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Showing posts with label Minority Citizens. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Minority Citizens. Show all posts
Sunday, April 15, 2012
Friday, September 16, 2011
Mayor Bloomberg Shutting Out Black Business Owners? Seems That Way! NOT Cool!
The Last Holdouts in the Neighborhood
LOUIS SAVARESE, the son and grandson of butchers, was raised to know the difference between a rib-eye roast and a cross-rib roast, but he is the first in his family to appreciate the finer points of cow hooves and chicken feet.
The Savarese family has run Michael’s Prime Meats on Nostrand Avenue in Flatbush, Brooklyn, since 1931. As the neighborhood changed from a mix of Irish, Jewish and Italian families to a solidly Caribbean enclave, the fare has changed as well.
“Forty years ago, we wouldn’t have a cow foot,” Mr. Savarese said, pointing to a bucket of them. Goat meat, oxtail, Jamaican curry powder — these are the gradual changes that have allowed Michael’s to stay open as so many of its neighbors have closed to make way for wig stores and West Indian bakeries. “We’re the last one,” Mr. Savarese said, slicing into a side of beef.
In a city where Jewish neighborhoods turn Puerto Rican, then African and then something else, Mr. Savarese belongs to the sparse ranks of holdouts who have held firm amid the city’s churn, even as newcomers have remade the streets around them. They dig in for many reasons: love of place, loyalty, optimism or sheer stubbornness. Nostalgia grounds some; inertia others. But all of them can still imagine, as they look out on their reshaped blocks, the neighbors and businesses that left decades ago.
At Michael’s, a woman carrying two shopping bags pushed open the door on a recent afternoon and asked, in a Caribbean lilt, for the price of the oxtail. It was $6.29 a pound, she was told. “Lord have mercy,” she said, backing out the door.
Mr. Savarese’s disparate tribe of holdouts includes an Irish bar owner in Brooklyn’s version of Chinatown, an artist hanging on in a zone of shoppers and tourists, and a drum maker who still creates them by hand. Taken together, they offer a twist on New York’s famous promise of reinvention. Theirs are stories of staying put.
“I call it the diehard effect,” said Joseph J. Salvo, the director of the population division of the Department of City Planning. “There are people who will not leave. Irrespective of the change that is occurring, they regard that as their home.”
“The smaller the number gets,” Mr. Salvo added, “the stronger the diehard effect.”
ONCE upon a time — actually, about 40 years ago — two brothers from Ireland bought two popular bars in Brooklyn, where longshoremen and firefighters played darts and bought their friends round after round. The families still own the bars, and the brothers, if they were still alive, would recognize much about them: shamrock posters, weathered dartboards, old men nursing morning beers.
But thanks to New York’s fickle demographic tides, the two bars have found themselves in very different worlds, with very different fortunes.
The Soccer Tavern, in Sunset Park, has flourished, adopted by the Chinese community around it. Meanwhile, the Lief Erickson in Bay Ridge — its name a vestige of the Norwegians who settled in the neighborhood — is languishing amid a growing population of Arabs who frown on alcohol.
“Chinese people drink,” said Julie Walsh, owner of the Lief Erickson, which sat nearly empty on a recent afternoon. “If every Middle Easterner around here would be spending money, the place would be booming.”
Over in Sunset Park, the changes are impossible to miss. Census data show that the area’s Irish population fell by half, to about 1,347, from 1980 to 2009, while the number of Chinese grew more than tenfold, to over 26,000.
But even more striking evidence can be found among the dart trophies that line the back wall opposite Jimmy Gillick, daytime bartender and keeper of the house corned-beef-hash recipe. A scratched plaque from the NYC Dart League lists the champions for 1998-99: Farley, Luno, O’Sullivan, Connolly, Hennessy, Price.
The winter 2009 trophy: Mei, Chan, Zhu, Manczuk, Farley.
“When we walk into other bars, they say, ‘Here comes the Chirish team,’ ” Brendan Farley, the bar’s owner, said in a thick brogue.
Other changes have crept in. A Chinese calendar hangs on the wall. Chinese New Year is one of the bar’s biggest nights. On Christmas, the tavern hosts an international pot luck dinner; the Chinese regulars bring in a whole roasted pig, and Mr. Gillick cooks up his hash.
Irish or Chinese, his customers speak a common language of tipped glasses and back slaps. In their own dive-bar way, they have broadened one another’s worlds.
“I didn’t even know what bok choy was,” said John Bleszcz, a retired city sanitation worker, sitting at the bar the other morning.
“It’s a mild cabbage,” answered Steve Constantin, a few stools down. “Or a mild radish.”
About a mile away, Mr. Farley’s cousin, Ms. Walsh, waited for customers, who rarely trickle in from the nearby mosques, halal butchers and hookah shops.
“We got them, and they don’t drink and they put people like me out of business,” she said. “That’s what happens.”
WHEN Ivy Brown moved into a fourth-floor loft in the meatpacking district of Manhattan in 1985, the blocks around her building were a desolate precinct of transvestite prostitutes, sex clubs and slaughterhouses.
“Nobody lived here,” Ms. Brown, 49, said. “It was nasty. It was gritty. It was gross.”
Friends and family were afraid to visit her apartment, on Hudson Street near 14th Street. Her electricity was spotty. But over the years, this self-described “nice Jewish girl” grew to love her adopted neighborhood, where she cycled through 17 roommates and was free to make art and, eventually, open a gallery that she still operates in her living room.
