Youth of Color Demand Racial Justice in Gun Reform During #NationalSchoolWalkout
Youth of Color Demand Racial Justice in Gun Reform During #NationalSchoolWalkout
In the days leading up to today’s protest, young people of color released a petition that calls for gun reform and...
In the days leading up to today’s protest, young people of color released a petition that calls for gun reform and school safety measures that center racial justice. In the petition, which was signed by several social justice organizations including Advancement Project, American Federation of Teachers and Center for Popular Democracy...
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Charter schools misspend millions of Ohio tax dollars as efforts to police them are privatized
Akron Beacon Journal - 05.30.215 - No sector — not local governments, school districts, court systems, public...
Akron Beacon Journal - 05.30.215 - No sector — not local governments, school districts, court systems, public universities or hospitals — misspends tax dollars like charter schools in Ohio.
A Beacon Journal review of 4,263 audits released last year by State Auditor Dave Yost’s office indicates charter schools misspend public money nearly four times more often than any other type of taxpayer-funded agency.
Since 2001, state auditors have uncovered $27.3 million improperly spent by charter schools, many run by for-profit companies, enrolling thousands of children and producing academic results that rival .
And the extent of the misspending could be far higher.
That’s because Yost and his predecessors, unable to audit all charter schools with limited staffing and overwhelmed by the dramatic growth in the schools, have farmed out most charter-school audits to private accounting firms.
Last year, these private firms found misspending in one of the 200 audits of charter schools they conducted, or half of 1 percent, while the state’s own police force of auditors found misspending in one of six audits, or 17 percent of the time.
“You don’t even have to understand audits to know that something is broken there,” said Kyle Serrette, director of Education at the Center for Popular Democracy.
The Center for Popular Democracy, based in Washington, D.C., is allied with teachers unions that generally oppose privatization in public education.
released in April, the nonprofit watchdog detailed $200 million in waste, fraud and abuse in charter schools in Ohio and 14 other states.
Serrette said none of the 43 states with charter schools has created an accountability system designed to catch fraud. But Ohio has all of the telltale flaws, and more.
Because the money must first be spent, audits are conducted years after public funds go missing.
“[Financial] audits are historical. They’re not out in front of these things,” said Robert Hinkle, Ohio’s deputy state auditor.
And the audits, which note potential fraud but give no actionable opinion, aren’t designed to detect fraud. They merely check revenues against expenses, ensuring tax dollars going in match receipts and cash balances.
Often, though, the receipts are unavailable.
“You have a system in Ohio, and everywhere else, where every single year charter school operators are getting audited. And every single year, those audits come up clean. It’s because they are not set up to catch fraud waste and abuse,” Serrette said.
And finally, there has been a historical lack of political will to strengthen state law so auditors can delve more deeply into the private contracts that charter schools enter.
“Every year, state lawmakers fail to … take the evidence that [the media] is providing and change that into law that would improve the system,” Serrette said.
Of the 10 charter schools responsible for the most misspending, all but one closed. The money likely never will be retrieved.
What academic records remain of their last report cards show none scored higher than the lowest possible grade, though only two were shuttered by the state for poor academics. One voluntarily closed. The rest cited financial and contractual issues for closing.
Taxpayers high and dry
Ohio first employed private accounting firms to take over school audits about a decade ago as the number of charter schools swelled and budget cuts thinned the auditor’s staff.
Last year, private accountants audited 41 percent of the roughly 5,800 Ohio organizations that received taxpayer funds, and 54 percent of charter schools, according to Yost’s office.
While there were fewer than 400 charter schools among the 5,800, they accounted for 70 percent of all tax dollars found to be misspent, often intentionally and illegally, according to 14 years of audits reviewed by the Beacon Journal.
And the difference between state and private auditors was profound: For every $1 private auditors found to be misspent, state officials found $102 in their audits.
Most charter schools that misspent tax dollars folded for financial issues, and after six years of failure to make restitution, the state can no longer collect.
And so more than $25 million remains unpaid — and likely never will be.
