Michelle Obama: Hillary Made Barack a Better Candidate

DENVER–Today’s meeting of the Democratic Women’s Caucus featured a surprise guest: Michelle Obama.

The potential first lady is making a concerted effort, it seems, to reach out to the different women’s constituency groups in the Democratic party, including those closely allied with Hillary Clinton.  (Earlier this week, Michelle Obama spoke to a gathering sponsored by Emily’s List, the organization that bundles donations to fund pro-choice candidates.)

In today’s remarks, Ms. Obama offered Hillary Clinton some major props, saying, “Thanks to her, my husband is a better candidate.”  The ballroom full of women echoed with cheers and applause.   “Thanks to her,” Michelle Obama continued, “his campaign is a better campaign.  And thanks to her, my daughters — and all of our daughters — have the freedom to dream bigger dreams…”

Michelle Obama went on to list the causes dear to the hearts of caucus-goers:  healthcare, equal pay, reproductive rights.  She spoke rather poignantly of the tensions of being a mother who works outside the home, saying she often feels she short-changing her daughters when she’s at work or on the campaign trail, and feels she’s giving the job and the campaign short shrift when she focuses on her girls.  “We all known that guilt,” she said, “and I know I can get an ‘amen’ on that.”  The audience shouted back, “Amen.”

Her remarks ended in an appeal to the party’s women activists to redouble their efforts on behalf of the Obama campaign.  Predicting the upcoming election to be “a tight contest,” Michelle Obama told a roomful of admirers, “Women are going to make the difference in this campaign…I am going to need you every step of the way.”

See more tagged with: Barack Obama, bigtentdenver, Democratic National Convention, DNC, gender gap, Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama, Womens Caucus and womens issues

Live From Main Street
What Will the Green Economy Look Like?

Printer-friendly version

We all say we want to go green, but do we all see the same kinds of change when we imagine an eco-friendly economy?

By Adele M. Stan
The Media Consortium

In Denver, Colo., Tom Plant, director of the Governor’s Energy Office, is practically giddy. It’s just days before the Democratic National Convention kicks off in Colorado’s biggest city, and a long-sought goal in Gov. Bill Ritter’s New Energy Economy program has just been met: Vestas, the Danish wind-turbine manufacturer, has announced its plan to open a new manufacturing plant just outside the city limits — its second in the state.

Plant reels off some numbers: 1,350 new jobs at the new Vestas plant; 650 employees already employed at another the Vesta plant that opened last March, and the prospect of an additional 400 workers at a plant expected to open two years from now. Colorado now generates more than a gigawatt of energy through renewable energy sources — three-quarters of that created in the 18 months since his boss took office.

And how many people does he expect to arrive with the convention?

“About a gazillion, I think,” Plant says, laughing. “Maybe two gazillion.”

A cleaner, greener future has long occupied the dreams of progressives. With an historic “change” election upon us and a crisis in fuel pricing and climate change, the moment appears at hand for the public to accept profound changes in our way of life and the very structure of our economy.

Economists and philosophers, community organizers and labor negotiators, all see in the current crisis an opportunity to create change that reaches beyond the immediate boon of a cleaner environment. Some look through the green crystal ball and see new opportunities for industry or a revitalized labor movement. Others see a new role for government as a change-maker, and still others see a quantum leap in the evolution of the human soul. As goals, they’re not necessarily mutually exclusive. But the paths imagined by green advocates don’t always converge. Already the sound of dissonance is audible between those who envision a completely new economic model, and those who seek to work with and clean up the old one.

Democratic Party officials surely had the “change” theme of this year’s presidential campaign in mind when they chose Colorado to host their convention. The Colorado legislature swung from its traditional red to blue when Ritter, the state’s first Democratic governor in 50 years to enjoy a legislative majority, rode into office in 2006, promising a new and vibrant state economy that capitalized on the crisis of global climate change.

Ritter’s New Energy Economy plan got a jump start before he was even elected, with the passage of a ballot measure in 2004 that called for the state’s utilities to bring the level of renewable energy sources in their portfolios up to 10 percent by the year 2015. Executives at Xcel Energy, the state’s largest utility, protested loudly, then went on to meet the standard eight years ahead of schedule. This year, Xcel’s lobbyists urged a doubling of the standard.

While Colorado’s mandate for renewable sources from its energy providers may have caught the attention of Vestas and other green technology companies, Plant sees something much bigger in their expansion. “When a company like Vestas locates 2,500 jobs in Colorado, it’s not to feed an entirely Colorado demand; I mean, they’re looking at the entire country,” Plant says.

Plant isn’t alone in seeing an opportunity to improve the economic fortunes of everyday Americans in the climate crisis.

Carla Din, Western field director of the Apollo Alliance, doesn’t think she’s asking for much: all she wants is a raft of green energy projects in California that build partnerships between organized labor, developers, environmentalists, social justice advocates and government. The Apollo Alliance seeks to build coalitions among interests that often conflict — such as labor and business — with a focus on meeting the needs of a green economy.

“We’re talking about retooling existing structures, but also about utilizing the workforce that has been in these areas … forever,” Din says.”For instance, the sheet metal workers, the plumbers and pipe-fitters… A lot of these workers are working in targeted industries that will need to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions for compliance with climate change laws.”

Legislatures in 25 states have passed laws like Colorado’s that require utilities to meet new standards for a minimum percentage of renewable energy sources in their portfolios. (California has the most comprehensive law, designed to reduce greenhouse emissions by 30 percent over the next 12 years.) The Apollo Alliance also advocates legislation that sets efficiency standards for the energy used by state government facilities and weds those requirements to fair labor standards for the workers who will do the required construction.