She gave her old dresses to the prostitutes, who made sure she got home safe. She befriended the bouncers and stopped eating meat, even if she grew to almost like the smell of animal blood. She was home.
But Ms. Brown, a birdlike woman with a pixie haircut, stylish glasses and always-moving hands, has spent the past decade watching her neighborhood slowly vanish. “Things start to disappear,” she said. “We lost the laundromat and the shoemaker and the hardware store.”
What was once the Locker Room, a sex club where patrons checked their clothes at the door, is now a cosmopolitan bar with pressed-tin ceilings. J’s Hangout, a gay club in her building into which men used to vanish for days, is now a splashy Mexican restaurant with blaring dance music and tacos that cost $18. Stretch Hummers and off-duty bankers have replaced the meat trucks and swingers. The Whitney Museum of American Art is moving nearby.
Ms. Brown said she used to feel as if she were living in a surreal movie. From her window, she could see butchers “in white coats covered in blood, warming their hands over fires in oil cans as pig carcasses are flying by.”
Now she has a view of the Apple store, where lines wind around the block whenever a new gadget is released. “I’m used to seeing some things outside,” she said, “but not white people in sleeping bags.”
She has become something of a hero to stalwarts; a blog dedicated to “Vanishing New York” has cataloged her memories. She has thought about moving, but not seriously; her rent-stabilized apartment and its 18 windows would be impossible to match.
Ms. Brown pines for the old days — “I cannot believe I miss that stench!” — but she understands the futility of New York nostalgia. “If you embrace this city, you have to embrace the fact that it’s not going to stay the same,” she said.
Instead, she is waiting for the neighborhood to change again. “Somewhere else is going to be the area, and everyone will go there,” she said.
And until then, she added, “I’m still holding on.”
AT this year’s Miss Norway competition in Bay Ridge, only 2 of the 13 contestants were from Brooklyn. They both lost.
A generation ago, not only would the entire slate have hailed from the borough, but most would probably have been from the Bay Ridge neighborhood, the hub for Norwegians in New York, said Arlene Rutuelo, a pageant organizer who doubles as the neighborhood’s de facto cultural ambassador.
Ms. Rutuelo and her mother, Helene Bakke, run Nordic Delicacies, a business that has become much more than just a shop for cod liver oil and lingonberry jam.
As the neighborhood’s Norwegian-American population plummeted, to 1,135 from a high of tens of thousands around World War II, according to the most recent census estimates, and nearly every other Norwegian business in Bay Ridge closed, Nordic Delicacies became a Scandinavian clearinghouse. People call requesting recipes for dishes their grandmothers used to make. They ask for the date of the annual parade, and for the phone number of the Swedish Consulate. So many people asked for souvenirs that Ms. Rutuelo set aside a counter, next to the cold cuts, for miniature flags and traditional Scandinavian troll dolls.
“We’re the official Norwegian information center,” she said.
When the store opened in 1987, the plan was for Ms. Bakke to cook the head cheese and salted lamb rib, using recipes from her childhood in Kvinesdal, Norway, and for Ms. Rutuelo to run the business. Bay Ridge “was a Norwegian village,” Ms. Rutuelo recalled. “Every business you could think of had a Norwegian.”
Today, her neighbors include a falafel shop, a sushi bar, two Polish diners, a Russian bodega, a Mexican grocery and an Indian restaurant.
On a recent afternoon, a customer walked into Nordic Delicacies and eyed the pickled herring, next to the fish balls in brine, before settling on the pea soup.
“I wouldn’t have thought 25 years ago that we would be the last one left,” Ms. Bakke said. “I never would have imagined.”
IN Cali Rivera’s workshop in the South Bronx, layers of smoke and grime that are older than his grandchildren cover the heaps of jumbled tools he has used to make countless drums of every pitch and size for more than 40 years.
His business, J. C. R. Percussion, has stayed open year after year despite pressure from all sides. Development around the new Yankee Stadium threatened to push him out, but he stayed firm — and rooted for the Mets. When rents rose and old neighbors left, he dug in even deeper.
But his lifelong battle extends beyond the borders of Highbridge, a neighborhood of bodegas and fried-plantain shops, to the economy of cookie-cutter factories, outsourced labor and even modernity itself. In an era when youngsters play the drums on iPhone apps and pop music is made on laptops, Mr. Rivera, hunched over a welder’s flame in a smoke-filled closet, is a holdout against time.
“Everything you see here, I put it together,” he said, surrounded by cowbells, bongos and faded photographs tacked to the wall. “It was created by me!”
Most of his competitors have their drums made in factories overseas, but Mr. Rivera’s instruments are made in his basement workshop, where his assistant clatters and bangs to a blaring salsa soundtrack.
“If you don’t do it by hand, it doesn’t go coo-coo,” Mr. Rivera said, smacking a cowbell he made that morning. “It goes blegh-blegh.”
The neighborhood has changed as many Puerto Ricans have left, to be replaced by Dominicans, Mexicans and Africans. But new neighbors have made for new customers. Downstairs, Mr. Rivera’s assistant worked one day on a set of Ashiko drums for an African musician.
“I’m not going to be rich, never,” Mr. Rivera, 61, said. “But it satisfies me.”
His spit-and-sweat operation seems galaxies away from 21st-century New York. His drumheads, stored in a bathroom, are the stretched skins of mules and goats from Venezuela. To loosen them up, he soaks the skins in a bucket in another bathroom, beneath the urinal.