The $27.3 million misspent since 2001 is only what the state knows about.
Charter school audits often cite “numerous” missing financial documents.
These documents — from receipts to contracts to bills — must be reviewed to ensure public funds are spent for a proper public use.
Last year, Yost declared financial records at five taxpayer-funded agencies too disorderly to audit; four were charter schools.
Audits privatized
Originally, all charter schools were audited by the state.
“We had to do all of them in house,” Hinkle said. “It’s just been within probably the [Auditor Mary] Taylor administration that, if we had some community schools that through prior audits have been fairly clean — again the issue is resources in a time when we were downsizing the number of employees — we allowed some contracting of community school audits.”
Today, networks of charter schools managed by the same private companies — among them Akron-based White Hat Management and Summit Academy Management — are bundled together and bid out to be audited year after year by the same private accounting firm.
The contracts usually last five years — longer than some charter schools are open. By bundling schools that employ the same treasurer (sometimes hired by the management company), there is greater efficiency because books are more uniform.
“It just makes sense for economy of scale, for the pricing we can get from the firms and also for the interest that we can get from a number of firms. If I send out one 80-hour [audit] job, I may not get as much interest as if I send out 10 of those jobs and it’s an 800-hour job,” Hinkle said.
The state pays around $41 per hour. Last year, REA & Associates, an accounting firm headquartered in New Philadelphia, conducted 111 of the 373 charter school audits, including nearly every audit on schools managed by White Hat and Summit Academy, the state’s largest operators.
Charting reform
Auditor Yost has taken notice of the misspending in the charter school sector, which nationally ranks low on academic performance and high on privatization.
Only Michigan and Texas have a greater portion of charter schools operated by private, for-profit companies, which are not compelled to disclose how they spend public money.
Sen. Peggy Lehner has proposed a bill that would require these private companies — which run most charter schools in Ohio — to give a more detailed account of how tax dollars are used. This heightened transparency in the auditing process was not included in charter school reform bills proposed earlier this year by the House and governor.
Yost worked with Lehner and a group of mostly charter-school advocates to draft the law change.
Meanwhile, the auditor is eyeing charter schools with what limited resources he has.
“We’ve already brought in a few of those audits,” Brittany Halpin, Yost’s spokesperson, said.
“[Yost] is considering bringing them all in,” she said.
Source: Ohio.com
“No hate in my holler” march is a window into West Virginia’s political divide
“No hate in my holler” march is a window into West Virginia’s political divide
When Jessica Shayan saw on Facebook that the national group CPD Action, a sister organization of the Center for Popular...
When Jessica Shayan saw on Facebook that the national group CPD Action, a sister organization of the Center for Popular Democracy, had planned a march to coincide with President Trump and House and Senate Republicans visiting the Greenbrier Resort for an annual policy retreat, she was alarmed.
Read the full article here.
Martin Luther King, institutions and power
Martin Luther King, institutions and power
Jared Bernstein, a former chief economist to Vice President Biden, is a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and...
Jared Bernstein, a former chief economist to Vice President Biden, is a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and author of the new book 'The Reconnection Agenda: Reuniting Growth and Prosperity.'
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. gestures during a speech at a Chicago Freedom Movement rally at Soldier Field in Chicago on July 10, 1966. (Afro American Newspapers/Gado/Getty Images)
When the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, he was in Memphis, supporting striking sanitation workers. By that time in his crusade for racial justice, he had elevated full employment to a key plank in his platform. The full name of the March on Washington was the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. A common placard held up that day read, “Civil Rights Plus Full Employment Equals Freedom,” a powerful economic equation indeed.
In my experience, too few people remember this aspect of King’s movement, instead emphasizing his stirring spiritual commitment to racial inclusion. But King was of course thoroughly versed in the reality of the institutional barriers blocking blacks and his unique genius was to combine deep spiritual awareness with an equally deep understanding of the role of power in economic outcomes. That’s one reason he was in Memphis, supporting the union.
