DOJ argues in court Texas Voter ID law could disenfranchise 1 in 10 voters

By Chris McGreal, The Guardian
Friday, July 13, 2012

The US department of justice has defended its ban of a Texas voter ID law by telling a federal court that the legislation is an attempt by the state’s largely white Republican party to resist the political impact of changing racial demographics.

A five-day hearing in Washington over whether the Obama administration has the power to block Texas from requiring voters to produce photo identification wrapped up on Friday with justice department lawyers strongly challenging the motives behind the legislation.

Texas says it is intended to combat a rising tide of voter fraud by requiring people to show specified forms of identification, such as a driving or gun licence, at the ballot box.

The justice department said the law was racially motivated because it was constructed by the Republican-controlled Texas legislature to disadvantage the growing Latino and black communities in the state which heavily favour the Democratic party.

The outcome of the case, expected in August, is likely to have an impact in other states where the justice department is challenging similar laws, including South Carolina, Mississippi, and Florida.

The issue is expected to end up before the supreme court.

An administration lawyer, Matthew Colangelo, told the court on Friday that as many as one in ten voters in Texas could be disenfranchised under the law because of the difficulties poor people face in getting the necessary identification, such as having to travel long distances or pay for copies of birth certificates. He said that was the intent of the law.

“Four million new people moved into Texas between 2000 and 2010. Ninety percent of those were minorities. Texas acted to take away that voting strength on the brink of that minority exercising it,” he said. “It was enacted against the backdrop of a huge explosive growth in the Hispanic population.”

The administration also contends that the costs involved in obtaining identification amount to a poll tax forbidden by the constitution.

A member of the Texas legislature, Trey Martinez Fischer, told the court that the voter ID bill was rushed through without proper debate using measures such as declaring it emergency legislation.

“There was a determined effort to pass this bill in record time,” said Martinez, who chairs the Mexican American Legislative Caucus.

Another Democratic legislator, Wendy Davis, said her attempts to introduce amendments to the legislation that would help voters obtain identification, such as making it available at every county courthouse so that voters did not have to make roundtrip journeys of up to 250 miles to special offices, were blocked by Republicans.

“The voter ID bill, we all believed, was a racially motivated bill,” she said.

Henry Flores, dean of St Mary’s University graduate school in San Antonio, said in evidence that the voter ID law was only the latest of scores of pieces of legislation in response to significant demographic changes over the past 40 years.

“It seemed to me that [the ID law] had been turned into an anti-immigration bill,” he told the court. “Race was at the heart of the whole thing.”

A California Institute of Technology professor, J. Morgan Kousser, told the court that Texas Republicans had been trying to push through a voter ID law since 2005 and that politics in the state is “very racially polarised”, with the state’s Democratic party now dominated by Latinos.

“In 2011, the vast majority of Democratic legislators are minorities. So a bill that has partisan effects would have racial effects,” he said.

The Obama administration blocked the law using a central piece of civil rights legislation, the 1965 voting rights act, which requires 16 states with a history of racially discriminatory laws and practices to clear all or some changes in voting laws and constituency boundaries with the justice department.

Texas brought this week’s legal challenge in federal court on the grounds that the justice department has no authority to apply the voting rights act because the voter ID law was motivated solely by an attempt to prevent fraud.

The state said up to 50,000 dead people remain on the electoral roll. But the justice department said there is little evidence of significant illegal voting and that the state has only prosecuted one case in recent times.

John Hughes, acting for Texas, derided the administration’s claim that as many as 1.5 million people who are registered to vote may not be able to.

“If that were remotely true the courtroom would be filled with people [without photo ID to vote],” he said. “It’s hard to find people who don’t have photo ID. Certainly the defendants didn’t find anyone.”

The justice department called only one witness who claimed to be directly affected by the law.
Victoria Rodriguez, 18, told the court that while her birth certificate and student ID were enough to permit her to board a plane, they wouldn’t be sufficient voter identification under the new law. Lawyers for the state told the court Rodriguez could obtain the necessary ID using her birth certificate.

Texas constructed part of its case around social science studies that he said show voter ID laws have no effect on voting, he said.

“Common sense is people who want to vote already have ID or can get one,” he said. “The evidence is that it is easy to get one in Texas and that’s why it won’t have a turnout impact.”
Daron Shaw, a University of Texas professor of political science, said his research in states that already have voter ID laws suggests few people are kept from the polls by the requirement.

“I think the weight of the evidence is that it will not have an impact on turnout,” he said.

The justice department challenged Shaw’s objectivity on the issue, eliciting from him that he worked as a political strategist on both of President George W Bush’s presidential campaigns.
Shaw’s research also came under scrutiny from other witnesses who challenged the methodology of the study including that only 2% of those asked whether the law would affect them had responded.

As the case was heard, the political confrontation continued in Texas where the attorney general, Eric Holder, told a conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) that the justice department “will not allow political pretexts to disenfranchise American citizens of their most precious right”.

Holder said that about one in four African Americans lacks government-issued photo identification of the kind required to vote in several states while fewer than one in ten white people do.

He said he opposed the Texas law because many people would have to travel too far to obtain the IDs, or would struggle to meet the cost of the necessary documentation.

The US supreme court in 2008 upheld the right of states to require voters to produce identification, but that case, involving Indiana, did not touch on the voting rights act.

Since then, 15 other states have passed laws requiring voters to show photo identification, although some of them offer alternatives. Texas has the most restrictive law.

How the War on Drugs Gave Birth to a Permanent American Undercaste

Tuesday, March 27, 2012 by TomDispatch.com
The New Jim Crow

by Michelle Alexander

Ever since Barack Obama lifted his right hand and took his oath of office, pledging to serve the United States as its 44th president, ordinary people and their leaders around the globe have been celebrating our nation’s “triumph over race.” Obama’s election has been touted as the final nail in the coffin of Jim Crow, the bookend placed on the history of racial caste in America.

Obama’s mere presence in the Oval Office is offered as proof that “the land of the free” has finally made good on its promise of equality. There’s an implicit yet undeniable message embedded in his appearance on the world stage: this is what freedom looks like; this is what democracy can do for you. If you are poor, marginalized, or relegated to an inferior caste, there is hope for you. Trust us. Trust our rules, laws, customs, and wars. You, too, can get to the promised land.

Perhaps greater lies have been told in the past century, but they can be counted on one hand. Racial caste is alive and well in America.

Most people don’t like it when I say this. It makes them angry. In the “era of colorblindness” there’s a nearly fanatical desire to cling to the myth that we as a nation have “moved beyond” race. Here are a few facts that run counter to that triumphant racial narrative:

• There are more African American adults under correctional control today -- in prison or jail, on probation or parole -- than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.
• As of 2004, more African American men were disenfranchised (due to felon disenfranchisement laws) than in 1870, the year the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, prohibiting laws that explicitly deny the right to vote on the basis of race.
• A black child born today is less likely to be raised by both parents than a black child born during slavery. The recent disintegration of the African American family is due in large part to the mass imprisonment of black fathers.
• If you take into account prisoners, a large majority of African American men in some urban areas have been labeled felons for life. (In the Chicago area, the figure is nearly 80%.) These men are part of a growing undercaste -- not class, caste -- permanently relegated, by law, to a second-class status. They can be denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries, and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education, and public benefits, much as their grandparents and great-grandparents were during the Jim Crow era.

