They started with nothing, worked tirelessly, saved every penny, pushed their kids hard in school and sent them straight into middle-class suburban bliss. American Dream realized. The end.
In a study commissioned by Health and Human Services, researchers analyzed youth growing up under tough circumstances, measuring them on a scale of “connectedness” to the labor market and education system.
At first glance, the data shows upward mobility among second-generation Latino youth. Latino youth (those with at least one immigrant parent) were more likely than their Black peers to be “consistently connected”--in school, working or both--and on par with whites.
[Editor's note: I've included Glenn Beck's piece on Van Jones above, in case you'd like to hear a narrator say 'green jobs' in a scary voice. I kid, but seriously: while we might see these as the obvious falsehoods that they are, a lot of people don't have the facts. It's up to us to get the truth in front of people. Thanks to Eva Paterson for permission to reprint her piece. -CK]
After smearing White House special advisor Van Jones for days on his show, Glenn Beck said on August 27, 2009: "I want to point out the silence; no one has challenged these facts — they just attack me personally."
Well, the White House is wise to stay above the fray but someone has to set the record straight. And as the person who first hired Van Jones, initially as a legal intern and later as a legal fellow, I am in a unique position to know the truth.
And the truth is: Beck is fabricating his facts.
For instance: several times on his show, Beck has said or implied that Van went to prison for taking part in the Rodney King riots.
NO CRIMINAL CONVICTIONS
Van has never served time in any prison. He has never been convicted of any crime. And just to be clear: Van was not even in Los Angeles during those tumultuous days.
I know because he was working for me - in San Francisco - when the four Los Angeles police officers were acquitted in the beating of Rodney King. I was the Executive Director of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area when Van was an intern.
The verdicts came down on April 29, 1992. I remember Van (who was then a legal intern working with me from Yale Law School) coming into my office in San Francisco. Many of us, including Van, sat there together, listening to the news and weeping. We were all in a state of shock. That night, TV showed the tragic images of LA burning.
The next day, when an initially peaceful march in downtown San Francisco devolved into chaos, Van left the area in tears. He was not involved in any destructive activity. He even penned an essay despairing of the violence and the state of the country.
So how can Beck make such unsubstantiated claims?
THE TRUE STORY (FROM SOMEONE WHO WAS THERE)
This is what really happened. On May 8, 1992, the week AFTER the Rodney King disturbances, I sent a staff attorney and Van out to be legal monitors at a peaceful march in San Francisco. The local police, perhaps understandably nervous, stopped the march and arrested hundreds of people – including all the legal monitors.
The matter was quickly sorted out; Van and my staff attorney were released within a few hours. All charges against them were dropped. Van was part of a successful class action lawsuit later; the City of San Francisco ultimately compensated him financially for his unjust arrest (a rare outcome).
So the unwarranted arrest at a peaceful march – for which the charges were dropped and for which Van was financially compensated – is the sole basis for the smear that he is some kind of dangerous criminal.
Van has spoken often about that difficult period 17 years ago - and its impact on him, as a young law student. But to imply that he was somehow a rioter who went to prison is absurd. Beck also bizarrely claims that Van was arrested in the Seattle WTO protests. That is just a flat-out falsehood.
You don’t have to take my word for it. Arrests and convictions are all a matter of public record. Beck is at best relying on internet rumors or even inventing claims to boost his ratings.
Beck is no more accurate with present facts than he is with past ones.
Last week, the world's central bankers got together for a little strategy session in Colorado, and declared that the recovery is on its way. This is the way it works with recessions. They ravage the world, leave millions hungry and homeless, and are eventually said to be 'over.'
For communities of color, 'recovery' can be a vapid term. People of color consistently face rates of unemployment higher than what whites experience in the worst recessions. Meanwhile, people of color in the labor market are pulling in wages of 60 cents for every dollar that white people earn. If this is what recovery is going to look like, we've got a problem.