In 1967, King called for “a radical redistribution of economic and political power.” He particularly understood the power, for better or worse, of American institutions, most notably of course, the institution of racism, which so successfully blocked African Americans from decent homes, jobs, schools and opportunities.
But countervailing institutions existed within his vision as well, including the church and the union, and, if it could be forced to live up to its promise, the government. Even the institutions of the consumer economy and the job market could, with the right force and strategy, including boycotts that flexed black consumer muscle and equal opportunity laws, be nudged in the direction of racial justice.
To some readers, this “institutional” framework may be confusing. What do I mean by referencing the consumer or job markets or racism or unions, as “institutions”? This certainly doesn’t square with the classic economic explanation of how the economy works: profit-maximizing individuals achieving optimal social welfare by each individual pursuing their goals.
The institutional framework, with its emphasis on historical, legal and cultural practices (norms) embedded in economic systems, stands in stark contrast to the market forces framework. Surely no one could question whether the legal system or the housing market black people faced in King’s time, not to mention our own, promoted objective, blind justice. Discrimination in schools, the economy, and almost every other walk of life could not and cannot possibly be viewed as a fair or merit-based system.
Honoring King’s vision and legacy thus requires not simply remembering his most well-known dream: a racially inclusive society very different from the one that existed in his, or sadly, our own time. It requires recognizing the need to redistribute the power from the oppressive, exclusionary institutions, many of the same ones — housing, schools, criminal justice, the economy — he fought for until the day he was taken from us.
What does honoring that vision mean today?
Although I certainly don’t advocate giving up on President-elect Donald Trump’s administration before it has started, all signs suggest that it and the Republican-led Congress will hurt, not help, the economically less advantaged. Republican budgets threaten to undermine the safety net, Trump’s proposed tax policy squanders fiscal resources on tax cuts for the rich, undermining opportunities for those stuck in places without adequate educational or employment opportunities. There’s talk among Republicans of trying to get more states to pass “right to work” laws that undermine unions and cut workers’ pay. Listening to Ben Carson’s hearing for secretary of housing and urban development quickly disabuses one of hope that he’ll tackle the legacy of segregated housing that remains a serious problem. As far as reforming the institutionalized racism the remains embedded in our criminal justice and policing systems, again, it’s awfully hard to be hopeful.
There are, however, many levels of institutional norms, laws and practices. The Fight for Fifteen has been immensely successful in raising minimum wages at the state and sub-state levels. I can’t prove this, but I’d bet that without Black Lives Matter, there would be no “blistering report” from the Justice Department on the racial practices of the Chicago Police Department. The activist group “Fed Up” has had great success elevating the issue of economic justice as regards Federal Reserve policy, a policy area that even liberal presidents have avoided getting into.
As I recently wrote regarding “ban the box,” a policy designed to give job-seekers with criminal records a fairer shot at employment:
Nineteen states and over 100 cities and counties have already taken similar action for government employees, and seven states (Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, Oregon and Rhode Island) plus Washington, DC and 26 cities and counties have extended ban the box policies to cover private employers. Some private businesses, including Walmart, Koch Industries, Target, Starbucks, Home Depot, and Bed, Bath & Beyond, have also adopted these policies on their own.
This last part about the private businesses is instructive. The Selma bus boycott was, of course, in no small part an economic action: Black people would not pay for discrimination. Regarding full employment, King realized that at high levels of unemployment, it’s costless to discriminate against a significant swath of potential workers. But when the job market tightens up, discriminating against a needed worker means leaving profit on the table.
Especially in the age of Trump, when so many Americans feel as if representative democracy is seriously on the ropes, it seems a no-brainer to channel King and once again tap the power of boycotts and leaning on businesses to do the right thing. It makes no sense at all to cede this field to Trump as he nonsensically claims (and gets) credit for job creation that already was happening.