Excuses for the Lockdown

There is, of course, a colorblind explanation for all this: crime rates. Our prison population has exploded from about 300,000 to more than 2 million in a few short decades, it is said, because of rampant crime. We’re told that the reason so many black and brown men find themselves behind bars and ushered into a permanent, second-class status is because they happen to be the bad guys.

The uncomfortable truth, however, is that crime rates do not explain the sudden and dramatic mass incarceration of African Americans during the past 30 years. Crime rates have fluctuated over the last few decades -- they are currently at historical lows -- but imprisonment rates have consistently soared. Quintupled, in fact. The main driver has been the War on Drugs. Drug offenses alone accounted for about two-thirds of the increase in the federal inmate population, and more than half of the increase in the state prison population between 1985 and 2000, the period of our prison system’s most dramatic expansion.

The drug war has been brutal -- complete with SWAT teams, tanks, bazookas, grenade launchers, and sweeps of entire neighborhoods -- but those who live in white communities have little clue to the devastation wrought. This war has been waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color, even though studies consistently show that people of all colors use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates. In fact, some studies indicate that white youth are significantly more likely to engage in illegal drug dealing than black youth. Any notion that drug use among African Americans is more severe or dangerous is belied by the data. White youth, for example, have about three times the number of drug-related visits to the emergency room as their African American counterparts.

That is not what you would guess, though, when entering our nation’s prisons and jails, overflowing as they are with black and brown drug offenders. In some states, African Americans comprise 80%-90% of all drug offenders sent to prison.

This is the point at which I am typically interrupted and reminded that black men have higher rates of violent crime. That’s why the drug war is waged in poor communities of color and not middle-class suburbs. Drug warriors are trying to get rid of those drug kingpins and violent offenders who make ghetto communities a living hell. It has nothing to do with race; it’s all about violent crime.

Again, not so. President Ronald Reagan officially declared the current drug war in 1982, when drug crime was declining, not rising. President Richard Nixon was the first to coin the term “a war on drugs,” but it was President Reagan who turned the rhetorical war into a literal one. From the outset, the war had relatively little to do with drug crime and much to do with racial politics. The drug war was part of a grand and highly successful Republican Party strategy of using racially coded political appeals on issues of crime and welfare to attract poor and working class white voters who were resentful of, and threatened by, desegregation, busing, and affirmative action. 

In the words of H.R. Haldeman, President Richard Nixon’s White House Chief of Staff: “[T]he whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.”

A few years after the drug war was announced, crack cocaine hit the streets of inner-city communities. The Reagan administration seized on this development with glee, hiring staff who were to be responsible for publicizing inner-city crack babies, crack mothers, crack whores, and drug-related violence. The goal was to make inner-city crack abuse and violence a media sensation, bolstering public support for the drug war which, it was hoped, would lead Congress to devote millions of dollars in additional funding to it.

The plan worked like a charm. For more than a decade, black drug dealers and users would be regulars in newspaper stories and would saturate the evening TV news. Congress and state legislatures nationwide would devote billions of dollars to the drug war and pass harsh mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes -- sentences longer than murderers receive in many countries. Another racially motivated factor is in the longer sentences imposed upon offenders charged with possession of crack cocaine (associated with blacks) vs. the lesser sentences for possession of powdered cocaine (associated with whites).

Democrats began competing with Republicans to prove that they could be even tougher on the dark-skinned pariahs. In President Bill Clinton’s boastful words, “I can be nicked a lot, but no one can say I’m soft on crime.” The facts bear him out. Clinton’s “tough on crime” policies resulted in the largest increase in federal and state prison inmates of any president in American history. But Clinton was not satisfied with exploding prison populations. He and the “New Democrats” championed legislation banning drug felons from public housing (no matter how minor the offense) and denying them basic public benefits, including food stamps, for life. Discrimination in virtually every aspect of political, economic, and social life is now perfectly legal, if you’ve been labeled a felon.

Facing Facts
But what about all those violent criminals and drug kingpins? Isn’t the drug war waged in ghetto communities because that’s where the violent offenders can be found? The answer is yes... in made-for-TV movies. In real life, the answer is no.

The drug war has never been focused on rooting out drug kingpins or violent offenders. Federal funding flows to those agencies that increase dramatically the volume of drug arrests, not the agencies most successful in bringing down the bosses. What gets rewarded in this war is sheer numbers of drug arrests. To make matters worse, federal drug forfeiture laws allow state and local law enforcement agencies to keep for their own use 80% of the cash, cars, and homes seized from drug suspects, thus granting law enforcement a direct monetary interest in the profitability of the drug market.

The results have been predictable: people of color rounded up en masse for relatively minor, non-violent drug offenses. In 2005, four out of five drug arrests were for possession, only one out of five for sales. Most people in state prison have no history of violence or even of significant selling activity. In fact, during the 1990s -- the period of the most dramatic expansion of the drug war -- nearly 80% of the increase in drug arrests was for marijuana possession, a drug generally considered less harmful than alcohol or tobacco and as prevalent in middle-class white communities as in the inner city.

In this way, a new racial undercaste has been created in an astonishingly short period of time -- a new Jim Crow system. Millions of people of color are now saddled with criminal records and legally denied the very rights that their parents and grandparents fought for and, in some cases, died for.

Affirmative action, though, has put a happy face on this racial reality. Seeing black people graduate from Harvard and Yale and become CEOs or corporate lawyers -- not to mention president of the United States -- causes us all to marvel at what a long way we’ve come.

Recent data shows, though, that much of black progress is a myth. In many respects, African Americans are doing no better than they were when Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated and uprisings swept inner cities across America. The black child poverty rate is actually higher now than it was then. Unemployment rates in black communities rival those in Third World countries. And that’s with affirmative action!

When we pull back the curtain and take a look at what our “colorblind” society creates without affirmative action, we see a familiar social, political, and economic structure: the structure of racial caste. The entrance into this new caste system can be found at the prison gate.

This is not Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream. This is not the promised land. The cyclical rebirth of caste in America is a recurring racial nightmare.

Wisconsin Voter ID Law Struck Down by Court

Wednesday, March 14, 2012 by Common Dreams
A Wisconsin law that requires voters present a photo ID when voting, was struck down by a Wisconsin Court today. Dane County Circuit Judge Richard Niess ruled that the law, signed by Walker in May of 2011, violated the Constitution.

"Without question, where it exists, voter fraud corrupts elections and undermines our form of government," wrote Niess in his decision. "The legislature and governor may certainly take aggressive action to prevent its occurrence. But voter fraud is no more poisonous to our democracy than voter suppression. Indeed, they are two heads on the monster."

Gov. Scott Walker said he would appeal the decision and vowed to continue to fight for a photo ID requirement in the voting booth.

* * *

From the Huffington Post.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) signed the voter ID bill into law in May, calling it a "common sense reform" that would "go a long way to protecting the integrity of elections in Wisconsin." 