Mr. Rivera starts most sentences with a curse word and ends them with a wheezy laugh. His stoop serves as a local clubhouse where men drink beer and tell jokes in Spanish.
Mr. Rivera was born in Puerto Rico and came to Highbridge in the late 1950s. He began making cowbells in his apartment, then switched to a studio on Ogden Avenue. He took over his current space, once an Irish bar, about two decades ago.
Business has been slow lately, and his daughter has been nagging him to give up the shop. But orders still come in, and customers still stop by to play the timbales and discuss salsa.
“This is the only place I got,” Mr. Rivera said. “This is what made me happy. We’ll keep banging.”
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Sources: Black Economic Advocacy Party, NY Times, Youtube, Google Maps
Thursday, July 14, 2011
Bachmann: "Poor Minorities Responsible For Economic Crisis" (Videos)
Sources: C-Span, Fox News, MSNBC, Youtube
GOP Spending Cuts Hurts Poor Black People Most: Two Americas!
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Them That’s Not Shall Lose
“Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.”
James Baldwin penned that line more than 50 years ago, but it seems particularly prescient today, if in a different manner than its original intent.
Baldwin was referring to the poor being consistently overcharged for inferior goods. But I’ve always considered that sentence in the context of the extreme psychological toll of poverty, for it is in that way that I, too, know well how expensive it is to be poor.
I know the feel of thick calluses on the bottom of shoeless feet. I know the bite of the cold breeze that slithers through a drafty house. I know the weight of constant worry over not having enough to fill a belly or fight an illness.
It is in that context that I am forced to assume that if Washington politicians ever knew the sting of poverty then they have long since vanquished the memory. How else to qualify their positions? In fact, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, nearly half of all members of Congress are millionaires, and between 2008 and 2009, when most Americans were feeling the brunt of the recession, the personal wealth of members of Congress collectively increased by more than 16 percent. Must be nice.
Poverty is brutal, consuming and unforgiving. It strikes at the soul.
You defend yourself with hope, hard work and, for some, a helping hand. But these weapons grow dull in an economy on the verge of atrophy, in a job market tilting ever more toward the top and in a political environment that would sacrifice the weak to the wealthy.
On Thursday, the Pew Research Center released a poll that showed how disillusioned low-income people have become. Those making less than $30,000 were the most likely to expect to be laid off or be asked to take a pay cut. Furthermore, they were the most likely to say that they had trouble getting or paying for medical care and paying the rent or mortgage.
But at least those numbers include people with incomes. A vast subset is chronically unemployed and desperately searching for work. According to the Consumer Reports Employment Index, “In 23 of the past 24 months, lower-income Americans have lost more jobs than they have gained.” It continues, “Meanwhile, more affluent Americans seem to be gaining more jobs than they are losing.”
And the current election-cycle obsession to balance the books with a pound of flesh, which is being pushed by pitiless Republicans and accommodated by pitiful Democrats, will only multiply the pain.
Until more politicians understand — or remember — what it means to be poor in this country, we are destined to fail the least among us, and all of us will pay a heavy price for that failure.
Sources: ABC News, Fox News, HLN, MSNBC, NY Times, Youtube
Sunday, July 10, 2011
Black-Owned Businesses Remedy For High Black Unemployment (Video)
Sources: Black Enterprise, CNN, Myspace.com
Obama's High Black Unemployment Crisis May Hurt Dems In 2012
Blacks' economic gains wiped out in downturn
Growing up black in the segregated 1960s, Deborah Goldring slept two to a bed, got evicted from apartment after apartment, and watched her stepfather climb utility poles to turn their disconnected lights back on. Yet Goldring pulled herself out of poverty and earned a middle-class life — until the Great Recession.
First, Goldring's husband fell ill, and they drained savings to pay for nursing homes before he died. Then Goldring lost her executive assistant job in the Baltimore hospital where she had worked for 17 years. The cruelest blow was a letter from the bank, intending to foreclose on her home of almost three decades.
Millions of Americans endured similar financial calamities in the recession. But for Goldring and many others in the black community, where unemployment is still rising, job loss has knocked them out of the middle class and back into poverty. Some even see a historic reversal of hard-won economic gains that took black people decades to achieve.
Goldring remembers her mother taping the blinds to the wall so no one could see them stealing electricity. She remembers each time she sat on the curb with her three brothers, surrounded by her family's belongings, waiting for a new place to live. Sitting on those curbs, she promised to always pay her bills on time.
Now, after finding herself poor again, "the only word I can say is devastated," says Goldring, 58.
"For me to live that life we were so comfortable in, we never had to worry about finances, we always had money where I can help my kids and my grandchildren — to go to calling my daughter to borrow $100 because I can't pay a bill ..." Goldring's voice trails off as she struggles to hold back tears.
Economists say the Great Recession lasted from 2007 to 2009. In 2004, the median net worth of white households was $134,280, compared with $13,450 for black households, according to an analysis of Federal Reserve data by the Economic Policy Institute. By 2009, the median net worth for white households had fallen 24 percent to $97,860; the median black net worth had fallen 83 percent to $2,170, according to the EPI.
Algernon Austin, director of the EPI's Program on Race, Ethnicity and the Economy, described the current wealth gap this way: "In 2009, for every dollar of wealth the average white household had, black households only had two cents."
Since the end of the recession, the overall unemployment rate has fallen from 9.4 to 9.1 percent, while the black unemployment rate has risen from 14.7 to 16.2 percent, according to the Department of Labor.
