This week on YO!Radio -- we headed over to the San Francisco City Hall press conference where Mayor Gavin Newsom and community activists addressed the recent surge of interracial violence in the Bay Area. PLUS: Amanze Emenike shares his experience in robbing Asians and Latinos in the Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood, and explains why these acts of violence aren't about race. Malcolm Marshall is producer and Donny Lumpkins is a content producer for YO! Youth Outlook Multimedia.
You can hear the segment here:
http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=9c1a6c7a94a59e45b26c1c21ab90c089#
Produced by Donny Lumpkins and the YO! Radio Crew
Posted: Apr 30, 2010
Copyright New America Media 2010
Friday, May 28, 2010
Friday, May 21, 2010
How Are the Children?
This post by "Musings Along the Border", examines the welfare of children in the low-income and poor communities of Texas.
How Are The Children
By Michael Seifert Musings Along the Border
"How are the children?"
I was told last week that this is a traditional greeting amongst the Maasai tribal people in Africa. I like it very much, as I think that this greeting might be a way to shatter the shrill politics of this American hour.
Instead of saying, “Hi! How are you?” we would smile and greet each other with “How are the children?”
The little reflection that that greeting causes would help us move beyond some of our more self-centered tendencies and toward that which indeed does matter—the children.
“Hi, how are you?” usually elicits, “Fine, thank you,” but that reply just doesn’t work always with “How are the children?”, at least here along the Texas/Mexico border.
The children here are mostly not fine. Graduations are coming up, for instance, but half of those who went into Brownsville’s ninth grades four years ago have dropped out of high school. Around here, even in the year 2010, a high school graduate remains a child of privilege.
How Are The Children
By Michael Seifert Musings Along the Border
"How are the children?"
I was told last week that this is a traditional greeting amongst the Maasai tribal people in Africa. I like it very much, as I think that this greeting might be a way to shatter the shrill politics of this American hour.
Instead of saying, “Hi! How are you?” we would smile and greet each other with “How are the children?”
The little reflection that that greeting causes would help us move beyond some of our more self-centered tendencies and toward that which indeed does matter—the children.
“Hi, how are you?” usually elicits, “Fine, thank you,” but that reply just doesn’t work always with “How are the children?”, at least here along the Texas/Mexico border.
The children here are mostly not fine. Graduations are coming up, for instance, but half of those who went into Brownsville’s ninth grades four years ago have dropped out of high school. Around here, even in the year 2010, a high school graduate remains a child of privilege.
“How are the children?” Fine, one might say, if her child has Medicaid. Not so well, if the family has no Medicaid, and the child falls and breaks a bone. Dr. Marsha, the kind pediatrician at the Brownsville Community Health Clinic talks about starting a fracture fund. She wants to call it “These Bones Won’t Heal.” Parents just break down and weep when they learn that the child will need a broken arm cast—a somewhat typical childhood accident is a backbreaker for a family living below the federal poverty line. Dr. Marsha and her clinic allies--social workers, doctors, nurses and medical assistants move heaven and earth to get that arm in a cast--but it is not an easy task. The mother's anguish is heartbreaking; it does not require a lot of imagination to know how this mother responds to that greeting, for her child is not doing fine.
“How are the children?” Right now, there are 400 of them being held in detention in Cameron County. They are not delinquents, but children—teenagers, and mostly boys but some are infants and toddlers-- who made the long trip from Central America and other parts, seeking to reunite with their parents. Some of the children will remain in custody for months, as their cases make their way through the immigration courts. Perhaps they will be reunited with relatives in the USA, or perhaps they will be returned to their home countries. In the meantime, they wait, in a shelter that is a kindly enough place, but they remain alone, separated from family and, this being especially true for the girls, carrying the scars of the horrible things that happen to those immigrants who pass through Mexico. These children are not fine.
I was also told, a couple of weeks ago, that children are resilient, and strong, and many, many of them make do, even with broken bones, a broken education, or broken dreams. I pray and hope that that is true, but it seems irresponsible to hope that a child is resilient and will somehow make it through abuse and neglect and remain a whole human being.
A saner response is to work on what can be changed—the way we educate children, the way we heal them, the way we apply immigration laws to them. I have written about this idea of a kinder and more compassionate society and have received some embarrassingly horrible comments by people who purport to be Christian Believers. Worse, as this is a small town, I would run into these folks once in a while, and really didn’t know what to say to them. I was certainly not interested in talking with them, so I mostly avoided them.
Until now.
Now I know what to say. “Hi! How are the children?”, will do for openers.
And now I am free to listen to them, for on this point, I am truly interested in what they have to say. How could you not want to know how the children are doing?
Monday, May 10, 2010
Evangelists Support Reform
Conservative evangelists are the new force for broad immigration reform, citing the Bible and its passages of protecting migrants and the vulnerable, as well as a respect for civil law, as the root of their support.
New Force for Broad Immigration Reform:
Conservative Evangelists
By Dan Gilgoff May 10, 2010
© CNN 2010
Some conservative evangelical leaders call Arizona's new immigration law misguided. They want federal reform that includes path to citizenship for illegal immigrants. They're trying to persuade rank-and-file evangelicals to get on board. Many evangelicals call push for reform biblically based; some want GOP to woo Hispanics.
(CNN) -- Tea Party activists and other conservatives are planning rallies next month in support of Arizona's tough new immigration law, which has come under attack from Democrats, Latino groups and some maverick Republicans.
But a growing chorus of conservative evangelical leaders has broken with their traditional political allies on the right. They're calling the Arizona law misguided and are attempting to use its passage to push for federal immigration reform that includes a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants.