"It’s a shame activist Dane County judges continue to stand in the way of common sense," said Cullen Werwie, a spokesman for Walker. "We are confident the state will prevail in its plan to implement photo ID." 

Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen (R) said he plans to appeal the decision. 

"In its rush to enact a Voter ID law, the Wisconsin Legislature failed to pay attention to the Wisconsin Constitution. Luckily, the League of Women Voters had the courage to stand up and defend the fundamental right to vote that our constitution guarantees," said Pines. "The proponents of Voter ID assert that it is meant to prevent fraud. We all know the truth: it is designed to suppress voting by poor people and students. Now, in Wisconsin, that will not happen." 

This is the second time in two days that such a law was struck down. Yesterday, a similar law in Texas was blocked by the Justice Department. Activists are hailing the curbing of these laws as a victory for minority communities that, many argue, would be disproportionately impacted by this kind of legislation.

Employers discriminate against long-term unemployed

By Andrew Jones - RAW Story
Monday, February 20, 2012

A number of long-term, unemployed people in Stamford, Connecticut revealed to CBS’ 60 Minutes how they have been discriminated by the job market for being out of work, resulting in questions as to whether they would be employed ever again.

“There’s no doubt,” worker Frank O’Neil told reporter Scott Pelley. “I mean, I’ve seen it in print, whether it’s some newspaper ads or online during those types of advertisements, I’ve actually seen, ‘If you are unemployed, you need not apply.’”

O’Neil added: “Just look at the web. You see the phrase everywhere: ‘Must be currently employed.’ Businesses can’t legally discriminate by age, race or sex, but there’s a new minority group now, the long term unemployed.”

Seeking assistance, the people interviewed by 60 Minutes turned to the state unemployment office for needed job training. Office president Joe Carbone expressed the psychological challenges of the unemployed people he’s encountered.

“The change is the mind,” Carbone said.
“That two years of unemployment erodes your self-confidence, your self-esteem. It separates you from your profession, your education, whatever you might have done previously. There’s all sorts of things. It causes divorces. It causes problems with children.”

Despite jobless claims reaching a four year low last week, there are still over 7.6 million people claiming unemployment benefits.

WATCH: Video from CBS, which was broadcast on February 19, 2012.

Who's Afraid To Hire The Jobless?

Unemployment Discrimination
8/11/11

WASHINGTON -- Job advertisements that require applicants to be "currently employed" are easy to find online. Yet attempts to trace the origins of such discriminatory job ads yield plenty of "It wasn't me" responses from the companies involved.

Many of the businesses insist they don't want to screen out the unemployed and blame the discriminatory language on the middlemen directly responsible for placing the ads.

Discrimination against people who are out of work is a phenomenon that's been in the news since last year, and lately it has been getting a lot more attention. Democrats in both chambers of Congress now want to make it a federal crime.

A recent report by the National Employment Law Project, a worker advocacy group, called out 73 businesses for asking in job postings that applicants be currently employed. "This perverse catch-22 is deepening our unemployment crisis by arbitrarily foreclosing job opportunities to many who are otherwise qualified for them," NELP said in the report.

The Huffington Post reached out to half the organizations cited in the report, and nineteen responded. While several staffing firms defended the ads, employers disavowed them, saying they'd been written by a person outside the company and that they were completely unaware of the language used.

For instance, a spokesperson for AIELLO Home Services, an HVAC company based in central Connecticut, said his company would never run a job ad that specified applicants should already have jobs.

"If you like to make money and have a flexible schedule, then a challenging and exciting opportunity awaits you," an online job ad for the company said. "And if you are currently employed, believe enough in yourself and your abilities to make a positive career move...you and your family will be glad you did." (The ad also specified: "NO prior industry experience required!")

After HuffPost forwarded the ad to the spokesperson, marketing manager Phil Clement, he looked into it and then said it was a mistake. "The ad is a pick-up from some consultant who has helped us in the past find sales people," said Clement. "The ad is even copyrighted by him. We've just put our address at the bottom and hoped to uncover one or two experienced sales people along the way."

Clement said his company has no policy against hiring the unemployed. "AIELLO simply wants to hire good people. There is absolutely no policy written or 'understood' that we will only recruit from the employed," Clement said, adding that he himself had been out of work for two months when the company hired him this year.

"As my own hiring should testify," Clement said, "AIELLO definitely hires the unemployed."

Some staffing firms, when questioned by reporters, are upfront about their intention to recruit only people who currently have jobs. Martin Recruiting Partners, a restaurant staffing agency based in Georgia, ran ads which stated candidates "Must be currently working & ready to move for the right reason."

George Seed, the company's vice president of operations, defended the policy.

"When my clients hire me, they want people who are motivated to go to work for the right reasons," Seed said. "And if someone is currently employed in a good position, then their motivation to move to a different company would be that the company offers better benefits or offers more growth for advancement, or whatever. They're not people who have to have a job, they're people who want to move for the right reasons."

Seed, along with representatives from four other staffing agencies listed in the NELP report, said many of his clients will only consider job applicants who are presently employed and claimed they had requested the language.

But when contacted by HuffPost, representatives from some of Martin Recruiting's clients denied having a policy against recruiting the unemployed.

"We hire people all the time that are not employed," said a representative from restaurant chain Golden Corral. "I can tell you that it's not part of our criteria that they be currently employed."

A representative from Cracker Barrel also said it has no policy excluding the unemployed from applying -- nor do they request that such language be included in job postings. A spokesperson for Wendy's, another client, said hiring decisions are made by franchisees and are usually done with local candidates.

When asked to comment on the fact that some of his clients said they did not wish to discriminate against the jobless, Seed did not respond.

NELP policy co-director Maurice Emsellem, who worked on the report, said hiring firms may be amplifying the anti-unemployed message. Emsellem said that since these agencies are one step removed from the hiring decision, they may feel less responsibility to remain open to all applicants.

"I don't think these big employers are saying to these big staffing agencies, 'Do me a favor: just don't send me anyone who's unemployed,' because it's contrary to their interest," Emsellem said. "If you're one day, two days unemployed, how does that make you ineligible for the job? It doesn't."

Roughly half of the companies named in the report were staffing agencies, and many of the ones HuffPost talked to passed responsibility for any discrimination to their clients, since the agencies don't make the hiring decisions themselves. Others defended the screening as legitimate.

Cypress Hospitality Group, a Florida-based staffing agency listed in the report, defended the ads it posted. "I don't see how 'current or very recent tenure' is discriminatory," a spokesperson said.

Express Employment Professionals, a staffing agency based out of Oklahoma City, listed an ad for a "reputable manufacturing firm" which sought a "motivated, self-directed full time receptionist" who was "currently employed."

In response to an inquiry about the NELP report, Express Employment said that the ad was not designed to discourage the unemployed, but to recruit people who will take the job seriously.

"We understand the impact the recession has had on today's workplace," the company said in a statement. "It has always been, and will always be, in our best interest to recruit from the unemployed, underemployed, or those looking for new opportunities. Unfortunately, some people mistakenly view job opportunities with staffing companies as short-term or temporary in nature. The ad in question was meant to define the job as long term. It was not intended to discourage unemployed job seekers."

Three companies said the ads cited by NELP were six months to a year old, but NELP said its review happened during a four-week period in March and April of 2011.