"I would say the recession is not over for black folks," Austin says. He believes more black people than ever before could fall out of the middle class, because the unemployment rate for college-educated blacks recently peaked and blacks are overrepresented in state and local government jobs that are being eliminated due to massive budget shortfalls.
Maya Wiley, director of the Center for Social Inclusion, says the anti-discrimination laws passed in the 1960s took decades to translate into an increase in black economic security — and that was before the recession.
"History is going to say that the black middle class was decimated" over the past few years, Wiley says. "But we're not done writing history."
Cleaning hotel rooms
Goldring was born and raised in Baltimore, and her mother was single for much of Goldring's childhood. At 16, she dropped out of school and went to work cleaning hotel rooms.
"That's when I first met white people. Some of them would stay a month at the hotel. They would have all their children with them," she remembers. "I thought, one day I'd like to hang out at a hotel."
She didn't know any middle-class people in her all-black neighborhood. "Where we lived, everyone struggled. We just struggled a little harder," she says. "If the lights stayed on for a whole year, if we didn't get put out, I thought we were doing really, really well."
At 21, pregnant with her second child, Goldring decided to get her GED. Then she went to community college, got a degree in secretarial work, and began a career.
She met her husband in 1983. He had a steady job as a heating and air-conditioning installer, and owned a brick two-bedroom home in Morgan Park, a leafy, integrated neighborhood.
With two incomes, money was not a problem. He liked to travel. She had never been out of Maryland.
"I thought, 'Is this how rich people live?'" Goldring remembers. "From where I was to where I ended up, it was way different."
Her husband had been married before. As a condition of the divorce, his daughter's name was added to the deed of the house. After Goldring's husband died in 2007, Goldring took out a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage, with a 6.5 percent interest rate, to purchase the house outright.
Everything was fine until her hospital "restructured" in 2009. Her boss, a senior vice president, was transferred to the corporate office. Executives were now sharing secretaries. A few months later, they let Goldring go.
No more family vacations. No more trips to the mall. No more filling the grocery cart.
But what Goldring misses the most is her checkbook. Her unemployment payments arrive on a debit card.
"Just being able to pull out my checkbook and pay a bill, even though there might not be much left in there," she says. "I really miss that checkbook with my name on it."
Spike in unemployment
Last April, black male unemployment hit the highest rate since the government began keeping track in 1972. Only 56.9 percent of black men over age 20 were working, compared with 68.1 percent of white men.
Chris Wilder, a Philadelphia journalist, lost his job in 2008 as the media industry suffered huge losses. Unemployment benefits amounted to about one-third of his salary. Ever since they ran out, his income has been near zero, other than sporadic freelance work.
If not for a policy in his apartment co-op to assist people who lose their jobs, "I might be living with my mother," he says.
He has felt depression and anxiety. He's gone from a six-figure salary to having to check his balance before using his bank card. "I miss being able to go into a store and go off budget," he says. "Now, when I go to shop for something, I have to stick to exactly what I came to get. I never have money to buy anything else."
Wilder, 43, grew up solidly middle class, the son of a newspaper editor and a college administrator. Now the single parent of a 15-year-old, he has managed to keep his son in cleats and baseball camps, but thoughts of dying poor have crept into his mind. All of his savings are gone.
"It's definitely harder for black people to get jobs," Wilder says. "With the economy as bad as it is, people are hiring nephews and family friends and friends of friends. It's hard for black people to break that cycle. We don't own or even run the big companies."
"It's hard to keep jobs as well, because they're gonna 'last hired/first fired' you," he adds.
Wilder isn't giving up on finding a job in his field, "but I should."
"I call everyone. I send resumes. It is extremely rare that I get a call back," he says. "When I was growing up, I never imagined there would be a time when I was out of work for three years."
College-educated blacks fared worse than their white counterparts in the recession. In 2007, unemployment for college-educated whites was 1.8 percent; for college-educated blacks it was 2.7 percent. Now, the college-educated unemployment rate is 3.9 percent for whites and 7 percent for blacks.
"I've definitely played by the rules," Wilder says.
He's not desperate enough to break the law, but "I see why people become drug dealers."
Becoming a drug dealer
Horace Davis did become a drug dealer. He illustrates another dimension of the recession's impact on blacks: While law-abiding folks are falling out of the middle class, those who got in trouble with the law are further than ever from a second chance.
After serving four years for drug trafficking, Davis walked out of prison into the middle of the recession in 2008. "I thought to myself, I'm older, I need to get a job, move on. The dope game was dead to me," Davis says, sitting on a concrete porch in an Asheville, N.C., housing project.
In the past few decades of the "War on Drugs," harsh drug sentencing laws have sent a disproportionate number of black people to prison, even though blacks are not more likely than whites to sell or use drugs, according to a 2008 report by the Sentencing Project. Today, about 280,000 African-Americans exit prison each year. They are often the last of the last to be hired.
After Davis got out, he spent months applying for dozens of jobs mopping floors or flipping burgers. He carried a letter from the state offering a $2,500 tax credit for hiring ex-offenders. He got one call back, from a chicken restaurant. "We'll be in touch," Davis remembers them saying. They weren't.
"Nobody wants black felons in their businesses," says Davis, 26.
A 2003 University of Chicago study by Devah Pager sent young white and black "testers" to apply for real low-wage jobs. Some of the testers were randomly assigned felony convictions. The study found that whites with felonies were slightly more likely to get callbacks than black applicants without criminal records.