The group, which includes influential political activists such as Richard Land, head of the Southern Baptist Convention's public policy wing, and Mathew Staver, dean of the Liberty University School of Law, will soon begin lobbying Republican leaders in Washington to support comprehensive immigration reform under President Obama.
But a big part of their job is to first persuade rank-and-file evangelicals to get on board.
"There's a misconception among people at the grass roots that the pathway to citizenship is amnesty, and it's not, but we have to overcome that," said Staver, who heads the law school at the university founded by Jerry Falwell. "There's a lot of work to be done."
Staver and Land have partnered with the Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, an influential Hispanic evangelical figure, and Rick Tyler -- former House Speaker Newt Gingrich's longtime spokesman and head of Gingrich's new values-based organization -- to try to draft a consensus evangelical position on immigration reform.
"After securing our borders, we must allow the millions of undocumented and otherwise law-abiding persons living in our midst to come out of the shadows," reads a recent draft of the document, which is still being finalized. "The pathway for earned legal citizenship or temporary residency should involve a program of legalization for undocumented persons in the United States. ..."
Many conservatives say illegal immigrants should be forced to return to their home countries and start the process of legally coming to the U.S. from scratch.
Rodriguez, who heads the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference -- which represents about 16 million Latino evangelicals in the U.S. -- says he'll soon start presenting the document to Republican leaders like Gingrich, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and Florida Senate candidate Marco Rubio in hopes that they sign on.
"If the conservative evangelical community looks to the Republican Party and says, 'We demand integration reform, we demand a just assimilation strategy,' that may be the tipping point in getting substantial Republican support for comprehensive immigration reform," Rodriguez said.
The conservative evangelicals pushing comprehensive immigration reform say that undocumented workers should have to pay fines, clear background checks, learn English and take a civics class before being granted citizenship.
Many evangelicals say their push for immigration reform is biblically based, citing passages urging respect for civil laws and concern for migrants and the vulnerable.
"Discussion of immigration and government immigration policy must begin with the truth that every human being is made in the image of God," the National Association of Evangelicals said in a recent resolution backing comprehensive immigration reform. "... Jesus exemplifies respect toward others who are different in his treatment of the Samaritans."
But evangelical leaders are also working to convince Republicans that the party will lose Hispanic voters -- a fast-growing bloc -- if they take a strident line on immigration.
The Southern Baptist Convention's Land said that Hispanics, like non-Hispanic white evangelicals, generally take a conservative approach to social issues like abortion and gay marriage, but that they often vote for Democrats because of the immigration issue.
"Hispanics are hard-wired to be like us on sanctity of life, marriage and issues of faith," said Land, describing political similarities between Hispanics and white Southern Baptists. "I'm concerned about being perceived as being unwelcoming to them."
The last time Washington attempted immigration reform, under President George W. Bush in 2007, the project failed, largely because many conservatives and Republicans said the plan's inclusion of a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants already in the U.S. was tantamount to amnesty.
Most major evangelical groups sat out the 2007 fight over immigration reform, but many, including the National Association of Evangelicals, which represents 30 million Americans, have since taken up the cause.
Trying to apply the political lessons of 2007, the evangelical leaders now pushing comprehensive immigration reform stress that the borders need to be secured as part of any reform package.
"I look at the Arizona law as a cry for help from a state that's being inundated as a result of the federal government refusing to enforce its laws," Land said.
But, he added, "I think the Arizona law is the wrong way to attack the problem."
Passed last month, the Arizona law requires immigrants to carry their alien registration documents at all times and allows police to question someone about their immigration status if they are in the process of enforcing some other law or ordinance.
Critics of the law say it will lead to racial profiling, though supporters say a package of changes to the law signed by Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer addressed those concerns.
Many evangelical leaders promoting comprehensive immigration reform say the law's passage gave new urgency to their campaign, which had been under way since last year.
Rodriguez says he declined to join other Latino groups in calling for a boycott of Arizona because he thought it would alienate white evangelicals at a time when he's trying to win their support.
Still, Rodriguez and the handful of conservative evangelical leaders promoting comprehensive immigration reform have yet to persuade some of the country's most powerful evangelical groups -- including Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council -- to come on board.
"We've been looking into this deeply but aren't ready to discuss our position, assuming we'll get to one," Tom Minnery, vice president of public policy at Focus on the Family, said in an e-mail message last week.
Even if such groups join their campaign, evangelicals backing comprehensive immigration reform may face another challenge: Persuading the White House to move forward with the plan after the bruising fight over health care reform.
New Force for Broad Immigration Reform:
Conservative Evangelists
By Dan Gilgoff May 10, 2010
© CNN 2010
Some conservative evangelical leaders call Arizona's new immigration law misguided. They want federal reform that includes path to citizenship for illegal immigrants. They're trying to persuade rank-and-file evangelicals to get on board. Many evangelicals call push for reform biblically based; some want GOP to woo Hispanics.
(CNN) -- Tea Party activists and other conservatives are planning rallies next month in support of Arizona's tough new immigration law, which has come under attack from Democrats, Latino groups and some maverick Republicans.
But a growing chorus of conservative evangelical leaders has broken with their traditional political allies on the right. They're calling the Arizona law misguided and are attempting to use its passage to push for federal immigration reform that includes a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants.
The group, which includes influential political activists such as Richard Land, head of the Southern Baptist Convention's public policy wing, and Mathew Staver, dean of the Liberty University School of Law, will soon begin lobbying Republican leaders in Washington to support comprehensive immigration reform under President Obama.
But a big part of their job is to first persuade rank-and-file evangelicals to get on board.
"There's a misconception among people at the grass roots that the pathway to citizenship is amnesty, and it's not, but we have to overcome that," said Staver, who heads the law school at the university founded by Jerry Falwell. "There's a lot of work to be done."