Several non-staffing companies named in the report disavowed the ads completely.

"We have no knowledge of the language [in the job postings]," said a representative for Allstate Insurance in Huntsville, Ala. "Perhaps for a part-time position, we have no problem hiring unemployed people. We actually receive state support to hire the unemployed."

Lakeshore Technical College, whose ad for a teaching job in Cleveland, Wis. called for a "currently employed" applicant, said that campus police officer was the only position for which they would require someone to be currently employed. Human resources director Kathy Kotajarvi explained that this is because of a policy with the local sheriff's department.

"The reason we said that is all our campus police have to be currently certified and employed by our local county sheriff's department," Kotajarvi said. "The sheriff has to certify them, and if they're not currently employed he will not certify them."

Lakeshore Technical College has a large number of unemployed workers who enroll in classes there trying to get retrained. Kotajarvi also said she knows they've hired several people who were unemployed in recent months.

"We hire unemployed persons for student help positions. We serve the dislocated workers, we understand what their needs are," Kotajarvi said. "We would never discriminate against anyone who's unemployed."

The report cited a Craigslist ad for Knight Transportation, a truckload company, that said candidates should be "currently employed" if they did not meet other background and experience criteria, such as 12 months of on-the-road experience in the past five years. A spokesman for Knight told HuffPost they consider all applicants on a case-by-case basis and that current employment is not a requirement.

Though the practice of restricting hiring to only those who are currently employed is legal under federal law, a NELP-commissioned survey, conducted last month by polling firm Hart Research Associates, found that 80 percent of of respondents felt discriminating against the unemployed was "very unfair. Ten percent called it "somewhat unfair."

The survey also found that 63 percent of respondents would support a law "making it illegal for companies to refuse to hire or consider a qualified job applicant solely because the person is currently unemployed."

Unlike race or gender, unemployment is not a protected status in most of the country because it has the ability to change. Helen Norton, associate professor at the University of Colorado School of Law, testified earlier this year before the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that discriminating by employment status would only be illegal if it is done to screen out a group like older workers, workers with disabilities, or minorities.

Yet at that same hearing, William Spriggs, assistant secretary for policy at the U.S. Department of Labor, pointed out that because blacks and Latinos have a higher unemployment rate, discrimination against the unemployed could disproportionately affect those groups.

"When employers exclude the unemployed from the applicant pool, they are likely to be excluding Latinos and African-Americans," Spriggs said.

In April, it became illegal in the state of New Jersey to use language in ads that discriminated against unemployed people, though lawmakers did not explicitly ban the practice of refusing to hire those who are jobless.

On July 12, Reps. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) and Henry Johnson, Jr. (D-Ga.) introduced the Fair Employment Opportunity Act of 2011. The legislation, if enacted, would prohibit employers and employment agencies from refusing to consider job applicants solely because they are unemployed. (Since that sort of discrimination is difficult to prove, employers would likely retain the ability to discriminate against the jobless, at least covertly.) Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) introduced the same bill in the Senate last week.

"Losing your job through no fault of your own should never disqualify you from finding a new job," Gillibrand said.

Employers Are Screening Out The Long-Term Unemployed.

 Will We Need Legislation To Protect Them?

By Susie Madrak 

 

If the economy ever does bounce back, we're still going to have to deal with all the ways employers will find to discriminate against the long-term unemployed. As I've written, when I was a recruiter during the 2000 recession, this was a real roadblock and getting all these Americans back will probably require protective legislation:

From an employer's standpoint, however, there could be some legitimate reasons for not hiring the unemployed, Morse said.

"For any particular position in this dour economy, there are thousands of applicants," he said. "People are looking for a way to narrow the field. They have pressure to put the best team on the field."

On top of employers' perceptions of unemployed workers, many long-term jobless applicants lose self-confidence and hurt themselves walking into the interview already beaten, said Karl Ahlrichs, a human-relations consultant at Gregory & Appel in Indianapolis.

"There can be a lot of comfort in playing the victim," he said. "But it's quickly picked up by the employer that that might carry through if you get hired."

On the other hand, if the candidates go in and point out the positives of long-term unemployment, it can work to their advantage.

"The people that are currently working are pretty burned out. They have been over-tasked and under-motivated and scared for a long time and their reserves are probably pretty far down," Ahlrichs said. "Somebody coming off the bench will be fresher."

Sitting the bench, however, hasn't proved to be a positive for Henri Shenter. Since losing his job in construction sales 15 months ago, Shenter has been turned down for jobs nearly 50 times.

He's looking for another sales job and at 35 has 15 years experience, but as soon as they see his last date of employment, he said, it's over.

"They throw it in the trash," said Shenter, of Greenwood. "There is absolute discrimination going on."

Whether that discrimination is legal is up for debate.

"An employer that discriminates against the unemployed risks legal action," said Michael Blickman, partner in the labor and employment group at Ice Miller, adding he is unaware of any legal precedent.

The candidate could argue that filing for unemployment is a statutory right and that an employer's policy not to hire the unemployed unjustly interferes with that right.
Morse disagrees, arguing that the unemployed are not among the categories protected by discrimination laws.

"The mere fact of you being unemployed for a period of time is not a protected characteristic," he said. Categories like age, race and gender are.

Still, a company like PMG Indiana that recently ran an ad for a production assistant that read: "Must have worked in the previous 12 months," walks a fine line, Blickman said.

"An employer should ensure that it has a solid business justification if it adopts that kind of policy or practice," he said. "The employer also risks the loss of good will among its own employees, customers and the public with this kind of policy."

How Wal-Mart Is Terrorizing the Country With its Corporate 'Personhood'

If Wal-Mart is a person, as per the Supreme Court, it's a behemoth terrorizing the countryside. But when it comes to workers' rights, it remains curiously immune from lawsuits.
By Barbara Ehrenreich, The American Prospect
Posted on April 29, 2011

What is Wal-Mart -- in a strictly taxonomic sense, that is? Based on size alone, it would be easy to confuse it with a nation: In 2002, its annual revenue was equal to or exceeded that of all but 22 recognized nation-states. Or, if all its employees -- 1.4 million in the U.S. alone -- were to gather in one place, you might think you were looking at a major city. But there is also the possibility that Wal-Mart and other planet-spanning, centi-billion-dollar enterprises are not mere aggregations of people at all. They may be independent life-forms -- a species of super-organisms.

This, anyway, seems to be the takeaway from the 2010 Citizens United decision, in which the Supreme Court, in a frenzy of anthropomorphism, ruled that corporations are actually persons and therefore entitled to freedom of speech and the right to make unlimited campaign contributions. You may object that the notion of personhood had already been degraded beyond recognition by its extension, in the minds of pro-life thinkers, to individual cells such as zygotes. But the court must have reasoned that it would be discriminatory to let size enter into the determination of personhood: If a microscopic cell can be a person, then why not a brontosaurus, a tsunami, or a multinational corporation?