"The penalty of a criminal record is more disabling for black job seekers than whites," Pager and other researchers wrote in a follow-up study in 2009.
Davis says he learned skills in prison: "How to cook, clean, horticulture, janitorial. I can do it. I've been trained. Tile, carpentry, mortar, edging and trimming, all that. I can operate a backhoe, a roller. Any opportunity to do something that would show my talents, I'd do it. It would be my ticket out the streets.
"I just need someone to give me that chance. A nice construction job, anything. I would hold onto that until I die."
Some economists say the real black unemployment rate is as high as 25 or 30 percent, because government figures don't count "discouraged" workers who have stopped looking for jobs and dropped out of the labor force.
Davis now falls into that category — partly due to societal forces and partly, he knows, because of his own bad decisions.
Recently, police said they caught Davis with a half-ounce of marijuana. His trial date is approaching. As a habitual felon, he could get a 10-year sentence.
Bitter irony
Some see a bitter irony in soaring black unemployment and the decline of the black middle class on the watch of the first black president.
"I thought Barack Obama could have provided some way out. But he lacks backbone," Princeton professor Cornel West told truthdig.com recently.
He said Obama had sold out the poor and become "a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats ... I don't think in good conscience I could tell anybody to vote for Obama."
Yet many jobless blacks do not blame their plight on the president.
"I have no problem with Obama when I look at what the alternatives are," Wilder says.
Goldring doesn't think Obama is doing a bad job either. "The unemployment situation is not the best, but I don't think it has a lot to do with him," she says. "Fixing this economy, it's going to take time.
Wiley, the Center for Social Inclusion director, says Obama should be applauded for several initiatives that have helped the black middle class, such as programs to modify certain mortgages and forestall foreclosure due to job loss.
She would have liked Obama to aggressively counter the suggestion that first black president would be showing favoritism if he specifically helped black people.
"It's the right thing to do for the nation," she says. "Black people are a huge segment of the population, they're especially hard-hit, and the country cannot recover if the black community — as well as the white community and others — does not recover."
Homeownership hits record
Black homeownership hit an all-time high in 2004, with 50 percent of African-Americans owning their homes, according to census data.
Today, the black homeownership rate is 45 percent, compared with 74 percent for whites. Nearly 8 percent of African-Americans who bought homes from 2005-2008 have lost them to foreclosure, compared with 4.5 percent of whites, according to an estimate by the Center for Responsible Lending.
Goldring remembers that when she got a foreclosure notice from the bank, "I bawled."
Her son, Chris Fredericks, says she was "vulnerable, more than I have ever seen her, but she still kept moving."
He was incredulous that his mother was in such a position. "At any point, you can slip back. It's just the way the economy is going," he says. "Once you get into a spiral, there's no telling how far down you could go."
One day, at a counseling session on how to prevent foreclosure, Goldring learned about a new Maryland program that offered help to people who were behind on their mortgages due to layoffs or medical bills.
She thought it was too good to be true. It wasn't.
The Emergency Mortgage Assistance program, financed by federal money, offered a zero-interest loan of up to $50,000. The money would pay off up to a year of back mortgage payments, plus up to two years of regular payments. All Goldring had to do was pay 31 percent of her current gross income, or the full mortgage payment if she got a new job close to her original salary.
And so on a sweltering June day, Goldring stood before a podium in her freshly mulched back yard, flanked by a congressman, the mayor, the lieutenant governor, and other officials. The sound of chirping birds filled the air. Cameras rolled as the dignitaries told Goldring's story, using her as an example to spread word of the Emergency Mortgage Program to other struggling homeowners.
"I want to thank you for your courage," said the lieutenant governor, Anthony Brown.
"I know you did everything right," Brown said. "You worked hard, you saved diligently, but challenges never overtaking our will sometimes overtake our wallets."
Goldring stood in front of the microphone and exhaled.
"After this," she said, "the only good thing would be to be employed, once again."
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Sources: CNN, MSNBC, Truthdig.com, Youtube, Google Maps
Friday, July 1, 2011
2010 Census Results Key To 2012 Election! Pros & Cons, Voting Rights
8 political takeaways from the census
The 2010 Census was inherently Political, even if most people don't see it that way.
Every 10 years, new census data is used to reapportion congressional seats across the country, while all states must use the census to redraw congressional districts.
These processes don't get much attention, but the stakes are high: They help determine control of Congress and state legislatures and, because they determine the Electoral College map, who wins the White House.
And the census's political influence doesn't stop there.
Because it presents a unique demographic portrait of the country, the census is mined for political intelligence by strategists from both parties and applied to campaigns from the county level all the way up to the presidency.
Here are eight political takeaways from the 2010 Census:
1.) Republicans need to improve relations with Hispanics. Fast.
The single biggest headline from the 2010 Census may be the explosion in Hispanic growth. More than half of U.S. population growth in the last decade is due to growth among Hispanics; nearly one in six Americans now identify as Hispanic.
That's bad news for Republicans, who've seen Hispanic support slip since 2004, when President George W. Bush made major inroads among those voters. Bush won 44 percent of Hispanics. Last November, by contrast, when the GOP wave swept control of the House out of Democratic hands, Republicans captured just 38 percent of that vote.
Much of the falloff is due to the tough Republican line on illegal immigration, including widespread GOP opposition to immigration reform that includes a path to citizenship for undocumented workers. Bush's efforts at such reform were brought down by his own party.