Staver and Land have partnered with the Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, an influential Hispanic evangelical figure, and Rick Tyler -- former House Speaker Newt Gingrich's longtime spokesman and head of Gingrich's new values-based organization -- to try to draft a consensus evangelical position on immigration reform.
"After securing our borders, we must allow the millions of undocumented and otherwise law-abiding persons living in our midst to come out of the shadows," reads a recent draft of the document, which is still being finalized. "The pathway for earned legal citizenship or temporary residency should involve a program of legalization for undocumented persons in the United States. ..."
Many conservatives say illegal immigrants should be forced to return to their home countries and start the process of legally coming to the U.S. from scratch.
Rodriguez, who heads the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference -- which represents about 16 million Latino evangelicals in the U.S. -- says he'll soon start presenting the document to Republican leaders like Gingrich, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and Florida Senate candidate Marco Rubio in hopes that they sign on.
"If the conservative evangelical community looks to the Republican Party and says, 'We demand integration reform, we demand a just assimilation strategy,' that may be the tipping point in getting substantial Republican support for comprehensive immigration reform," Rodriguez said.
The conservative evangelicals pushing comprehensive immigration reform say that undocumented workers should have to pay fines, clear background checks, learn English and take a civics class before being granted citizenship.
Many evangelicals say their push for immigration reform is biblically based, citing passages urging respect for civil laws and concern for migrants and the vulnerable.
"Discussion of immigration and government immigration policy must begin with the truth that every human being is made in the image of God," the National Association of Evangelicals said in a recent resolution backing comprehensive immigration reform. "... Jesus exemplifies respect toward others who are different in his treatment of the Samaritans."
But evangelical leaders are also working to convince Republicans that the party will lose Hispanic voters -- a fast-growing bloc -- if they take a strident line on immigration.
The Southern Baptist Convention's Land said that Hispanics, like non-Hispanic white evangelicals, generally take a conservative approach to social issues like abortion and gay marriage, but that they often vote for Democrats because of the immigration issue.
"Hispanics are hard-wired to be like us on sanctity of life, marriage and issues of faith," said Land, describing political similarities between Hispanics and white Southern Baptists. "I'm concerned about being perceived as being unwelcoming to them."
The last time Washington attempted immigration reform, under President George W. Bush in 2007, the project failed, largely because many conservatives and Republicans said the plan's inclusion of a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants already in the U.S. was tantamount to amnesty.
Most major evangelical groups sat out the 2007 fight over immigration reform, but many, including the National Association of Evangelicals, which represents 30 million Americans, have since taken up the cause.
Trying to apply the political lessons of 2007, the evangelical leaders now pushing comprehensive immigration reform stress that the borders need to be secured as part of any reform package.
"I look at the Arizona law as a cry for help from a state that's being inundated as a result of the federal government refusing to enforce its laws," Land said.
But, he added, "I think the Arizona law is the wrong way to attack the problem."
Passed last month, the Arizona law requires immigrants to carry their alien registration documents at all times and allows police to question someone about their immigration status if they are in the process of enforcing some other law or ordinance.
Critics of the law say it will lead to racial profiling, though supporters say a package of changes to the law signed by Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer addressed those concerns.
Many evangelical leaders promoting comprehensive immigration reform say the law's passage gave new urgency to their campaign, which had been under way since last year.
Rodriguez says he declined to join other Latino groups in calling for a boycott of Arizona because he thought it would alienate white evangelicals at a time when he's trying to win their support.
Still, Rodriguez and the handful of conservative evangelical leaders promoting comprehensive immigration reform have yet to persuade some of the country's most powerful evangelical groups -- including Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council -- to come on board.
"We've been looking into this deeply but aren't ready to discuss our position, assuming we'll get to one," Tom Minnery, vice president of public policy at Focus on the Family, said in an e-mail message last week.
Even if such groups join their campaign, evangelicals backing comprehensive immigration reform may face another challenge: Persuading the White House to move forward with the plan after the bruising fight over health care reform.
Audit: 43 Businesses Have Illegal Staff
More than one-half of the Arizona businesses that have had their workforces audited by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents since July 2009 have been found to have illegal workers on their payrolls.
Immigration department spokeswoman Virginia Kice said that 43 of the 84 companies screened in two rounds of audits have been sent letters listing employees whose employment eligibility is suspect.
The agency's policy is not to name the companies with illegal employees unless they are disciplined with a fine or other measure.
Besides violation notices, two of the 43 companies with illegal workers were informed of pending fines.
In its investigation, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents audited the I-9 forms of 17,194 Arizona employees.
Kice would not say how many were found to have suspect documentation, but nationally the number is running about 18 percent. That would indicate that about 3,000 of the screened workers had suspect documents.
Employers are required to verify their employee's eligibility to work via an I-9 form that they must keep and turn over to immigration officials for inspection on request.
Only citizens and non-citizens with employment-authorization documents are allowed to hold jobs in the United States. Employers are required to terminate those employees found to be working illegally.
"If you continue to employ these individuals without valid documentation, you may be subject to a civil money penalty ranging from $375 to $3,200 per unauthorized alien for a first violation," the letters read.
On April 13 and 14, Pro's Ranch Markets in Phoenix fired about 300 illegal workers, or 20 percent of its workforce, who were identified by an audit of its I-9 employment verification forms.
The company said the employees gave it forged or falsified work documents when they were hired.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents announced 650 audits, including 40 in Arizona in July and followed up with an additional 1,000, including about 44 in Arizona in November.
Reach the reporter at max.jarman@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-7351.