But Wal-Mart's defense against a class action charging the company with discrimination against its female employees -- Dukes v. Wal-Mart -- throws an entirely new light on the biology of large corporations. The company argues that with "7 divisions, 41 regions, 3400 stores and over one million employees" (in the U.S., as of 2004, when the suit was first launched), it is "impossible" for any small group of plaintiffs to adequately represent a "class" in the legal sense. What with all those divisions, regions, and stores, the experiences of individual employees are just too variable to allow for a meaningful "class" to arise. Wal-Mart, in other words, is too big, too multifaceted and diverse, to be sued.

So if Wal-Mart is indeed a person, it is a person without a central nervous system, or at least without central control of its various body parts. There exist such persons, I admit -- whose brains have lost command over their voluntary muscles -- but they are in a tiny minority. Surely, when the Supreme Court declared that corporations were persons, it did not mean to say "persons with advanced neuromuscular degenerative diseases."

For those who have never visited more than one Wal-Mart store, let me point out that the company is not a congeries of boutiques run by egotistical retailing divas. True, there are detectable differences between stores. Some feature Wal-Mart's indigenous "Radio Grill," famed for its popcorn chicken; others offer McDonald's or Subway. But other than that, every detail, from personnel policies to floor layout, is dictated by corporate headquarters in Bentonville.

An example: In 2000, I worked for three weeks in the ladies' wear department of a Wal-Mart in Minnesota. (Full disclosure: This makes me part of the class now suing Wal-Mart for sex discrimination, though the possibility of an eventual payout in the high two-figure range has not, I think, influenced my judgment on these matters.) In the course of my work, I made a number of sensible suggestions to my supervisor -- for example, that the plus-size women's jeans not be displayed at what was practically floor-level, where plus-size women could not reach them without requiring assistance to regain altitude. Good idea, my supervisor said, but it was up to Bentonville to determine where the jeans, like all other items, resided.

Much has changed since my tenure at Wal-Mart. The company has struggled to upgrade its image from sweatshop to a green and healthful version of Target. It has vowed to promote more women. But one thing it hasn't done, as far as anyone knows, is to reconfigure itself as an anarchist collective. Bentonville still rules absolutely, over both store managers and "associates," which is the winsome Wal-Mart term for its chronically underpaid workers, some of whom report that they are still being forced to work off the clock, for no pay at all, just as I found in 2000.

So if Wal-Mart is a life-form, it is an unclassifiable one, at least in ordinary terrestrial terms. It eats, devouring acre after acre and town after town. It grows without limit, sometimes assuming new names -- Walmex in Mexico, Asda in the U.K. -- to trick the unwary. Yet in its defense in the Dukes v. Wal-Mart suit, Wal-Mart claims to have no idea what it's doing. This could be a metaphor for capitalism or perhaps a sign that a successful alien invasion is in progress. The only thing that's for sure is, should the Supreme Court decide in favor of Wal-Mart, we'll have a lot more of these creatures running around: monstrously oversized "persons" who insist that they can't control their own actions.

'Dual System': Minorities Lose Financial Ground, Critics Say

(Leaving behind whole sectors of the population based on race and income disparity will be what destroys this country, inevitably. You cannot expect to advance as a society when you leave whole chunks of the population behind.--jef)

++++++++

Tuesday, April 5, 2011 by USA Today
by Christine Dugas

After making big financial gains in recent decades, African Americans and Hispanics are again losing ground, critics say.

Rather than blaming the lingering effects of the recession, a growing number of reports point to financial discrimination as a major cause.

"Communities of color have received the worst treatment at a very high cost," says Michael Calhoun, president of the Center for Responsible Lending (CRL). "We estimate 20% of African-American and Hispanic homeowners will lose their homes in this housing crisis," more than twice as high as white households.

Homeownership is the primary engine of wealth, but the housing slump only partly explains the growing gap affecting minority families, says John Taylor, CEO of National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC).

"It's about a dual system of finance," he says. "People of color do not have the same access that most American citizens enjoy."

While most consumers are able to go to a full-service bank branch that offers an array of competitively priced products and services, minorities are disproportionately forced to go to payday lenders, pawnshops and high-cost mortgage lenders, Taylor says.

Those who live in minority neighborhoods — even middle-income families whose high credit scores could qualify them for a prime loan — are likely to be steered into a subprime loan, says Hilary Shelton, NAACP's senior vice president for advocacy and policy.

Josephine Wiles-Warner didn't think that she would become a subprime casualty statistic when she bought a home in Herndon, Va., in 2000 as she sought to provide security and good schools for her family.

"That is what this nation is about," says Warner, 57, a single working mother who is raising five adopted children while she pursued dual graduate degrees in project management and information systems.

She had needed to refinance her mortgage when she took time off from work in 2006 to go to Liberia for her mother's funeral. Countrywide Financial offered her a subprime loan that Warner later found out she couldn't afford.

When Countrywide was close to filing for bankruptcy protection, another lender took over her loan, and her payments continued to spiral out of control until she got a foreclosure notice.

Getting pushed back

"She had faith in the process, but she was qualified for a loan that she could not afford," says Mani Fierro, a real estate and bankruptcy attorney in Herndon who assisted Warner but does not represent her. Many minorities have become victims of mortgage lenders who are interested only in getting the biggest commission, he says.

Fierro suggested Warner find a buyer for a short sale, where the home is sold for less than the mortgage balance and prevents a foreclosure. He put her in touch with Robert Chavez, a Realtor, who purchased the home and now rents it to Warner and her family.

"They were my guardian angels," says Warner, who hopes to eventually buy back the home.

Cases like that show how minority communities are being pushed back to where they were 25 or 30 years ago, Calhoun says.

It is a reminder of redlining, a practice that grabbed much attention in the 1990s, where whole minority neighborhoods were excluded from banking and insurance services, as though the financial community had drawn a red line around areas where it didn't want to do business.

Regulators tried to stamp out redlining by using the Community Reinvestment Act and public access of mortgage data through the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act to help more minorities become homeowners.

Those "were major and effective tools in helping to open the doors of opportunities," says Shelton, but over time, regulatory oversight has loosened.

Now, minorities face what is sometimes called reverse redlining, Taylor says. Instead of financial services companies avoiding minority neighborhoods, the industry targets them with more-expensive and more-abusive products.

Other signs that minorities are losing financial ground:

• In December, the NCRC said that too many of the largest lenders in the FHA loan program refused to provide conventional loans to consumers with credit scores between 580 and 640, even though that violated FHA policy. It said that has had a disparate impact on communities of color.

Last May, a study compiled by seven non-profit groups including the Chicago-based Woodstock Institute, also found that from 2006 to 2008, the overall share of conventional prime mortgage lending in communities of color fell 35%, while the share of loans to predominantly white neighborhoods increased 11%.

• Minorities are much more likely to be unbanked and underbanked, which are households that have a checking or savings account but rely on alternative financial services, such as payday loans. In January 2009, 54% of black households and 43.3% of Hispanics were either unbanked or underbanked, compared with 25.6% of U.S. households, according to a survey by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

• Only 16% of people who overdraw their accounts paid 71% of all overdraft fees, but they were more likely to be minorities and low-income consumers, according to a 2006 and 2008 study by the CRL.

Excessive overdraft fees are a major reason why consumers close bank accounts and leave the banking system, according to a 2008 Harvard study.