And then there's Arizona's 2010 immigration law, championed by Republicans, that requires immigrants to carry their alien registration documents at all times and allows police to question people's residency status while enforcing other laws.
Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform and an influential conservative strategist, says the problem runs deeper. "Republicans have not reached out to Hispanics as they should have for the last 20 years," he says. "The census numbers are not the wake-up call, they're the follow-up call."
Look for a handful of rising Hispanic Republican stars, like newly elected Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, to echo that line.
2.) Democrats need to compete harder in red states
Of the 12 new U.S. House seats that will be created this year because of population shifts revealed by the 2010 Census, eight are in solidly red states: Arizona, Georgia, South Carolina, Texas and Utah.
The booming Hispanic population -- among which Democrats have an advantage -- is responsible for much of that growth, but not all of it. Demographers say there has also been a migration of Americans from the Northeast and the Rust Belt, both traditional Democratic strongholds, to the more Republican-dominated South and West.
GOP strategists argue that those transplants are more likely to be entrepreneurial and connected to business -- and therefore more likely to vote Republican. And they say that policies like no state income tax in Texas and Florida, identified with the GOP, will win over new arrivals.
"People who are showing up here are tired of policies that have driven jobs and families from their old states," says Chris Elam, a spokesman for the Texas Republican Party. "They're showing up with a chip on their shoulders about failed government policies."
Democratic pollster Cornel Belcher, who worked for President Barack Obama in the 2008 campaign, won't go that far. But he says his party has a lot of work to do in the South and West.
"The Western states don't lean left, so the Democratic Party has to shift its brand," he says. "Issues like new energy sources and energy independence are what appeal to a Western audience."
3.) The battleground states are moving south and west
It wasn't long ago that Ohio was considered the central battleground in presidential politics. Winning the Buckeye State put George W. Bush over the top in 2004.
But Ohio and other Rust Belt battlegrounds have seen their populations plateau, shifting electorate clout to the West and parts of the South, like Georgia and North Carolina. The 2010 Census numbers will take two House seats each from Ohio and New York and give seats to states like Georgia and Arizona.
But it's not just that Southern and Western states are gaining political muscle. They're also growing more politically competitive, thanks to increasing racial diversity and suburbanization, both threats to Republican hegemony.
"Moving forward," Belcher says, "we're going to be waiting for returns from states like Colorado, Nevada and Arizona to determine how our national elections turn out."
4.) New electoral math makes it harder for a Democrat to win the presidency
In shifting congressional seats to the South and West, the 2010 Census is also shifting Electoral College votes in that same direction. While deep blue New York will lose two Electoral College votes, deep red Texas will pick up four.
Measured against the national total of 538 Electoral College votes -- used to determine the outcome of presidential elections -- such modest swings might seem like small potatoes. They certainly wouldn't have mattered in the landslide 2008 election, when Obama beat Republican presidential nominee John McCain by 192 electoral votes.
But in squeaker elections like 2000, when George W. Bush bested Al Gore by just five electoral votes, the slightly revised electoral math could have big consequences.
5.) Mormon political influence is growing
The U.S. Census Bureau hasn't asked Americans about their religious affiliation since the 1950s, saying that such questions infringe church/state separation rights.
But the 2010 Census found that Utah, home to the headquarters for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and to the nation's largest Mormon population, was the second-fastest-growing state in the last decade, seeing a 24 percent population spike.
The other three fastest-growing states -- Nevada, Arizona and Idaho -- all have substantial Mormon minorities.
With Mormon numbers growing, through high birth rates and proselytization, and with the religion gaining greater acceptance among other Americans, especially in the West, look for more Mormon-fueled political activism, especially in the GOP.
The trend is already visible: Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, both Mormons, may soon announce bids for the presidency.
6.) The face of American politics will get less white
Obama is the country's first African-American president, but, racially speaking, he's probably more of a sign of things to come than a political anomaly. New census figures show that minorities are becoming a bigger slice of the American pie, while white Americans are claiming a smaller share.
In fact, white Americans were the only racial group to see their proportion of the population shrink in the last 10 years, from 75 percent to 72 percent.
Want to help define America? Take the iReport cultural census
That's due to more than just Hispanic growth. The Asian population, for instance, grew by 43 percent in the last decade, faster than any other major racial group.
The election of Indian-American governors like Bobby Jindal in Louisiana and Nikki Haley in South Carolina, both Republicans, shows how the face of politics is already changing to reflect the new racial map.
The next frontier: Congress, where whites are still overrepresented. Asians occupy just 3% of congressional seats, while Hispanics occupy 6% -- substantially less than those groups' shares of the nation's population.
7.) Our politics are moving from country to city, or at least near the city
More than 80% of Americans now live in metropolitan areas -- places with cities of 50,000 or more people. An additional 10%, the 2010 Census found, live in so-called micropolitan areas, organized around towns of 10,000 to 50,000. Both kinds of population-dense areas saw big growth in the last decade, with greater Houston and metro Atlanta watching their numbers surge by around 25 percent.
Some of that growth came on the backs of the country's rural areas. The census found that large swaths of Appalachia and the Great Plains -- which encompasses the Dakotas, Kansas, Nebraska and the Texas panhandle -- lost population.