Read more: http://www.azcentral.com/business/articles/2010/04/23/20100423arizona-illegal-workforce-audit.html#ixzz0nZT3TGbp
This article was written by Max Jarman for the Arizona Republic. It was published on Apr. 23, 2010.
© The Arizona Republic
Immigration department spokeswoman Virginia Kice said that 43 of the 84 companies screened in two rounds of audits have been sent letters listing employees whose employment eligibility is suspect.
The agency's policy is not to name the companies with illegal employees unless they are disciplined with a fine or other measure.
Besides violation notices, two of the 43 companies with illegal workers were informed of pending fines.
In its investigation, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents audited the I-9 forms of 17,194 Arizona employees.
Kice would not say how many were found to have suspect documentation, but nationally the number is running about 18 percent. That would indicate that about 3,000 of the screened workers had suspect documents.
Employers are required to verify their employee's eligibility to work via an I-9 form that they must keep and turn over to immigration officials for inspection on request.
Only citizens and non-citizens with employment-authorization documents are allowed to hold jobs in the United States. Employers are required to terminate those employees found to be working illegally.
"If you continue to employ these individuals without valid documentation, you may be subject to a civil money penalty ranging from $375 to $3,200 per unauthorized alien for a first violation," the letters read.
On April 13 and 14, Pro's Ranch Markets in Phoenix fired about 300 illegal workers, or 20 percent of its workforce, who were identified by an audit of its I-9 employment verification forms.
The company said the employees gave it forged or falsified work documents when they were hired.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents announced 650 audits, including 40 in Arizona in July and followed up with an additional 1,000, including about 44 in Arizona in November.
Reach the reporter at max.jarman@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-7351.
Read more: http://www.azcentral.com/business/articles/2010/04/23/20100423arizona-illegal-workforce-audit.html#ixzz0nZT3TGbp
This article was written by Max Jarman for the Arizona Republic. It was published on Apr. 23, 2010.
© The Arizona Republic
Monday, April 26, 2010
Mujeres Latinas en Accion Brings New Play to Chicago
To combat sexual assault and domestic violence in Hispanic communities, Mujeres Latinas en Accion brings “Monologos de la Vagina” to Chicago, – a Spanish-language version of Eve Ensler’s award-winning play “The Vagina Monologues.”
A special performance of “The Vagina Monologues” hopes to raise awareness en español
by Adriana Diaz Medill Reports Chicago
April 13, 2010
Vagina: written the same in English or Spanish, is a word that most people have difficulty saying out loud in any language. But a Chicago advocate for victims believes that talking about sex, frankly and unabashedly, is an important part of solving the problem of violence against women.
Maritza Reyes is the sexual assault program coordinator for Mujeres Latinas en Accion, a multiservice agency based in Pilsen that is bringing “Monologos de la Vagina” a Spanish-translated production of Eve Ensler’s “The Vagina Monologues.”
The play comprises several stories that touch on themes including sex, love, rape, sexual slavery, domestic violence, masturbation and the female orgasm.
Reyes said sexual assault and domestic violence are issues that are very prevalent in Hispanic communities. “I think that we don’t speak about it. I think it’s sort of like ‘well we’ll take care of it within ourselves, we don’t need to involve other people’,” Reyes said. “And that ends up harming the child or the person that is sexually abused because they see it as the family is protecting the abuser as opposed to protecting the victim.”
It is estimated that only three in 10 rapes are reported. Providing a variety of social services, Mujeres Latinas en Accion is also one of 33 centers that constitute the Illinois Coalition Against Sexual Assault.
In 2009, 28 percent of rape victims that sought first-time services from crisis centers were Latino, said Sean Black, the Coalition’s communications coordinator. About 8 percent of the county’s victims spoke Spanish only, heightening the need for bilingual awareness.
The performance is part of a global campaign run by the V-Day organization, a global non-profit founded by Ensler, the playwright of “The Vagina Monologues.” Although 26 percent of the city’s population is of Hispanic or Latino origin, the only other Spanish V-Day benefit production of the monologues held in Chicago was in 2005.
Silvana Tabares, 31, of Brighton Park, who attended an English language performance of the show in Pilsen Friday, said she truly enjoyed the show. “I am very impressed,” she said. “I enjoyed every story and I learned a lot about how women should respect themselves.”
Reyes said more than 95 percent of the agency’s clients speak Spanish only and many of them have never heard of the show. “It’s such a taboo subject in the Latino community to talk about vaginas, to talk about sex and also to talk about domestic violence and sexual assault,” she said. “So we wanted to bring it to them in a format that maybe they would be more comfortable with.”
©2001 - 2010 Medill Reports - Chicago, Northwestern University. A publication of the Medill School.
A special performance of “The Vagina Monologues” hopes to raise awareness en español
by Adriana Diaz Medill Reports Chicago
April 13, 2010
Vagina: written the same in English or Spanish, is a word that most people have difficulty saying out loud in any language. But a Chicago advocate for victims believes that talking about sex, frankly and unabashedly, is an important part of solving the problem of violence against women.
Maritza Reyes is the sexual assault program coordinator for Mujeres Latinas en Accion, a multiservice agency based in Pilsen that is bringing “Monologos de la Vagina” a Spanish-translated production of Eve Ensler’s “The Vagina Monologues.”
The play comprises several stories that touch on themes including sex, love, rape, sexual slavery, domestic violence, masturbation and the female orgasm.
Reyes said sexual assault and domestic violence are issues that are very prevalent in Hispanic communities. “I think that we don’t speak about it. I think it’s sort of like ‘well we’ll take care of it within ourselves, we don’t need to involve other people’,” Reyes said. “And that ends up harming the child or the person that is sexually abused because they see it as the family is protecting the abuser as opposed to protecting the victim.”