My intuition is that many businesses, as in the ban-the-box example, would be willing to help push back on the institutional injustices that persist. Higher and more equal pay scales, implementation of the updated, higher overtime threshold that was wrongly blocked by a Texas judge (in fact, many businesses, to their credit, have gone ahead with this change), not blocking collective bargaining if their workers want to exercise that right, flexible scheduling policies that help parents balance work and family — there’s no reason for progressives not to fight for these ideas at the sub-national level and the private sector.
Although these sub-national fights are more likely where the action is for the next few years, meaningful action is developing at the national level as well. King would have easily recognized the Trump phenomenon as the work of exclusive institutions once again grabbing the power and would have organized accordingly and effectively. As we speak, many of us are trying to block the repeal of health-care reform in this spirit. The Indivisible Movement and the Women’s March would also have been highly familiar to Dr. King.
But on whatever level or in whatever sector the fight takes place, as we celebrate King’s indelible contributions, let us recall his understanding of power, the institutions that power supported and his admonitions to us not to rest until much more of that power lies in the hands of those who still command far too little of it.
By Jared Bernstein
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Fed's Kashkari says low inflation affords 'luxury' of low rates
Fed's Kashkari says low inflation affords 'luxury' of low rates
MINNEAPOLIS (Reuters) - Low inflation allows the Federal Reserve to keep U.S. interest rates lower for longer in order...
MINNEAPOLIS (Reuters) - Low inflation allows the Federal Reserve to keep U.S. interest rates lower for longer in order to boost the economy and jobs, a top Federal Reserve official said on Wednesday.
"If we can keep creating jobs while inflation is in check, let's do that," Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari said at a meeting with community activists and members of the black community in Minneapolis who were airing their concerns about low pay and high unemployment. "We can do our best to make the job market as strong as possible."
By KRITOFFER TIGUE, ANN SAPHIR, & DIANE CRAFT
Source
Ana Maria Archila On Confronting Jeff Flake
Ana Maria Archila On Confronting Jeff Flake
NPR's Lulu Garcia-Navarro talks with Ana Maria Archila of the Center for Popular Democracy about her widely-publicized...
NPR's Lulu Garcia-Navarro talks with Ana Maria Archila of the Center for Popular Democracy about her widely-publicized confrontation with Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona in a Capitol Hill elevator.
Listen to the interview here.
Hundreds of Activists Occupy the Capitol to Stop Trumpcare
Hundreds of Activists Occupy the Capitol to Stop Trumpcare
Hundreds of activists from around the country descended on Capitol Hill Wednesday to protest the GOP's latest assault...
Hundreds of activists from around the country descended on Capitol Hill Wednesday to protest the GOP's latest assault on health care and the Affordable Care Act. As Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell spent hours twisting senators' arms over lunch and secret meetings trying to whip up votes, nearly 300 Americans, including doctors, nurses, home health aides, and people with chronic conditions, occupied Republican senators' officers, demanding that their elected officials kill the Better Care Reconciliation Act and support a single-payer, Medicare-for-all health care system.
Read the full article here.
Charter Schools are Cheating Your Kids: New Report Reveals Massive Fraud, Mismanagement, Abuse
Salon - May 7, 2014, by Paul Rosenberg - Just in time for National Charter School Week, there’s a...
Salon - May 7, 2014, by Paul Rosenberg - Just in time for National Charter School Week, there’s a new report highlighting the predictable perils of turning education into a poorly regulated business. Titled “Charter School Vulnerabilities to Waste, Fraud and Abuse,” the report focused on 15 states representing large charter markets, out of the 42 states that have charter schools. Drawing on news reports, criminal complaints, regulatory findings, audits and other sources, it “found fraud, waste and abuse cases totaling over $100 million in losses to taxpayers,” but warned that due to inadequate oversight, “the fraud and mismanagement that has been uncovered thus far might be just the tip of the iceberg.”
While there are plenty of other troubling issues surrounding charter schools — from high rates of racial segregation, to their lackluster overall performance records, to questionable admission and expulsion practices — this report sets all those admittedly important issues aside to focus squarely on activity that appears it could be criminal, and arguably totally out of control. It does not even mention questions raised by sky-high salaries paid to some charter CEOs, such as 16 New York City charter school CEOs who earned more than the head of the city’s public school system in 2011-12. Crime, not greed, is the focus here.