• People of color are more likely to be payday borrowers, and a typical borrower pays back $800 for a $300 loan, says the CRL. In California, minorities represent 56% of payday borrowers but make up just 35% of the population, a 2008 CRL report said.

Marginal profitabilty

Many financial experts say that African Americans and Hispanics tend to get subprime loans or rely on check-cashing businesses, payday lenders and pawnshops because of job loss and low income.

They also say that banks do not ignore minority neighborhoods.

"The penetration of banks throughout the communities has continued to grow," says Wayne Abernathy, executive vice president at the American Bankers Association. "Many bank branches are very marginal in terms of profitability, but we maintain them anyway to reach out to populations."

Meanwhile, regulators are taking steps:

• The FDIC tried to address payday lending by creating a two-year, small-dollar loan pilot program with 28 volunteer banks. When it ended last summer, the banks had made more than 34,400 loans with a principal balance of $40.2 million, the FDIC said.

• The Department of Justice created a fair lending unit in January 2010. In March 2010, it reached a $6.1 million settlement with two AIG subsidiaries after a lawsuit alleged AIG charged African-American borrowers higher fees.

• The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau opens its doors in July.

The agency's Elizabeth Warren has said it will target one type of fee that has hit minorities so hard.

"Warren has indicated that overdraft fees are a major problem … that she wants to address," says the CRL's Calhoun.

The EEOC Looks At Job Discrimination Against Unemployed

By Susie Madrak  | February 22, 2011

 

It's about time someone in this administration noticed. Now what are they going to do about it?

As the Fed updated its forecast last week, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission held a forum on discrimination against unemployed job seekers. Members of Congress had urged the commission to explore the issue, after reading press reports of numerous instances in which employers and staffing agencies refused to consider the unemployed for openings.

The message — “the unemployed need not apply” — has at times been explicitly stated in job announcements. In other cases, unemployed job seekers have reported verbal rejections after a recruiter or employer learned they were not currently working.

One of the questions for the E.E.O.C. is whether excluding unemployed applicants is illegal. Jobless workers are not specifically protected by antidiscrimination laws, but various laws outlaw hiring bias on the basis of sex, race, national origin, religion, age and disability. Since African-Americans, older workers — especially older women — and disabled workers have been hit particularly hard in the downturn, discriminating against unemployed people in those groups may violate the law.

Take African-American workers. They make up 12 percent of the work force, but 20 percent of the unemployed. Even college-educated black Americans are far more likely than their white peers to be unemployed.

Another question for the E.E.O.C. is whether it is acceptable for employers to use current employment as a proxy for relevant experience, or as an expedient to screen applicants. Testimony at the forum by Helen Norton, associate professor at the University of Colorado Law School, rebutted those and other possible justifications. Current employment is not relevant to jobs that provide on-the-job training. And even for jobs that require up-to-date skills, an interview or a test would be a more accurate and less discriminatory way to evaluate a candidate’s qualifications.

Simply excluding unemployed workers also excludes candidates who may have been employed until recently as well as those who have used a period of unemployment to receive additional training or education.

Some Fight Back

Joe Bageant's "Rainbow Pie"
By MICHAEL DONNELLY

Q: How do you know if you are rich, middle class or poor in America?

A: When you go to work, if your name is on the building - you’re rich; if your name is on an office door – you’re middle class; if your name is on your shirt - you're poor…and, if someone else’s name is on your hand-me-down work shirt…?

You always hear about natural-born musicians,artists, teachers, nurses, even businessmen. But what happened to the natural-born farmer and extended farm family when the rural-to-urban migration saw us go from 92% of Americans making their living (and dying) on the land in 1900 to around 2% today? What happened to the natural sense of community that engendered - that "we're all in it together," culture we now long for? And, what about America's supposedly classless society? How's that working out for ya?

Here’s a new book that answers these questions and more.

The Shower Line

Nobody writes about Class in America and about America’s unacknowledged Class War like Joe Bageant. Dubbed the “Sartre of Appalachia” by Jeffrey St. Clair, Joe writes about America’s largest, yet invisible to most, class – 60 million poor, undereducated white laborers. These are the folks who as Joe notes are on the other side of “the shower line” – those who pull off their sweaty work clothes and take their showers after their back-breaking day’s physical labor as opposed to those who shower and dress far more finely before heading off to work.

Joe’s first book, “Deer Hunting with Jesus” introduced us to many of these salt-of-the-earth folks and explained the whys and wherefores of their rather self-defeating worldview. In his latest book, a memoir cum polemic, “Rainbow Pie, A Redneck Memoir,” Bageant delves into the origins – his own and that of the 60 million others existing on the hidden side of the great shower line.

Joe’s memoir begins in 1951 at grandparents Maw and Pap’s small farm along Shanghai (it’s an Irish term) Road in Morgan County, West Virginia. Like many a homestead along the Blue Ridge Mountains, it was a multi-generational subsistence farm (“the farm was not a business”) that had been the norm in America before the great corporate-driven rural-to-urban shift that coincided with the end of World War Two.

Joe’s childhood days “Over Home” were whiled away on the usual attendant chores, hand-picking bugs off garden crops, watching Pap plow fields behind his draught horse or hand-harvest the large cornfield, sweating away with the adults during the all-hands-on-deck haying and wood cutting, helping with the late Autumn hog butchering, dodging the ever-present snakes and bullying older cousins and hunting with the adults or developing future hunting skills plinking holes in a broken metal bucket set on a fencepost.

A Multi-faceted American Tragedy

For the Christian teetotaler Pap - who likely never brought in more than $1000 in any given year - freedom “resided in yeoman property rights” – the Jeffersonian ideal of an Agrarian Democracy. No one in Maw and Pap's hard-working extended family ever went hungry or homeless. As Joe notes, this rural system of subsistence farming and barter right up the great rural-to-urban migration was “an economy whose currency was the human calorie.”

And, that’s what this book is all about: the post WWII shift from Maw and Pap’s Agrarian Democracy to the urban-dominated/techno/bureaucratic/military/security/consumer Empire of today. He writes how that shift and the resulting class stratification has led us to the brink of economic and ecological collapse.

Joe notes: “Damn few of us grasp how the loss of traditional aesthetic and foundational values, the yeoman tradition, are connected with so much modern American tragedy.”

The rush to “agri-business;” the obesity/diabetes health crisis; the out-migration to teeming cities; the resulting army of disposable laborers; the meth epidemic devastating the “white working-class’s futureless young”…all are tragedies personal and political. It’s also the root of our ecological crisis. You just can’t have “ten thousand years of agriculture synthesized into money” without it. Joe posits, “In all likelihood, there is no solution for environmental destruction that does not first require a healing of the damage done to the human community.”

“Lunchpails and Laptops”

Joe traces the family’s urban migration and the series of laborer jobs Daddy took on to support the family once they moved to town. Weekends saw the clan come Over Home and engage in the activities they always had before, especially gardening, canning and hunting. By Joe’s sixth grade, the family was bouncing around from one rental to another; the large family meals of Down Home replaced by Swanson’s TV dinners when available, and “coffee bread” – white bread soaked in coffee - when times were toughest.