It is estimated that only three in 10 rapes are reported. Providing a variety of social services, Mujeres Latinas en Accion is also one of 33 centers that constitute the Illinois Coalition Against Sexual Assault.
In 2009, 28 percent of rape victims that sought first-time services from crisis centers were Latino, said Sean Black, the Coalition’s communications coordinator. About 8 percent of the county’s victims spoke Spanish only, heightening the need for bilingual awareness.
The performance is part of a global campaign run by the V-Day organization, a global non-profit founded by Ensler, the playwright of “The Vagina Monologues.” Although 26 percent of the city’s population is of Hispanic or Latino origin, the only other Spanish V-Day benefit production of the monologues held in Chicago was in 2005.
Silvana Tabares, 31, of Brighton Park, who attended an English language performance of the show in Pilsen Friday, said she truly enjoyed the show. “I am very impressed,” she said. “I enjoyed every story and I learned a lot about how women should respect themselves.”
Reyes said more than 95 percent of the agency’s clients speak Spanish only and many of them have never heard of the show. “It’s such a taboo subject in the Latino community to talk about vaginas, to talk about sex and also to talk about domestic violence and sexual assault,” she said. “So we wanted to bring it to them in a format that maybe they would be more comfortable with.”
©2001 - 2010 Medill Reports - Chicago, Northwestern University. A publication of the Medill School.
Thursday, April 22, 2010
Trained to Fail
The following article is written by Yvonne Liu from the Applied Research Center, an organization that is one of Marguerite Casey Foundation's grantees. This article appeared in the magazine ColorLines and does not belong to the Marguerite Casey Foundation.
The article links and refers to a previous feature written by Claudia Rowe about Green Jobs.
Jason Smith needs a job. For two years, he’s been submitting applications and waiting by the phone for a callback. Sometimes, he gets a response, but the ratio of applicants to openings is at historic highs, so he hasn’t been hired. That wouldn’t make Smith much different from the 15 million Americans who are out of work, except that he was supposed to be among those leading us into a promising 21st century economy.
Last June, Smith graduated as a member of the inaugural class of the Oakland Green Jobs Corps. He and his classmates were hopeful for their future—they’d get cutting edge jobs and be part of a movement for climate justice. Eight months later, many sit waiting for employment. A 26-year old Black man, Smith’s living with his parents, where he moved when he lost his job. He’s among 3.4 million workers who have been unemployed for more than a year.
A year ago, President Obama was among the nation’s loudest advocates for reversing the Great Recession by building a green economy. Congress included almost $4 billion in the Recovery Act for green job training. This funding is on top of the Department of Labor’s annual training allotment, which was a combined $7.4 billion in fiscal years 2009 and 2010. Job training programs have sprung into action and workers have jumped at the chance for a new career.
But Washington stopped there. While Obama began this year vowing to focus on “jobs, jobs, jobs”, most economists agree the jobs bill he signed into law last month is too little, too late. The Senate’s plan to roll out further job creation efforts appears stalled. They can’t even agree to keep unemployment insurance going for all those long-term jobless workers like Smith. So we are facing a jobless recovery, with some estimates predicting that job numbers won’t return to pre-recession levels until November 2014. The White House has said it doesn’t expect unemployment to drop meaningfully this year.
As a result of this neglect, the experience of Smith and his training classmates is not uncommon. There are no firm numbers on how many newly trained green workers are still jobless. But stories abound of programs that turn out workers with new, promising skills—in solar panel installation and weatherization, in places like Seattle and Chicago—and who nonetheless can’t find jobs.
The Oakland Green Jobs Corps was created in October 2008 as a demonstration of how investments in renewable energy can create opportunities to lift people of color out of poverty and onto promising career pathways. When the city won $250 million in a settlement from the state’s Enron lawsuit, advocates urged the money be used to fund green jobs, specifically a local training program. They argued the money should benefit communities of color, who were hurt the most by the unscrupulous practices of large energy corporations.
The Ella Baker Center surveyed 20 employers and found that many were in the process of expanding their businesses and that the major challenge they faced was finding trained people. In October 2008, about a dozen members of the Green Employer Council—a group of employers that helped shape the job training curriculum—committed to hiring a graduate of the Oakland Green Jobs Corp. But eight months later, when Smith and his colleagues donned green helmets and received diplomas in a graduation ceremony, the employers didn’t follow through on their promise. The ongoing recession curbed their business expansion; they were no longer hiring new workers.
The lesson ought to be clear: Job training alone doesn’t create jobs. But since 1982, the federal government has argued the contrary. That was the last economic downturn in which unemployment reached toward double digits. According to President Ronald Reagan, the cause wasn’t a shortage of jobs. He said he’d “looked in the Sunday paper at the help-wanted ads” and found “as many as 65 pages,” which “convinced us that there are jobs waiting and people not trained for those jobs.” To Reagan, the era’s 9.8 unemployment rate reflected a skills gap.
This moment marked a fundamental shift in how the federal government addressed rising jobless numbers, argues University of Oregon labor educator Gordon Lafer, in his 2002 book The Job Training Charade. Reagan enacted the Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA), which altered the landscape of job training in three crucial ways.
First, the federal government moved from being an employer of last resort to a source of funding for privatized, short-term training. An earlier job training initiative, the Comprehensive Employment and Training Administration (CETA), provided both training and jobs. At its peak, CETA employed nearly three-quarters of a million adults and an additional one million youth for summer jobs.
“The only case in which training creates jobs is when businesses want to hire more people, but can’t find people with skills,” says Lafer. “This is very rarely true, especially during times of recession. Politically, training gets promoted the most when the economy is down, when it can’t create jobs.”