In short, the report is about as apolitical as can be imagined: It is narrowly focused on a white-collar crime wave of staggering proportions, and what can be done about it within the existing framework of widespread charter schools.
The report, co-authored by the Center for Popular Democracy and Integrity in Education, makes the point that the problem of charter school waste, fraud and abuse, which it focuses on, is just one symptom of the underlying problem: inadequate regulation of charter schools. But it’s a massive symptom, which has so far received only fragmentary coverage.The report takes its title from a section of a report to Congress by the Department of Education’s Office of the Inspector General, a report that took note of “a steady increase in the number of charter school complaints” and warned that state level agencies were failing “to provide adequate oversight needed to ensure that Federal funds [were] properly used and accounted for.”
But, the report noted, it’s not just the federal government that should be concerned. Reform efforts are underway in several states; Hawaii even repealed its existing charter school law in 2013, and put strict new oversight measures in place, and “Even the Walton Family Foundation, an avid charter advocate, launched a $5 million campaign in 2012 to make oversight of charters schools more stringent.”
“We expected to find a fair amount of fraud when we began this project, but we did not expect to find over $100 million in taxpayer dollars lost,” said Kyle Serrette, the director of education justice at the Center for Popular Democracy. “That’s just in 15 states. And that figure fails to capture the real harm to children. Clearly, we should hit the pause button on charter expansion until there is a better oversight system in place to protect our children and our communities.”
The report explained that the problem has its roots in a historical disconnect between the original intentions that launched the charter school movement and the commercial forces that have overtaken it since. At first, the report noted:
Lawmakers created charter schools to allow educators to explore new methods and models of teaching. To allow this to happen, they exempted the schools from the vast majority of regulations governing the traditional public school system. The goal was to incubate innovations that could then be used to improve public schools. i The ability to take calculated risks with small populations of willing teachers, parents, and students was the original design. With so few people and schools involved, the risk to participants and the public was relatively low.
But the character of the movement has changed dramatically since then. As charter school growth has skyrocketed (doubling three times since 2000), “the risks are high and growing, while the benefits are less clear,” the report continued, adding:
This is not an uncommon occurrence in our nation’s history. In the past—in some cases, our very recent past—industries such as banking and lending have outgrown their respective regulatory safety nets. Without sufficient regulations to ensure true public accountability, incompetent and/or unethical individuals and firms can (and have) inflict great harm on communities.
The report found that “charter operator fraud and mismanagement is endemic to the vast majority of states that have passed a charter school law.” It organized the abuse into six basic categories, each of which is treated in its own section:
• Charter operators using public funds illegally for personal gain; • School revenue used to illegally support other charter operator businesses; • Mismanagement that puts children in actual or potential danger; • Charters illegally requesting public dollars for services not provided; • Charter operators illegally inflating enrollment to boost revenues; and, • Charter operators mismanaging public funds and schools.
Perhaps most disturbingly, under the first category, crooked charter school officials displayed a wide range of lavish, compulsive or tawdry tastes. Examples include:
• Joel Pourier, former CEO of Oh Day Aki Heart Charter School in Minnesota, who embezzled $1.38 million from 2003 to 2008. He used the money on houses, cars, and trips to strip clubs. Meanwhile, according to an article in the Star Tribune, the school “lacked funds for field trips, supplies, computers and textbooks.”
• Nicholas Trombetta, founder of the Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School is accused of diverting funds from it for his private purchases. He allegedly bought houses, a Florida Condominium and a $300,000 plane, hid income from the IRS, formed businesses that billed even though they had done no work, and took $550,000 in kickbacks for a laptop computer contract.
• A regular financial audit in 2009 of the Langston Hughes Academy in New Orleans uncovered theft of $660,000 by Kelly Thompson, the school’s business manager. Thompson admitted that from shortly after she assumed the position until she was fired 15 months later, she diverted funds to herself in order to support her gambling in local casinos.