Just as he did in Deer Hunting, Joe presents a thorough explanation of who “Mama’s People” are: poor, unattractive, alcoholic (or teetotaler), anti-Black, violent, petty criminal, third grade-educated, Christian Fundamentalist, NASCAR-loving, Scots-Irish Rednecks whose misfortunes inspire a litany of country songs. Joe deftly explains how these folks are manipulated into serving as "bullet magnets" for endless Imperial wars and as shock troops for the mean-spirited "conservative" ideology that convulses American society today. Yet, he never demeans anyone. "Polite” society does enough of that. Joe just sticks to the facts.

As if society’s disapproval wasn’t enough, Joe explains how the corporatization of all things American coupled with a surplus of expendable heavy laborers has led to a “Culture of Shame.” Not only are Mama's People the scapegoats of the educated classes, such folks beat themselves up and desperately try to hide their roots. That’s the ugly truth about Chamber of Commence propaganda that declares that one only has value if they are producing goods for someone else's profit or are part “of the middle class commissariat.” These "truths" and the "nothing prevents anyone from being the next Horatio Alger" myth are bought by people who then bemoan their predicament as "my own damn fault." Many, like Bageant's Daddy, simply recast their personal histories as a "Leave it to Beaver" happy fantasy. That kind of shaming has always kept the peasantry in line.

Joe developed an unlikely appetite for reading. He escaped the usual high school bullies by retreating to the Library. Eventually he parlayed that love of books into knowledge that allowed him to get one step out of the permanent underclass he so lovingly writes about. He can write about it so well, cuz he never really left. Joe went through a series of working class jobs, just like his kin. He suffers the same work-related and diet-caused ailments.

“The Few Can Indeed Screw the Many”

The small multi-generational family farm was over by the mid-60s. By then, 22 million Americans had traveled the corporate-delineated one-way path from farm-to-city as America went from agrarian to consumer society. Once Joe's generation of children of those who left the farms passes on, memories of what we once had will be lost, just as hundreds of years of hard-won intricate knowledge of place was lost in the great migration - gone irretrievably in less than 50 years. A society where the top 1% control 45% of the income and an even larger share of the wealth and where 67% are counting on Social Security for their entire retirement income is a class society by definition...and screwed.

Some Fight Back

But people do fight on: people in Chiapas are taking it on; folks in Joe’s backyard - Christian greens - are fighting the crime of mountaintop-removal coal extraction; some two billion or so worldwide still do multi-generational agriculture on small plots…if they survive the same, inexorable corporatiztion (see, Monsanto), they'll be in better shape when it all comes tumbling down.

These days, many educated, far more wealthy children a couple generations removed from the great shift engage in magical thinking escapism. (On some level who can blame them?) Some who do see what's coming just retreat into an "it's beyond fixing" paralysis. Yet, I’m encouraged that this last weekend while I was finishing Rainbow Pie, I met some young folks who are engaged in small-scale farming in the Blue Mountains out here in the NW. One told me she did it because “I like it. Always have. And, it sure seems like it'll be a useful skill after the collapse.”

Two days later an environmental activist friend told me and my Wilderness First Responder buddy Tim that she was thinking of getting a nursing degree because “I figure it'll come in handy after the collapse.” (My New Age friends would call this a whole lot of "synchronicity.")

Even if it's likely to be way worse than either - or any of us - envisions, their heads and hearts sure are in the right place. And, to their ever-lasting credit, they're living the sanest response and they are not letting the bastards get their day, too.

“When Empires Die; They Die Broke”

Yep. Some folks are rising above the national denial and preparing for the economic and ecological shit-storm - the first squalls of which we are now battening down against. But, as Joe notes, we’re pretty unlikely to make a dent in the underlying causes if we continue to deny the existence of our massive, permanent underclass. We’re unlikely to dent it without an extensive, improbable multi-generational investment towards a just society. That would take years and trillions of dollars which just aren't there; squandered on Imperial follies and sequestered in the holdings of that top 1% - virtually all of whom have multiple overseas hide-outs (see- Bush/Paraguay).

Continued denial of this ruling class-driven Apocalypse is deadly and immoral. Bageant notes that as the American class denial he has dedicated his life to shedding light upon continues…"we deny the one truth held in common by every enlightened civilization: we are our brother's keepers.”

Like “Deer Hunting with Jesus,”“Rainbow Pie” should be a required college Sociology text. I recommend people purchase and read both books , starting in order with "Deer Hunting with Jesus."

Down Home may well be Done With. But, Joe Bageant has done a great service gleaning some sobering truths out of the ashes of America's abandonment of agrarian democracy. If there is a future, historians then will scoff at the fabricated “truths” of the Chamber of Commerce propaganda network and look to Rainbow Pie and the collective works of Joe Bageant for a faithful, authentic explanation of just how it all went wrong.

Google & Verizon's Evil Plan Is Really Bad News for Regular Internet Users

If we wake up one day to an Internet that has a carpool lane for the upper class, it's worth thinking about the alternatives.
By Scott Thill, AlterNet
Posted on August 25, 2010

The firestorm over tech giant Google and telco titan Verizon's self-interested proposal to arbitrarily codify a pay-to-play Internet will dominate the news in the coming months, as net neutrality steps onto a mainstream media stage crowded with Muslim mosques and other distracting fodder. But now that other telcos like warrantless wiretapper AT&T have quickly endorsed Googlezon's proposal, it was left to Jon Stewart on a recent episode of the Daily Show to sum up the mammoth migraine awaiting us all: "We're fucked."

My colleague Ryan Singel at Wired had a similar take, calling the one-time staunch net neutrality defender Google a "carrier-humping net neutrality surrender monkey." Both assessments are dead-on: By giving up its previous commitment to open networks and devices in both the wireline and the wireless space, Google -- arguably the most powerful tech company in the world -- has simply cashed in its neutrality chips, nearly fully compromised "Don't Be Evil" corporate philosophy, and screwed us all. The irony is that the Internet we've become used to over the last couple decades has made Google and Verizon powerhouses in the first place.

"The Internet and communications industries are in the same category as the energy, transport and finance industries: for they are the lifeblood of commerce and speech in this nation," said Columbia Law School copyright and communications professor Tim Wu, whose 2003 paper "Network Neutrality, Broadband Discrimination" helped shape the network neutrality issue. "Just consider the power and public role of firms like Verizon or Google (especially if they work together). Sitting atop the web, they can influence what firms succeed or fail -- by making sites load faster or slower, or end up on page 10 of search results. It goes further -- in subtle ways, the information carriers have the power to influence elections and even censor speech they don't like."

The ramifications of allowing dumb-pipe telcos like AT&T, Comcast, Verizon and others to instead provide tiered services -- with the so-called "public Internet," no doubt slowed to a crawl, firmly stashed at the bottom of that traffic hierarchy -- is simply insane. It would be like your city allowing businesses, local and otherwise, to determine which blocks of your homeward commute become toll roads. Sure, one road would be spared in the interest of the public good, and it would be claustrophobically crowded with anyone and everyone who decided against paying the toll because of economic hardship, because of philosophical disagreement, because of whatever.