Reagan’s JTPA dissolved CETA’s public employment arm and redirected the money to private, for-profit job trainers. This was the second fundamental change. Previously, CETA programs operated at the city level and enabled community-based organizations to manage operations. JTPA instead empowered state governors with primary budget authority and setup private business councils, which planned the training programs at the local level.
Third, the Reagan program fundamentally changed the discourse around job training. Rather than being part of a one-two punch to get people back to work, it set up unemployment and poverty as personal failures. Only through filing individual skills deficits—especially in “soft skills,” such as discipline, punctuality, loyalty and “work ethic”—could the disproportionately Black and Latino poor and unemployed move into the middle class.
The impact on communities of color and women was grim. To begin with, funding was woefully inadequate, enough to serve only 2 percent of the eligible population. Because the federal government paid training providers for their services when they met certain outcomes, widespread “creaming” occurred by the program operators. People of color and women were skipped over as providers recruited white male workers to their programs, knowing that the latter population suffered the least in terms of barriers to employment. As a result, Black enrollment in job training fell by half in JTPA’s first year. Latino participation dropped even further. Two studies found that two-thirds of the on-the-job trainees were white men.
“Green job training is subject to the same critique as the JTPA,” says Lafer. “Green jobs are like a mantra, but nobody knows what they are or where they are.”
Wherever they are, there aren’t currently enough of them for the people that want them. Instead of continuing to pour money into training for green jobs that don’t exist, what the country needs is investments in large-scale job creation, one that will put people of color and women to work—in green jobs. Jason Smith perhaps says it best. “We need to get back to [being] a producing country, where we make things and then sell it to other countries,” Smith concludes. “So much money has been given to corporations, I just want a piece of it, I just want a job.”
The article links and refers to a previous feature written by Claudia Rowe about Green Jobs.
Jason Smith needs a job. For two years, he’s been submitting applications and waiting by the phone for a callback. Sometimes, he gets a response, but the ratio of applicants to openings is at historic highs, so he hasn’t been hired. That wouldn’t make Smith much different from the 15 million Americans who are out of work, except that he was supposed to be among those leading us into a promising 21st century economy.
Last June, Smith graduated as a member of the inaugural class of the Oakland Green Jobs Corps. He and his classmates were hopeful for their future—they’d get cutting edge jobs and be part of a movement for climate justice. Eight months later, many sit waiting for employment. A 26-year old Black man, Smith’s living with his parents, where he moved when he lost his job. He’s among 3.4 million workers who have been unemployed for more than a year.
A year ago, President Obama was among the nation’s loudest advocates for reversing the Great Recession by building a green economy. Congress included almost $4 billion in the Recovery Act for green job training. This funding is on top of the Department of Labor’s annual training allotment, which was a combined $7.4 billion in fiscal years 2009 and 2010. Job training programs have sprung into action and workers have jumped at the chance for a new career.
But Washington stopped there. While Obama began this year vowing to focus on “jobs, jobs, jobs”, most economists agree the jobs bill he signed into law last month is too little, too late. The Senate’s plan to roll out further job creation efforts appears stalled. They can’t even agree to keep unemployment insurance going for all those long-term jobless workers like Smith. So we are facing a jobless recovery, with some estimates predicting that job numbers won’t return to pre-recession levels until November 2014. The White House has said it doesn’t expect unemployment to drop meaningfully this year.
As a result of this neglect, the experience of Smith and his training classmates is not uncommon. There are no firm numbers on how many newly trained green workers are still jobless. But stories abound of programs that turn out workers with new, promising skills—in solar panel installation and weatherization, in places like Seattle and Chicago—and who nonetheless can’t find jobs.
The Oakland Green Jobs Corps was created in October 2008 as a demonstration of how investments in renewable energy can create opportunities to lift people of color out of poverty and onto promising career pathways. When the city won $250 million in a settlement from the state’s Enron lawsuit, advocates urged the money be used to fund green jobs, specifically a local training program. They argued the money should benefit communities of color, who were hurt the most by the unscrupulous practices of large energy corporations.
The Ella Baker Center surveyed 20 employers and found that many were in the process of expanding their businesses and that the major challenge they faced was finding trained people. In October 2008, about a dozen members of the Green Employer Council—a group of employers that helped shape the job training curriculum—committed to hiring a graduate of the Oakland Green Jobs Corp. But eight months later, when Smith and his colleagues donned green helmets and received diplomas in a graduation ceremony, the employers didn’t follow through on their promise. The ongoing recession curbed their business expansion; they were no longer hiring new workers.
The lesson ought to be clear: Job training alone doesn’t create jobs. But since 1982, the federal government has argued the contrary. That was the last economic downturn in which unemployment reached toward double digits. According to President Ronald Reagan, the cause wasn’t a shortage of jobs. He said he’d “looked in the Sunday paper at the help-wanted ads” and found “as many as 65 pages,” which “convinced us that there are jobs waiting and people not trained for those jobs.” To Reagan, the era’s 9.8 unemployment rate reflected a skills gap.
This moment marked a fundamental shift in how the federal government addressed rising jobless numbers, argues University of Oregon labor educator Gordon Lafer, in his 2002 book The Job Training Charade. Reagan enacted the Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA), which altered the landscape of job training in three crucial ways.
First, the federal government moved from being an employer of last resort to a source of funding for privatized, short-term training. An earlier job training initiative, the Comprehensive Employment and Training Administration (CETA), provided both training and jobs. At its peak, CETA employed nearly three-quarters of a million adults and an additional one million youth for summer jobs.