Others spent their stolen money on everything from a pair of jet skis for $18,000 to combined receipts of $228 for cigarettes and beer, to over $30,000 on personal items from Lord & Taylor, Saks Fifth Avenue, Louis Vuitton, Coach and Tommy Hilfiger. But the real damage came from the theft of resources for children’s future.
“Our school system exists to serve students and enrich communities,” said Sabrina Stevens, executive director of Integrity in Education. “School funding is too scarce as it is; we can hardly afford to waste the resources we do have on people who would prioritize exotic vacations over school supplies or food for children. We also can’t continue to rely on the media or isolated whistle-blowers to identify these problems. We need to have rules in place that can systematically weed out incompetent or unscrupulous charter operators before they pose a risk to students and taxpayers.”
Stevens was not just expressing a nebulous hope. The report also offered a set of proposals on how to go about reining in the abuses. Initial suggestions on how to respond to each kind of abuse are presented in each of the six areas mentioned above, but there is also a comprehensive framework integrating them into a coherent whole.
The report’s first proposal is that all states should establish an oversight “Office of Charter Schools.” It “should have the statutory responsibility, authority, and resources to investigate fraud, waste, mismanagement and misconduct,” including the authority to refer findings for prosecution. It should have “an appropriate level of staffing” so that “The ratio of charter schools to full-time investigators employed by the Office should not exceed ten to one.” It should have the power to place distribution of charter school funds on hold. And it should have the authority to intervene in funding or other decisions made by charter authorizing entities if they are violating state or federal law.
A second proposal is that states amend their charter laws to “explicitly declare that charter schools are public schools, and are subject to the same non-discrimination and transparency requirements as are other publicly funded schools.”
A third proposal is to require public online availability of each charter school’s original application and charter agreement.
Not surprisingly, a number of proposals target those running charter schools. Specifically, regarding charter school governing board members, the report proposes: 1) Require them to live in close proximity to the school/s physical location. 2) Require boards to be elected “with representation of parents (elected by parents), teachers (elected by teachers) and in the case of high schools, students (elected by students).” Other board members should be “residents of the school district in which the school/s operate.” 3) Require board members to file full financial disclosure and conflict-of-interest reports, similar to those required of traditional school district board members — and post them online on the school’s website. 4) Hold board members legally liable for fraud or malfeasance occurring at the school or schools that they oversee.
More broadly, charter schools — and the oversight entities that authorize them — should be publicly transparent in the following ways: 1) A full list of each charter school’s governing board members, officers and administrators with affiliation and contact information should be available on the school’s website. 2) Minutes from governing board meetings, the school’s policies, and information about staff should be available on the school’s website. 3) Charter schools should be fully compliant with state open meetings/open records laws. 4) Charter school financial documents should be publicly disclosed annually, on the authorizer’s website, including detailed information about the use of both public and private funds by the school and its management entities. 5) Charter schools should be independently audited annually, with audits published on the school’s websites. 6) All vendor or service contracts over $25,000 should be fully disclosed. No such contracts should be allowed with any entity in which the school operator, or any board member, has any personal interest.
If most of these sound like simple common sense, that’s pretty much just the point. There are plenty of issues around education that are controversial. Protecting ourselves, our children and their future against a massive white-collar crime wave should not be one of them.
Source
Report: In MN, Jobless Rate for Blacks is Nearly 4 Times Higher than Whites
Bring Me the News - March 5, 2015, by Adam Uren - Minnesota has the third-highest unemployment gap between white and...
Bring Me the News - March 5, 2015, by Adam Uren - Minnesota has the third-highest unemployment gap between white and black people in the country – with the jobless rate among blacks almost four times higher than among whites.
The figures come from a new study by the Center for Popular Democracy, which shows that the unemployment rate in Minnesota among black resident is 3.7 times higher compared to white people.
This is second only to the District of Columbia (5.6 times) and Wisconsin (4.6 times).