Many Democrats argue that a national shift from traditionally Republican rural areas to more urban ones gives them a leg up. "It's the red states that are growing, but it's blue terrain in those states," says Jesse Ferguson, a spokesman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
But it's suburban and exurban counties -- as opposed to cities themselves -- that are seeing the biggest growth, which means that areas outside of cities are becoming more politically powerful -- they'll be focal points for many new House districts that will be carved up this year -- and more competitive, but not necessarily more Democratic.
8.) 2011 is a good year to be a Republican
OK, this isn't political intelligence gleaned from the census -- it's a fact that will determine how census numbers are used politically: The state governments tasked with drawing up new House districts based on the most recent census data are dominated by Republicans.
Every 10 years, each state is required to draw up new congressional and state legislative districts that reflect population shifts from the last census. This year, the GOP has a big advantage: It controls 26 state legislatures, while Democrats control just 15, with eight others divided. (Nebraska, not included in that tally, has a nonpartisan legislature.)
"Republicans are in the best position for redistricting since the 1960s," says Tim Storey, senior fellow with the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Redistricting of House and state legislative districts will occur in all states by early next year. Look for Democrats to challenge most of the redistricting plans in Republican-controlled states -- and for the GOP to do the same in Democratic-controlled states.
Political posturing around the process is already under way.
"Even in places where Republicans control the process," says the DCCC's Ferguson, "they can't control the demographic realities that voter growth is happening among Democratic communities."
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Sources: CNN, MSNBC, Youtube, Google Maps
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
Charlotte Leaders Reach Out To Small Business Owners: Job Creation
Well, Well Its About Time Charlotte's Leaders & Politicians Begin Reaching Out To The Community's Small Business Sector, Especially Minority Entrepreneurs.
Yesterday The City Of Charlotte Launched A Small Business Portal Website: CharlotteBusinessResources.com To Assist Entrepreneurs With Start-Up Help, Including Funding Information.
The Site Is Very Similar New York City's Web-Based "One Stop Shop" Small Business Start-Up Portal.
Considering Charlotte's High Unemployment Rate (10%) Such A Venture Is An Excellent Tool For Job Creation.
I Wonder Why Mayor Anthony Foxx (Who's Up For Re-election) Didn't Do This When He Was First Elected Back In 2009?
I Wonder How Many Unemployed People Would Have Benefited From This Very Effective Business Idea Say Just A Year Ago?
Whatever The Case Since I Have Observed Much Improvement In Charlotte's Business Community, I Endorse This Region As The Southeast's New Business Hub.
In Other Words If You Are Starting A Small Business, Charlotte, NC Is The Place To Be!
Its NO Longer Atlanta, GA!
Most Certainly NOT Columbia, SC!
Its CHARLOTTE, NC!!
City Of Charlotte launches website to help small business owners
Small business owner Will Peters says it was a chore when he started his web-based company four years ago.
"I had to go to several different websites, and physically go all around to build my company, including different locations like the City Hall," Peters said Monday at a morning gathering of small business owners hosted by Charlotte at the start of Small Business Week.
Peters' Anstad Group is a design, marketing and technology company, which provides web communications. He's familiar the importance of the World Wide Web.
Peters currently employees 10 people.
"I've got two designers, three developers, a couple of marketing development specialists," he said.
On Monday, Peters and dozens of others got a firsthand look at what the city says will help businesses like his get up and going.
The new website CharlotteBusinessResources.com will also provide companies with the tools they need from the city to keep running.
"With this portal, what it's done is made it a one stop shop," said Peters.
The portal covers everything from starting a small business to networking and training opportunities. It's primary function is to link small businesses to the best resources to help them succeed.
"Now we're going virtual and I think it's going to be an enormously helpful tool for our small businesses," said Charlotte Mayor Anthony Foxx. "We can be the best city in America when it comes to starting and running a small business."
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Sources: Charmeck.org, City Of New York, charlottebusinessresources.com, WCNC, Google Maps
Monday, November 22, 2010
Grameen Bank Microloans: Job Creator & Pathway Out Of Poverty
Lending Plan Won Prize, But Will It Work Here?
The maroon couch was big enough to take up half the living room, but by the time the 10th woman arrived it could hold no more.
The room temperature was rising from all the body heat. Chairs were brought in from the kitchen. Even the floor was called into service.
“I’d like to start the collection,” Alethia Mendez announced after the last of the 15 women had arrived on a recent Saturday morning.
Therese Prentice counted out crisp bills, divided them, tucked them in envelopes and recorded the amount in a flimsy green book. The next woman repeated the exercise, until all 15 had made their payments for the week.
Then the money was handed to Ms. Mendez, the group’s 24-year-old banker.
“This is the way it was done in Bangladesh, so we do the same thing here,” Ms. Prentice said. “It’s our ritual.”
The women are clients of Grameen Bank, the international organization that pioneered “microloans” to third-world entrepreneurs and that, along with its founder, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006.
But the women were not in one of the abjectly poor villages in Bangladesh where Grameen usually does business; they were in a modest two-story brick house in St. Albans, Queens.
Since the beginning of January, 11 Grameen lending groups have sprung up throughout Queens in the bank’s first venture in the United States. They have lent more than $250,000, in amounts ranging from $500 to $3,000, to more than 100 women for income-generating activity like elder care, housecleaning and flower-arranging businesses.
“Of the entire U.S. population, 40 percent is underbanked, and as a result end up using payday lenders, check cashers and other, more expensive services,” said Vidar Jorgensen, president of Grameen America. “We’re here to meet this huge need.”
