whom are female, and consider that the restaurant industry generates five times the average number of sexual harassment claims per worker. And that in many instances employers have allegedly misused tip credits, which let owners pay servers less than minimum wage if tipping makes up the difference.
The problems are vast, as Porter points out. They tend to afflict a very specific and unfortunate swath of the American populace: the poor and disadvantaged. And the evidence isn't merely anecdotal.

 Few people are better versed in the ways in which tipping marginalizes those who depend on it than Saru Jayaraman, who is the co-founder and co-director of the Restaurant Opportunities Center United (ROC United) and director of the Food Labor Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley. Jayaraman has been working to end the modern tipping system for years, collecting the sort of data the National Restaurant Association (NRA), which has long defended the practice, hardly appreciates.
But tipping, Jayaraman says, isn't merely problematic in its current, contemporary context. The practice is abhorrent from a historical perspective, too.

While researching her new book 'Forked: A New Standard for American Dining," Jayaraman dug into the history of tipping, which complicates—or really darkens—the way in which we pay restaurant workers even further. Among the many things she uncovered is that the federal tipped-minimum wage, which allows restaurants to pay tipped workers as little as $2.13 per hour in the United States, is rooted in a regrettable period in this country's past: slavery.
I spoke with Jayaraman to learn more about the racist origins of tipping, the lingering racism and sexism the system has allowed to persist, and all the other reasons why she believes we should be ashamed about the way we pay restaurant workers in the United States. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You're not exactly a fan of how we tip in America. I'm understating that, aren't I?
I've definitely been a longtime advocate of ending the tipped minimum wage, which is currently $2.13 an hour nationally. It creates a two-tiered system that allows for an employee, a worker, to not be paid at all by their employer. That to me is what's nefarious about tipping. It's based in this idea that an employer shouldn't have to pay workers, essentially because they're valueless, and that's very wrong to me.
What I have been advocating for is what already exists in seven states, including California, which is that every employer be required to pay the full minimum wage to all workers, and people get tipped on top of that. And actually those seven states, despite the change, enjoy higher rates of tipping than the forty three states with lower wages for tipped workers. We're fine with that—we're not trying to get rid of tipping entirely. We just want the remaining forty three states to follow in California and the other six states' footsteps, eliminating the two-tiered system and requiring employers to pay the full wage to all workers, with tips on top of that.

But we hear all the time about how waiters in big cities make lots of money. Is there any truth to that?
It's much, much more than that.
The restaurant industry is the second largest and fastest growing industry, and yet the Department of Labor reports every year that seven of the 10 lowest paying jobs are restaurant jobs. And, in fact, of those seven lowest paying jobs in America, four are tipped occupations. So even including tips, restaurant workers make up four of the ten lowest paying jobs in America.
There's this myth, especially if you live in a place like New York or Washington D.C., that what tipped workers make is largely even, that everyone makes what white guys working at fancy steakhouses make.
But even in places like New York and D.C., seventy percent of tipped workers are actually women, largely working at casual restaurants, like Applebees, IHOP , and Olive Garden, earning a median wage of $9 an hour when you include tips. These people suffer three times the poverty rate of the rest of the U.S. workforce, use food stamps at double the rate, and, the worst part, suffer from the absolute worst sexual harassment of any industry in the United States. When you're a woman living on tips—even if you're making a lot of money on tips, which most women aren't—you're subject to the whims of the customer, and really encouraged by management to objectify yourself or subject yourself to objectification to make money in tips.
But yes, fundamentally, the problem with the way we tip is that employers, not customers, should have to pay their own workers.