“The only case in which training creates jobs is when businesses want to hire more people, but can’t find people with skills,” says Lafer. “This is very rarely true, especially during times of recession. Politically, training gets promoted the most when the economy is down, when it can’t create jobs.”
Reagan’s JTPA dissolved CETA’s public employment arm and redirected the money to private, for-profit job trainers. This was the second fundamental change. Previously, CETA programs operated at the city level and enabled community-based organizations to manage operations. JTPA instead empowered state governors with primary budget authority and setup private business councils, which planned the training programs at the local level.
Third, the Reagan program fundamentally changed the discourse around job training. Rather than being part of a one-two punch to get people back to work, it set up unemployment and poverty as personal failures. Only through filing individual skills deficits—especially in “soft skills,” such as discipline, punctuality, loyalty and “work ethic”—could the disproportionately Black and Latino poor and unemployed move into the middle class.
The impact on communities of color and women was grim. To begin with, funding was woefully inadequate, enough to serve only 2 percent of the eligible population. Because the federal government paid training providers for their services when they met certain outcomes, widespread “creaming” occurred by the program operators. People of color and women were skipped over as providers recruited white male workers to their programs, knowing that the latter population suffered the least in terms of barriers to employment. As a result, Black enrollment in job training fell by half in JTPA’s first year. Latino participation dropped even further. Two studies found that two-thirds of the on-the-job trainees were white men.
“Green job training is subject to the same critique as the JTPA,” says Lafer. “Green jobs are like a mantra, but nobody knows what they are or where they are.”
Wherever they are, there aren’t currently enough of them for the people that want them. Instead of continuing to pour money into training for green jobs that don’t exist, what the country needs is investments in large-scale job creation, one that will put people of color and women to work—in green jobs. Jason Smith perhaps says it best. “We need to get back to [being] a producing country, where we make things and then sell it to other countries,” Smith concludes. “So much money has been given to corporations, I just want a piece of it, I just want a job.”
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Have We Forgotten Why We Wanted Health Care Reform?
America is discontent with change. Only a couple years ago, we were calling for change, particularly in health care. Now change has come — and we are again grumbling. I witnessed this at a dinner party. The loudest dissenter was the epidemiologist, alongside the psychologist and mountaineer, who loathed being mandated to participate in a health insurance pool, and resented more the threat of a fine. I felt like I had fallen into the “Twilight Zone.” These were good people, educated people — PhD-holding, NPR-listening trusted friends. Such words would only be spoken at a tea party rally!
But these friends are not extremists. They identified with the tenets of liberalism — responsibility and empathy — but as middle class white collar workers, they were not immune to conservative fears of higher taxes and excessive government regulation. The media was saturated with such claims, claims that are frightening in a time of economic uncertainty. Fear makes us forget.
The American health care system was a child of World War II. During the war, the U.S. government capped wages to deter inflation, so private companies began luring workers with health insurance as a perk. By the time the war ended and the wage cap was rescinded, health insurance had become the standard to attract good workers, and thus America — quite accidentally — fell out of step with the rest of the industrialized nations that had already established universal health care by the 1940s.
Our market-driven health care system never made good on capitalism’s usual promise: that competition drives down costs and improves the quality of services and goods. Costs didn’t decrease with competition and eventually were the cause of 60 percent of the bankruptcies in the U.S. Quality of care paled in comparison to that in other developed nations; the life expectancy rate is 78.11 years in America, but 82.6 in Japan (did you know you’d actually live longer in Cuba than in America?). And don’t even try being a baby here; we have the worst infant mortality rate of all developed countries (Cuba trumps us in baby survival, too). To top it off – America actually spends the most on health care than all other members of the UN.
Health care never yielded the success of laissez-faire public policy typical for industries like entertainment and electronics. The World Health Organization notes this anomaly in its 2008 World Health Report: “Today, it is clear that left to their own devices, health systems do not gravitate naturally towards the goals of health for all through primary health care...Health systems are developing in directions that contribute little to equity and social justice and fail to get the best health outcomes for their money.”
The free-market U.S. health care system was not working. Do you remember how badly it was not working?
Christina Turner must remember. I found her story in The Huffington Post. The 45-year-old suspected drug-induced rape when she accepted a drink from two men at a bar and woke up hours later lying road side with cuts and bruises. Taking precautions, Turner took her doctor-prescribed month’s batch of anti-AIDS medicine. Now she is uninsurable. Insurers would not sell her a policy — telling her that maybe in a few years, they would reconsider if she could prove she was still AIDS-free.
It’s a dilemma many Americans faced: perverse insurance policies blocking access to affordable health care. Stories like Turner’s saturated the media only two years ago — but since the reform, the same media is suspicious of the change that was requested. Have we forgotten the Reuter’s investigation of insurance company Fortis?
Reuters reported that Fortis sought, found and targeted every policyholder who had contracted HIV and looked for any excuse for policy cancellation. In one case, Fortis used an obviously misdated handwritten note by a nurse, who wrote “2001” instead of “2002” to claim that the policyholder had concealed HIV as a preexisting condition. Fortis, now known as Assurant Health, made $150 million in profits alone between 2003 and 2007 by utilizing policy cancellation tactics.
And there is Mike Pyles, a 49-year-old man driven to homelessness by $230,000 in medical bills from his fight with renal cell cancer. Pyles lived out the statistic that every 30 seconds, an American goes bankrupt from medical bills.
Didn’t we used to rally at our dinner parties, denouncing the unfairness of the health care system? Instead, the epidemiologist asks me, “But if you use more health services—shouldn’t you pay more?” Bless his soul, but my friend’s innocent question is a kinder version of “Why should I pay for other people’s health? If you are the one sick, why should I pay for it?”