If the program works well, Grameen intends to expand nationwide. But while it has flourished elsewhere, it is not clear whether Grameen’s model — which relies on peer pressure rather than collateral to make sure women repay their debts — will work here, and whether such small loans can actually help lift its borrowers out of poverty.
“In parts of the United States it may very well work, but I have real doubts about it working in places like New York City,” said David R. Jones, president and chief executive officer of the Community Service Society of New York.
His group gives cash grants averaging $3,000 to city residents in financial distress — for instance, to people who have fallen behind on their rent or who cannot pay their medical bills. But Mr. Jones said that $3,000 is generally not enough to stabilize a New York resident.
Still, Grameen’s experiment here is being closely watched. Elaine L. Edgcomb of the Aspen Institute in Washington, who co-wrote a 2005 study of more than 100 microlending programs in the United States, said that borrowers do “move out of poverty, and the business can be an important contributor to that, but it’s not always the only contributor.”
“For many families, the increase in income is sufficient to take them above the poverty line,” she said.
Grameen’s distinguishing feature is its mandatory weekly meetings at which borrowers learn money management skills from their banker and from one another and must make their payments in front of everyone else in the group. If one person defaults on a loan, Grameen will not call a lawyer or a collection agency or confiscate any assets. Instead, no one in the group will be eligible for a new loan.
“You have 30 eyeballs who are looking at you and making you accountable,” said Myriam Pericles, a 41-year-old first-generation Haitian-American, who will use her $3,000 loan to expand her computer consulting business. She was a little skeptical about the process. “Maybe all this works in Bangladesh, but this is America, where people are different — our value system gets warped, our word is not our bond.”
Nicole Brown, 30, who immigrated from Jamaica as a child, is using her $2,000 loan to start a day care business. “I didn’t have it in my head to start my own business, but if you want to be great in life, you have to have your own stuff,” she said. She added that she was drawn to Grameen through her sister, Wendy Brown, who is using her $3,000 loan to expand her apartment-cleaning business, Meticulous Cleaning Service L.L.C.
As the other group members looked on, Wendy Brown, 36, made her first payment on the $3,000 loan: $60 toward principal, $6 for interest and $2 toward a savings account. If she makes all her payments, she will retire the debt within a year and be eligible for another loan. “It’s very simple, as opposed to getting it through a normal bank and going through the red tape and getting denied,” she said.
Grameen America’s managers, who are based in Jackson Heights, say that all the women in Queens are paying back their loans on time. But adapting its model to the United States has not been easy.
While Grameen officially requires a home visit to verify that borrowers are truly poor — they must fall below the United States Census Bureau’s poverty line, currently defined as $21,027 for a four-person household with two children — some borrowers at the St. Albans meeting still had not received a visit. Grameen organizers said last week that all borrowers would receive home visits in the next few weeks.
Finding potential borrowers has been another challenge.
“Here, the women are not working in the community where they are living,” said Shah Newaz, the general manager of the Jackson Heights office, who has worked with Grameen for 26 years all over the world. It is hard to meet with the women “because they are not in their houses in the daytime, and in the evening they are very tired and preparing meals, taking care of children and getting ready for the next day.”
Grameen aims its loans at women, saying it has found them more responsible than men and more comfortable with the group model. So far, the Queens operation has lent only to women.
But the organization says it will lend to men here, and is aware that it cannot discriminate on the basis of gender. “We want a female candidate, but in the U.S. you can’t say that in advertisements,” Mr. Newaz said. “That is a problem.”
The idea behind Grameen Bank began in Bangladesh in 1976, when Muhammad Yunus, an economics professor, lent a total of $27 to a group of 42 women in Jobra, a southern village. All of the women repaid their loans. Since 1983, when Mr. Yunus formally founded Grameen, it has lent $6.8 billion to 7.4 million Bangladeshis; 97 percent of its borrowers are women.
Mr. Yunus tried to start a microlending program in the United States in 1985, when he was invited to rural southern Arkansas by Bill Clinton, who was then the governor. But the program Mr. Yunus helped start, called the Good Faith Fund, failed. The group lending model never caught on. If given the choice, “any human being on earth would want to borrow as an individual rather than as a group member. It didn’t work very well in this country,” explained Mary Houghton, founder of ShoreBank, who helped advise the Arkansas experiment.
Another microfinance organization, Acción USA, which has lent money to more than 20,000 people since 1991, also attempted the group lending model in its early days. “We found that the group methodology did not work well because there was a general lack of trust among potential borrowers and an unwillingness to guarantee another person’s loan,” said Bill Burrus, president and chief executive of Acción USA. The organization has since adopted a more traditional individual lending model in almost all cases, and its default rate has ranged from 4 to 7 percent in recent years. Grameen says its default rate in Bangladesh was less than 1 percent, though higher in times of flooding.
Grameen America is aiming to reach 21,000 borrowers within five years, the number that its organizers say would allow it to break even. To improve its chances of success, it relies upon dense social networks, the kind often found in immigrant communities, to help form its groups of borrowers. The center in St. Albans consists predominantly of Caribbean and African-American women.
Not long ago, they would wait out winter afternoons between cleaning jobs on subway platforms, unable to afford lunch or dinner.
“We’d starve until we got home,” Nicole Brown said. The sisters, who had moved back in with their mother, did not want to ask for more help from her, so they turned to Grameen.
“Last year, I had $3 in my pocket,” Wendy Brown said. “This loan could help be the turning point.”
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Sources: Grameen Bank, NY Times, Youtube, Google Maps
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