In this video, community organizer Shaw San Liu of San Francisco's Chinese Progressive Association explains what the inequitable economy means for her community — before, during, and after the officially recognized recovery.
It's time we take seriously that some people are locked out from the onset and build a truly fair economy for everyone.
As the recession leaves millions of households barely getting by, crumbling local transit systems have made it a challenge just to get out the door.
Though the demand for public transit has soared amid the economic crisis, according to a report by the Transportation Equity Network and Transportation for America, "state, regional and local funding for more than 80 percent of U.S. transit systems has remained flat or has fallen lately, and nearly 90 percent of those systems have had to raise fares or cut service.” Boston and San Francisco residents, for example, may soon be paying about a third more per ride, which could cost a family hundreds of dollars more each year to get to work and school.
Heightening other socioeconomic barriers, the gutting of public transit especially impedes urban communities of color. About 60 percent of transit riders are people of color, many of them lacking access to a car. Likewise, immigrants who lack drivers licenses depend heavily on buses and subways. According to the report, “African-Americans are almost six times as likely as whites to take their trips by transit (5.3 percent vs. 0.9 percent) and Hispanics about three times more than whites (2.4 percent vs. 0.9 percent).”
Given the banking industry's growing reputation for bilking, cheating, and otherwise betraying naive borrowers, it's not surprising that a new bank account can be a tough sell in poor urban communities of color. So how should banks get the “underbanked” to trust them?
According to data released by the Pew Charitable Trusts, a relatively high percentage of Manhattanites are happy saving the old-fashioned way—stowing it away in their bedrooms or wiring it back to their home countries. And some folks just don't have enough spare cash to bother opening an account.
For people living paycheck-to-paycheck in the midst of the recession, the reluctance isn't unreasonable. In fact, it makes perfect sense in light of the fact that the economic crisis was fueled by institutions that capitalized on the most vulnerable borrowers. Add to that the long legacy of redlining, a pattern of racial and economic discrimination that keeps neighborhoods shut out of the mainstream financial system.
The trend is no longer attributable to a lack of bank branches, which moved state and city agencies and community groups to increase efforts in recent years to get banks to open in underserved and low-income areas. Now, New Yorkers are walking past banks and credit unions on the way to check cashers, according to Pew: 86 percent of licensed check cashers in Manhattan are situated less than four blocks from a bank or credit union.
When financial crisis hit, the California legislature didn't raise taxes, end tax giveaways, or cut corporate welfare. Instead, they cut services to the people made most vulnerable by the recession -- children, the elderly, the sick, victims of domestic violence, AIDS patients, and people just trying to get back to work. Now -- where could our legislature have learned their priorities? Too many movies? ColorLines' Darlene Pagano takes on the Governator in this new video.
Former California State Senator Sheila Kuehl has written an excellent essay detailing exactly who the cuts affect. Spoiler alert: it's not anyone who can bear the burden. Also check out this L.A. Times article that digs into the question of whether Schwarzenegger's last-minute vetoes were constitutional.
As Jonathan Yee notes in his analysis of the latest employment figures, the kind-of-less bad jobless numbers are shadowed by record rates of long-term unemployment. Those who have been out of work for 27 weeks or more has reached an all-time high, making up over one third of the unemployed. The National Employment Law Project warns that prospects are rapidly dimming for the half million workers who are within weeks of exhausting their federally-funded unemployment benefits, despite a temporary extension under the Recovery Act.
If past is prologue, chronic joblessness hits communities of color especially hard. According to a study by the Economic Policy Institute and NELP based on 2001-2004 data, Blacks made up 26 percent of the long-term unemployed, and Latinos made up over 13 percent. Long-term unemployment had grown for both groups since the early 1990s but had declined for whites. (And this is was during the relatively "good" times of the jobless recovery.) Today, as the manufacturing sector deteriorates, it's likely that Black auto industry workers—once a bulwark of blue-collar stability—will continue to bear some of the worst impacts of the recession.