I've thought about how bizarre it is, sociologically, that when you work at a restaurant, especially as a waiter, you're essentially working for a different boss not just every day, but throughout the day.
Exactly. That's exactly right. You don't actually work for the person you work for. And you know what? It's bad for the employer, too. When you have a workforce that doesn't work for you, and is firstly responsive to the consumer, that's problematic. We hear from our partners all the time about how it leads to workers engaging in all kinds of non-malicious but less than ideal practices, like giving free drinks to people, and basically doing things that hurt the bottom line, because at the end of the day they don't really work for the employer, they work for the customer.
The idea that the restaurant industry was the only industry that didn't have to pay its workers was actually codified into the very first minimum wage law that passed in 1938 as part of the New Deal under FDR. It said that you have the right to the minimum wage either through wages or through tips, which essentially gave tipped workers the right to a zero dollar minimum wage.
We've gone from a zero dollar minimum wage in 1938 to a whopping $2.13 an hour tipped minimum wage, which is the current federal mandate for tipped workers. Right now, it's between $2.13 and $7 in forty three states. Seven states, however, have rejected this system, saying that no, employers should have to pay their employers a full wage, even in the restaurant system.
Employers are supposed to make up the difference if the tips don't suffice though, right?
Well, the law has always said from the very beginning that the employer has to make up the difference between the lower tipped-minimum wage and the regular tipped minimum wage, but the U.S. Department of Labor reports an 84 percent violation rate in regards to employers actually ensuring that they make up that difference. Even if employers did ensure that tips made up that difference, there are serious problems that still remain, like the issue of sexual harassment, which is very real and plagues what is a vastly female restaurant workforce.
I'm really not just talking about Hooters, although Hooters has been one of the fastest growing chains. I'm talking about everything from Olive Garden to the Capital Grille; I'm talking about fine dining all the way down to small family restaurants.
How did tipping become such a defining feature of restaurants? How did it become so ingrained?
When rich Americans traveled to Europe in the 1850s and 1860s, they stayed at hotels and dined at restaurants. When they came back, they tried to show off that they knew the rules of Europe and how to tip, and those were the environments in which they tried to tip first. The only other environment in which they tried to tip were the porters and valets in train travel. Today 75 percent of tipped workers are restaurant workers, and the remaining 25 percent are nail salon workers and airport valets.
Initially, these rich Americans coming back from Europe would try to tip hotel workers and restaurant workers and porters, but it really was an issue of the labor movement. Hotel workers ultimately were unionized. The porters, too. The workers who were left out were the restaurant workers.
At the time, restaurant workers were predominantly in cities like New York, where white workers were migrating to from rural areas to work in urban factories. Previously, when they worked on farms, they ate at home. But having moved into the city, they spurred a growing demand for restaurant food. The problem was, they needed workers who were even poorer than they to serve them. So there were these original fast food restaurants, or what I call the original fast food restaurants. Factories workers were given something like 15 minutes to run out of the factory to what were called 'penny places,' because they'd run in, grab food, and slap a penny on the table for the former slaves who were serving them their food.
So industrialization really coincided with growth in the United States, spreading the practice of tipping so quickly it became the standard. And at the time the only workers poorer than the newly industrialized workers who would serve them food were black.
That's another wrinkle that many people don't know about, right? Tipping in the United States actually dates back to slavery.
The origin of tipping is really the feudal system, it's this idea of noblesse oblige. But when tipping came to the United States, it had a real racial tinge to it, because, originally, the workers who earned tips were almost exclusively black workers—they were newly freed slaves.
There was this massive anti-tipping movement to protest the practice, a resounding populist movement that actually got anti-tipping bills passed in six states across the country, including Washington state and many southern states. What's interesting is that that movement, the anti-tipping populist one, ending up spreading to Europe and succeeding, because the labor movement picked it up and said 'we are professionals, and we shouldn't have to live on tips, because we should be paid by our employers.' That's why you see so little tipping in Europe. What we started here spread there and actually killed it at the origin in Europe.
We, on the other hand, went in the opposite direction in the states. The restaurant industry, which was hiring newly freed slaves as tipped workers, really wanted the right to hire these workers but pay them next to nothing. So they put forth this idea that they were valueless and really shouldn't have to be paid by their employers. They essentially made the argument that newly freed slaves should get a zero dollar wage.