The gap in Minnesota has lessened since 2007 however, when 3.85 times
It also found that the jobless rate among Hispanic people is more than two times greater than for white people.
A rally will be held Thursday, WCCO reports, which will “draw attention to the racial differences between wages and jobs available” in the Twin Cities and Minnesota as a whole.
It is being organized by representatives of Neighborhoods Organizing for Change (NOC), the Center for Popular Democracy and the Economy Policy Institute, and held at the NOC offices in W. Broadway Ave., Minneapolis, starting at 3 p.m.
Unemployment falling, gap still wide
The significant disparity between black and white unemployment remains, even though overall unemployment has dropped in recent years thanks to the recovery of Minnesota’s economy since the financial crisis.
The unemployment rate among black people across the state fell to 11.9 percent in 2014, compared to 15.4 per cent in 2007.
However, the rate among white people stood at just 3.2 percent in 2014, down from 4 percent in 2007. The report also found that the unemployment rate among Hispanics stood at 7 percent in 2014, almost the same as it was in 2007.
The unemployment gap is even worse in the metro area, with the graph above showing that the black unemployment rate is 3.89 times higher than white.
The report features a case study of 23-year-old Minneapolis resident Tyrone Raino, who told the Center for Popular Democracy the only full-time job he could find is 40 minutes outside the city, and he works there 40 hours a week while taking a further 20 hours of classes every week.
Disparity is nothing new
Minnesota regularly features among the worst states for racial unemployment gaps.
In 2013, Minnesota was second only to Wyoming according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Star Tribune reports, when the black unemployment rate was triple the white rate.
And in 2011, MPR reported on a study by the Economic Policy Institute, which found the Twin Cities along with Memphis had the biggest white-black unemployment gaps out of the nation’s 50 biggest metropolitan areas.
When The Atlantic ran a piece last month lauding the metro area for its winning mix of affordability, opportunity and wealth, several publications responded by highlighting the gaps that suggest not everything is rosy in the Twin Cities.
It’s not just with unemployment either. WalletHub found Minnesota has the second-worst wealth gap between white people and people of color in the United States, as well as one of the biggest gaps for home ownership levels.
Source
Listen to Death Cab for Cutie’s New Anti-Trump Song “Million Dollar Loan”
Listen to Death Cab for Cutie’s New Anti-Trump Song “Million Dollar Loan”
Last year, Death Cab for Cutie released the album Kintsugi. Today, the band have put out a new song called “Million...
Last year, Death Cab for Cutie released the album Kintsugi. Today, the band have put out a new song called “Million Dollar Loan,” along with its video, directed by Simian Design. The song targets Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, who famously said his father gave him $1 million to start his business dealings. It’s part of a new program called 30 Days, 30 Songs, created by writer Dave Eggers. Starting today until Election Day (Tuesday, November 8), there will be new songs each day from artists including My Morning Jacket’s Jim James, Aimee Mann, Thao Nguyen (of Thao & the Get Down Stay Down), and clipping. In addition, 30 Days will include an unreleased R.E.M. live song.
Below, listen to “Million Dollar Loan,” read Ben Gibbard’s statement on the track, and see the 30 Days, 30 Songs single artwork (featuring an eagle with Trump’s hair). Read 30 Days, 30 Songs’ mission statement here. All of 30 Days’ proceeds will go to the Center for Popular Democracy and their efforts toward Universal Voter Registration for all Americans.
Lyrically, “Million Dollar Loan” deals with a particularly tone deaf moment in Donald Trump’s ascent to the Republican nomination. While campaigning in New Hampshire last year, he attempted to cast himself as a self-made man by claiming he built his fortune with just a “small loan of a million dollars” from his father. Not only has this statement been proven to be wildly untrue, he was so flippant about it. It truly disgusted me. Donald Trump has repeatedly demonstrated that he is unworthy of the honor and responsibility of being President of the United States of America, and in no way, shape or form represents what this country truly stands for. He is beneath us.
By Matthew Strauss
Source
6 days ago
6 days ago