"The greatest danger of the fast lane is that it completely changes competition on the net," Wu explained in a New York Times roundtable on Google and Verizon's sweetheart deal. "The advantage goes not to the firm that's actually the best, but the one that makes the best deal with AT&T, Verizon, or Comcast. Had there been a two-tier Internet in 1995, likely, Barnes and Noble would have destroyed Amazon, Microsoft Search would have beaten out Google, Skype would have never gotten started -- the list goes on and on. We'd all be the losers."

Or as IO9's Annalee Newitz put it: "Googlezon has succeeded in creating a caste system in the online world, and the public is the lowest caste of all." Cue Jon Stewart's disturbing truth. No laugh track please.

But is there an option available to the public, other than pressuring Federal Communications Commission chairman Julius Genachowski to join his FCC colleagues Michael Copps and Mignon Clyburn -- as well as level-headed politicians like Al Franken, Alan Grayson and others -- in their efforts to reclassify broadband as a communications service, a political no-brainer if there ever was one? After all, the FCC has already filed a plan to do just that, but has yet to move on it, although with Copps, Clyburn and Genachowski on board it has the needed votes. It seems the easiest place to start, although Grayson has rightly complained that the whole debacle "doesn't inspire confidence that the FCC can hold the line against telecom and cable companies, when those companies have something else in mind."

Because of this collusion -- empowered by an April federal court ruling, spearheaded by Clinton-appointed judge David S. Tatel, declaring that the FCC lacks Internet regulatory authority and needs specific permission from Congress to get it -- open-spectrum and other utopian proponents and are hamstrung by cold, economic reality. Tatel's pointed barb that FCC and congressional "policy proposals" about network neutrality or regulatory authority "are just that -- statements of policy…not delegations of regulatory authority" was a not-subtle reminder that the FCC's only play is to get Congress to step up and give it the power it pretends it has. But instead of doing just that, Genachowski has wasted time diving back and forth between the boardrooms of Microsoft, AT&T and other heavyweights to forge a corporate consensus. But feel his pain: Congress couldn't pass a football in the name of the public good these days. Getting them to agree that the FCC should be able to regulate AT&T's management of its networks -- after asking the company to spy like crazy on Americans -- is beyond a non-starter.

As Google and Verizon made clear in their proposal, emboldening a publicly engineered alternative wireless Internet is going to be hard to do when indispensably well-meaning spectrum reformers like Gigi Sohn and Laurie Racine's nonprofit Public Knowledge are counting on both telco goodwill and congressional power. Public Knowledge's first principles on open spectrum demands that "bidders for half of the spectrum to make access to that spectrum available to third parties at wholesale rates" and respect consumers' "right to use any equipment, content, application or service on a non-discriminatory basis without interference." Good luck enforcing that without FCC regulatory authority.

Everything comes down to parsing the signals. At last report, more than half of current wifi hotspots are free; a 12 percent increase from the first quarter of 2010. A comparative deluge of broadband-enabled devices are on the way, a thankful development for those who are tired of having to connect their DVD players, sound systems, television, computers and phone with nearly obsolete cables. The logical pattern leads forward into a future littered with free, fast Internet connections, right? Wrong.

In the absence of neutral, enforceable legislation, who controls the spectrum controls the wireless world. And right now, the spectrum is seen as a revenue stream by the FCC: The controversial 2008 spectrum auction raised nearly $20 billion from the usual suspects like Verizon and AT&T, who carved up America's wireless empire for themselves and left crumbs for the rest. (Proceeds from the auction, according to the FCC, were transferred to the U.S. Treasury to be used for the nation's digital television transition efforts, but given Treasury's economic malfeasance, who knows where that $20 billion went?) And the throttling wasn't far behind: Earlier this year, Genachowski proposed the "Mobile Future Auction" in an effort to encourage television broadcasters to stop hoarding unused spectrum, which is what monopolies routinely do when they own it.

"The highly valuable spectrum currently allocated for broadcast television is not being used efficiently," Genachowski said. "Indeed, much is not being used at all."

Freeing up that wireless, radio, television and microwave spectrum, whether through voter initiative or anti-capitalist hacking, should be the prime objective of any net neutrality advocate or official. Even nationalization shouldn't be off the table; in fact, it should probably be at the head of it. Because it is pure folly to rely on corporations looking to carve the Internet into variously monetized thoroughfares to provide unrestricted access, although the airwaves belong to the same public it has been fleecing for decades.

As civilization as we know it fully enters the wireless 21st century, setting aside net neutrality provisions only for the wireline world, as Google and Verizon have proposed, is both like naming technocratic educational downsizing No Child Left Behind and actually expecting it to work. Without a government-sponsored open spectrum available without restriction to the public, which can also choose become a living broadcaster in its own right, net neutrality will remain but a theory in search of an application.

Even if the FCC decides to reclassify broadband, we have already learned from the evolution of the communications industry that, when left unregulated, it trends toward consolidation and complexity rather than diversification and simplicity. We are in the early stages of the 21st century with what seems like unlimited capacity, pardon the pun, for tremendous connectivity and capitalization. But instead we're watching the same corporations squeeze us dry of options and alternatives. And until advances in multi-node mesh networking and similarly minded wireless workarounds put the lie to mounting warnings of a suspicious spectrum crunch, we're left with the usual options: Crawl up Congress' lazy ass and make net neutrality more important than Muslim mosque controversies, or economically punish service and content providers like AT&T, Verizon and Google for their selfish behavior. (Killing off redundant landline and wireless accounts would be a good start.)

Google already got the message after publicly selling out its corporate slogan "Don't Be Evil," while Verizon got a pass because everyone already knows telcos are evil incarnate. But pressure must be kept on Google, telcos, the FCC and the Obama administration to make net neutrality an election issue. Otherwise, we're all going to wake up one day and find that the internet has a carpool lane for the upper class, and we're not invited unless we're willing to cough up our cash and our principles.

States May Ban Credit Checks For Job Applicants

Any sort of non-criminal &/or civil history should be excluded from background checks for non-money handling jobs

States May Ban Credit Checks For Job Applicants
By Susie Madrak Friday Mar 05, 2010 4:00pm

Doing credit checks for jobs that don't give applicants access to money is not only a stupid thing, it's de facto discrimination based on class. The people who crashed the economy still have great credit records, while the people whose lives were ruined are the ones to bear yet another burden as a result. People shouldn't have to wait for state legislation - this should be a national law that flat out forbids the practice:

ANNAPOLIS, Md. – It's hard enough to find a job in this economy, and now some people are facing another hurdle: Potential employers are holding their credit histories against them.

Sixty percent of employers recently surveyed by the Society for Human Resources Management said they run credit checks on at least some job applicants, compared with 42 percent in a somewhat similar survey in 2006.

Employers say such checks give them valuable information about an applicant's honesty and sense of responsibility. But lawmakers in at least 16 states from South Carolina to Oregon have proposed outlawing most credit checks, saying the practice traps people in debt because their past financial problems prevent them from finding work.

[...] "If somebody is trying to get a job as a truck driver or a trainer in a gym, what does your credit history have to do with your ability to do that job?" Hixson said. He said he knows of no research that shows a person with a bad credit history is going to perform poorly.

Under federal law, prospective employers must get written permission from applicants to run a credit check on them. But consumer advocates say most job applicants do not feel they are in a position to say no.