And part of the racial divide, part of what made tipping such a race-specific practice, is that there was a cultural stigma where white people would balk at the idea of being tipped because they found it degrading?
Exactly. In fact, among the six states that passed tipping bans, five of them were southern states, and it was based on this idea that black workers were the only workers making tips, because there was this idea that you only tip inferiors. That is what I mean when I say the origins are noblesse oblige. The origin is that you tip an inferior. When the practice came to the United States, the newly freed slaves, the black workers, were the equivalent of the proletariat in the feudal system. When these states banned tipping, it was because they were trying to discourage whites from tipping instead of actually paying former slaves.
So when we talk about the quiet ways in which racism persists in society today, tipping is this strange remnant that most people probably aren't aware of.
Yes, absolutely. But you know, that racial segregation still exists, albeit in a slightly different form. We've done a ton of research on racial segregation in our industry, which is still incredibly pervasive. There is still a $4 per hour wage gap between what white workers and workers of color make in the restaurant industry, and it's because workers of color are relegated to lower level positions. In fine dining, they work as buses and runners, instead of as server and bartenders. They also work in lower level segments, at places like Olive Garden instead of at places like Capital Grille. They work in places where you make less money.
So the origins are racist, but the current impact, the current reality, is inherently racist, too. Because of the two-tiered system, because of the racial segregation, the people who are most impacted and impoverished by the current tipping system are people of color, and in particular women of color.
You have done a lot of research about how the restaurant industry is especially cruel to women. How bad is it?
There's actually this story that got cut out of my book about a woman who was working at ... one of the biggest fine dining chains in the country, who experienced horrific sexual harassment from very wealthy, well-heeled customers coming to the restaurant. The problem is not just the wage, and the fact that these people, most of whom are women, don't make enough to live on. The very fact of having to live off of tips, whether it's a lot or a little, basically is a source of tremendous gender inequity and sexual harassment.
And you have data to back this up.
For our most recent report, which came out in 2014, we asked hundreds of restaurant workers to answer this question: 'Have you experienced sexual behavior in the restaurant industry that is scary or unwanted?' And 90 percent of workers, both male and female, said yes.
More broadly, the data show that the restaurant industry has the highest rate of sexual harassment of any industry in the United States. It's actually five times the rate of all other industries. Seven percent of American women work in restaurants, but thirty percent of sexual harassment complaints from women come from the restaurant industry. It's the single largest source of sexual harassment complaints of any industry in the United States.
Our research shows that all of that sexual harassment—from customers, coworkers, and management—can be traced back to this whole culture of forcing women to make their income based on pleasing the customer. To me it's all summed up by this one quote from Texas, where they earn $2.13 an hour before tips. This waitress was speaking at a Senate press conference, and she said: 'Senators, what would it be like for you if your income depended on the happiness of the people you serve? Because my income depends on the people I serve, I have to put up with a guy groping by butt every day so I can feed my four year old son every day.'

Given how pervasive restaurant work is, especially for younger women, the problem is not only immediate—it also has broader, longer term consequences, right?
Absolutely. It's the reality for for six million women in America. Six million women are tipped workers in America. But for millions more, this is the first job in high school, college, or graduate school, and that's extremely troubling. It completely skews the way in which they are taught what is acceptable and tolerable in the work place. I have had women come to me to tell me they were sexually harassed in their corporate job, but that they didn't do anything about it because it wasn't nearly as bad as when they were working in the restaurant industry as a young women.
So the industry is essentially setting the standard for what is tolerable in the workplace. And it's setting a very low bar.
How does one even respond to all of that? Or, I guess, more immediately, how has the industry responded?
After we released our report in 2014, the NRA changed its leadership to be a woman, and launched a PR campaign with about 100 high profile women saying how the restaurant industry is such a great place for women to work. So they never actually responded directly to the critique of to the data on sexual harassment. Instead, they launched a marketing campaign to spread the idea that the industry is a good place to work for women.
I see, so the problem wasn't that women were being harassed, it was that people know they were being harassed. That's encouraging.
Exactly.
I mean, when we've directly confronted them on this issue we've hit a wall, too. In the Connecticut state legislature, we bought up this issue of sexual harassment, and a leader of the Connecticut restaurant association, a restaurant owner, basically said 'well, if women are experiencing sexual harassment they should find another place to work.' That's been their response. They have had no legitimate response.
Their response to the poverty issue is that no, it's not true. They say these workers make a ton of money, that they underreport their tips, which is why you don't see it in the government data. The data of course disproves that. But with sexual harassment it's worse, since they don't even pretend to have an explanation.