So I ask him, and the rest of America: “Why shouldn’t I help you? What’s so bad about you anyway that I cannot help pay for your health?”
Have we forgotten how our hearts went out to the millions of uninsured, to the bankrupt – how we once wanted to help them, how we once feared being victims of the same injustice? Now from our pedestal of optimum health, we ignore that the reform bans insurers from dropping coverage for the sick, prohibits denying coverage for preexisting conditions, and eradicates lifetime limits. We slump on our pedestal, lamenting how the reform will affect the healthy. Can we not see from our height – the old, the sick, and the poor?
Maybe with the new health care reform, we will want to help each other again.
The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Suphatra Laviolette and not of Marguerite Casey Foundation.
But these friends are not extremists. They identified with the tenets of liberalism — responsibility and empathy — but as middle class white collar workers, they were not immune to conservative fears of higher taxes and excessive government regulation. The media was saturated with such claims, claims that are frightening in a time of economic uncertainty. Fear makes us forget.
The American health care system was a child of World War II. During the war, the U.S. government capped wages to deter inflation, so private companies began luring workers with health insurance as a perk. By the time the war ended and the wage cap was rescinded, health insurance had become the standard to attract good workers, and thus America — quite accidentally — fell out of step with the rest of the industrialized nations that had already established universal health care by the 1940s.
Our market-driven health care system never made good on capitalism’s usual promise: that competition drives down costs and improves the quality of services and goods. Costs didn’t decrease with competition and eventually were the cause of 60 percent of the bankruptcies in the U.S. Quality of care paled in comparison to that in other developed nations; the life expectancy rate is 78.11 years in America, but 82.6 in Japan (did you know you’d actually live longer in Cuba than in America?). And don’t even try being a baby here; we have the worst infant mortality rate of all developed countries (Cuba trumps us in baby survival, too). To top it off – America actually spends the most on health care than all other members of the UN.
Health care never yielded the success of laissez-faire public policy typical for industries like entertainment and electronics. The World Health Organization notes this anomaly in its 2008 World Health Report: “Today, it is clear that left to their own devices, health systems do not gravitate naturally towards the goals of health for all through primary health care...Health systems are developing in directions that contribute little to equity and social justice and fail to get the best health outcomes for their money.”
The free-market U.S. health care system was not working. Do you remember how badly it was not working?
Christina Turner must remember. I found her story in The Huffington Post. The 45-year-old suspected drug-induced rape when she accepted a drink from two men at a bar and woke up hours later lying road side with cuts and bruises. Taking precautions, Turner took her doctor-prescribed month’s batch of anti-AIDS medicine. Now she is uninsurable. Insurers would not sell her a policy — telling her that maybe in a few years, they would reconsider if she could prove she was still AIDS-free.
It’s a dilemma many Americans faced: perverse insurance policies blocking access to affordable health care. Stories like Turner’s saturated the media only two years ago — but since the reform, the same media is suspicious of the change that was requested. Have we forgotten the Reuter’s investigation of insurance company Fortis?
Reuters reported that Fortis sought, found and targeted every policyholder who had contracted HIV and looked for any excuse for policy cancellation. In one case, Fortis used an obviously misdated handwritten note by a nurse, who wrote “2001” instead of “2002” to claim that the policyholder had concealed HIV as a preexisting condition. Fortis, now known as Assurant Health, made $150 million in profits alone between 2003 and 2007 by utilizing policy cancellation tactics.
And there is Mike Pyles, a 49-year-old man driven to homelessness by $230,000 in medical bills from his fight with renal cell cancer. Pyles lived out the statistic that every 30 seconds, an American goes bankrupt from medical bills.
Didn’t we used to rally at our dinner parties, denouncing the unfairness of the health care system? Instead, the epidemiologist asks me, “But if you use more health services—shouldn’t you pay more?” Bless his soul, but my friend’s innocent question is a kinder version of “Why should I pay for other people’s health? If you are the one sick, why should I pay for it?”
So I ask him, and the rest of America: “Why shouldn’t I help you? What’s so bad about you anyway that I cannot help pay for your health?”
Have we forgotten how our hearts went out to the millions of uninsured, to the bankrupt – how we once wanted to help them, how we once feared being victims of the same injustice? Now from our pedestal of optimum health, we ignore that the reform bans insurers from dropping coverage for the sick, prohibits denying coverage for preexisting conditions, and eradicates lifetime limits. We slump on our pedestal, lamenting how the reform will affect the healthy. Can we not see from our height – the old, the sick, and the poor?
Maybe with the new health care reform, we will want to help each other again.
The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Suphatra Laviolette and not of Marguerite Casey Foundation.
Friday, April 16, 2010
Grantees in the News: National Council of La Raza
Clarissa Martinez, immigration expert with National Council of La Raza (NCLR), was recently interviewed by Latino USA to discuss a new report criticizing a Homeland Security immigration enforcement program. The report found that the hotly contentious Immigration and Customs Enforcement's local enforcement program was disobeying its original agreements and lacking oversight of its officers.
NCLR, a think tank of applied research and policy analysis, is the largest national Hispanic civil rights and advocacy organization in America. Latino USA is an NPR distributed program that opens the doors of knowledge for Americans about Latinos, as well as educating Latinos about each other. You can hear it on your local National Public Radio station.
You can safely listen to the episode here.
NCLR, a think tank of applied research and policy analysis, is the largest national Hispanic civil rights and advocacy organization in America. Latino USA is an NPR distributed program that opens the doors of knowledge for Americans about Latinos, as well as educating Latinos about each other. You can hear it on your local National Public Radio station.You can safely listen to the episode here.
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