So, despite all of this, not everyone has a problem with tipping—like the National Restaurant Association, which vehemently defends it. What's their argument for it?
Their favorite thing to say is that no one actually earns $2.13 an hour, and that employers are obligated to make up the difference. They love to paint this picture of the wealthy white guy working in fancy restaurants as though it's emblematic of restaurant work around the country. I've been at conferences and senate hearings, where they'll say 'our workers make $18 an hour with tips,' and they can because, honestly, for about a century they haven't really been pushed to provide actual evidence of this.
Actually, why don't I give you an example. I had somebody from the Senate budget office call me recently to tell me that the NRA was recently in their office claiming that tipped workers across America make $18 an hour. We said that's great, now give us some evidence. So they followed up with a letter, and on their letterhead it said 'our workers make $18 an hour with tips.' The letterhead was the evidence! That's been the sort of nonsense we've been dealing with for a hundred years. Here we are providing government data—and this is not even worker reported data; it's employer reported data, payroll data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics—that shows these workers are making a median wage of $9 an hour with tips, and all the evidence they have to the contrary is a baseless line on their letterhead.
So it's really been misinformation spread by the restaurant industry that's giving weight to the argument for the current tipping system. I mean, if you read the history, this is not the first time we're having this argument. For a century, the NRA and its predecessors have argued that waiters are all wealthy steakhouse servers so there's no reason for us to pay them a wage, since they're already making a ton of money in tips.
They also warn about what would happen if we were to get rid of tipping, right?
Yes. The other argument they like to use is that if we actually had to pay these workers a wage the industry would collapse, the system would fail, many jobs would be lost, and prices would skyrocket.
But here's the thing: that all has been proven to be completely false by the seven states that have completely eliminated this system. They have higher restaurant sales per capita, higher job growth in the restaurant industry, higher job growth among tipped workers, and even higher rates of tipping than the others. California is actually the state with the largest and fastest growing restaurant industry in the country, and Alaska has the highest tipping rate in the country even though it has had the same wage for tipped and non tipped workers for decades.

Several high profile restaurateurs and chefs have done away with tipping recently. Is this a sign that tipping is on its way out in the United States? Is the tipped minimum wage at the very least on its way out? Or is the practice still too ingrained for that kind of change?
You know, if you had asked me that question nine months ago, I wouldn't have known. But I have to say that the number of really high profile industry leaders that have come out of the woodwork that are now with us and supporting us, that are willing to go to state capitols to talk about this issue, is changing that. One of them even said to me recently that they really believe the tipped minimum wage will be gone within a decade. And I see that, too. We're on the precipice of some monumental, really historic change.
Congress introduced the first bill last spring, proposing the full elimination of the tipped minimum wage for tipped workers. That is a hundred years in the making, so these are historic changes. And these sorts of serious discussions, I think, are a sign that it's on its way out. The data, as we have talked about, is just too overwhelming to ignore. I really don't think the National Restaurant Association is going to be able to hold onto their stance, which is supported by pretty much none of the data we have available.
In terms of tipping, a lot of the industry leaders we work with think that as that change happens—the migration away from the tipped minimum wage—they see tipping also slowly going away. Our concern, and why we would never want to legislate that or push for a complete elimination of tipping, is that we don't think that the employer will do it in the way people like Danny Meyer have done it, which is transparently, guaranteeing that his workers will get everything that they would have gotten through tips through wages.
What we want is one fair wage. We want to get rid of the two-tiered system, and let workers earn tips on top of a fair wage.
So kind of like how many other industries that have adopted tipping function. Like, say, coffee shops, where baristas are paid a salary at or above the minimum, and also tipped from time to time?
Thats exactly right.

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