Asked if the labor movement will need to reshape the industrial-era structure of its trades sector, characterized by individual unions for distinct specialties, Din bristles a bit. “I don’t necessarily think things have to be restructured; I think things have to be done strategically and efficiently with a lot of cross-pollination.”

But a revolution on the scale required to reshape the economy and save the planet just won’t happen without a fundamental change in the way people regard their place in the world, says Oakleigh Thorne II of the Thorne Ecological Institute, an education center he founded more than 50 years ago in Boulder, Colo. Applying the old economic principle of unbridled growth to green industries just won’t do, he says. Thorne argues that the same principles that govern ecological systems control economic systems, as well. “If you violate ecological principles you might be able to make a fast buck on the short term,” he says, “but long-term, you’ll have an economic disaster.”

Van Jones, president of Green For All in Oakland, Calif., wants nothing less from a new green economy than the alleviation of poverty — and a few other things. Voicing a more urgent imperative in the threat of global climate change, Jones, who will be featured as a panelist at The Media Consortium’s Live From Main Street program in Denver on Sunday, sees a world of possibilities in an economy gone green.

The revitalization of urban America could reach into the city’s core, says Jones, with green-collar jobs for those who today struggle to find good-paying work — not to mention the health benefits for residents who today choke with asthma on fumes and city soot. While Green For All advocates legislative remedies, that’s just where its efforts begin. If the kind of change he’s talking about is to be made, Jones says, the current economy will need some radical adjustments.

Models used by today’s economists, Jones explains, are based on notions developed in the 19th century. “Whether left or right,” Jones says, “[these models] had one almost unspoken assumption, which is that you’re going to have an awful lot of nature and very few people. So you find these weird terms, like ‘inexhaustible resources’… Now you’re living in a world where you have an awful lot of people and shockingly little nature left.”

You can’t tinker with the equation to fix the flaw in that model, he says. “If you … have to break up with oil and coal, you may as well break up with poverty and a bunch of other stuff, anyway,” insists Jones, whose book, The Green-Collar Economy, is due from HarperCollins in October.

Economist James Galbraith is frustrated by the lack of attention to the climate crisis by his colleagues. “Where is the economic school of thought that addresses the impact of climate change?” he asks. Except for the work of one or two economists, he says, “it doesn’t exist.” Galbraith, a professor at University of Texas (Austin), says solving the crisis will require a complete reordering of universities to foster collaboration across disciplines.

In his recently released book, The Predator State, Galbraith pleads a case for Democrats to abandon the so-called free market system, since Republicans have clearly done so over the last eight years, as demonstrated by a series of bailouts, manipulations and deficit spending. Galbraith suggests, the challenge of heading off the perils of global climate change offers a jumping-off point from which to launch a new, more beneficial economic system. “It’s a sensible application,” he says. That new system will feature of hybrid of government planning, regulated markets and institutions that foster innovation.

Like Jones, Galbraith sees in the current economic and ecological crises the potential to reinvent decaying societal structures and create entirely new ones. But when asked if it is time for a new New Deal, Galbraith offers a caution against “reaching back to a glorious moment and calling for the revival of an old solution.” One thing the next president and Congress should do, Galbraith says, is to create national-level institutions on the order of our great national laboratories, like the National Institutes of Health or NASA, designed to address the climate crisis.

Nothing less than the sort of effort the U.S. mounted when mobilizing for World War II will create the enterprise needed to address climate change and energy independence in ways that will restructure the economy for the better, Galbraith adds. Folded into that enterprise, he says, should be a goal for universal broadband access (”It’s carbon-neutral”) and a national infrastructure project that does not simply repair decaying structures, but completely redesigns roads, bridges and transportation in ways that are energy-efficient and create sustainable communities.

For his part, Jones sees more creative energy for reinventing the economy coming from the human heart and mind — what he calls “the revolution within” — than from existing institutions. “Why be stuck with these little single-issue not-for-profits and broken-up academic departments trying to solve this thing from inside of it?” he asks. Thinking about this crisis needs to be simplified, not made more complex, he explains. “You know, the reason that Green For All has the name it has is ’cause it’s what a child would say… You gotta get back to the complete innocence of childhood.”

Where Jones calls for a return to innocence, Thorne calls for simplification of our lives, a goal Galbraith also seeks through his economist’s lens, noting, for instance, the efficiency of shortening the food chain.

But Thorne’s philosophy, the “deep ecology” first proposed by the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess, hangs on more than simplicity; it urges humility in human interaction with the rest of creation. “This integral consciousness is the next step… Out of the consciousness will come the cultural change. Consciousness is always ahead of culture.”

Yet even within the green economy movement, consciousness has its limits. Where thinkers like Jones and Galbraith see a sort of creative destruction in allowing the structures of yesterday fall away to make room for the new, pragmatists like Din and Plant have high hopes for greening the industrial model. Conflicts inherent in these two visions could be the next big test of the progressive movement.

This article is part of The Media Consortium’s Live From Main Street series, and is published in conjunction with the next Live From Main Street program, “So You Say You Want Change? Exploring the Conflicts and Opportunities Ahead.” Hosted by Laura Flanders of GRITtv, the town hall will feature Van Jones of Green For All, who is interviewed in the article, and a number of other progressive leaders, including Rep. Donna Edwards, Polly Baca, David Sirota, Faye Wattleton, Andre Banks and Lee Camp of Laughing Liberally. This edition of Live From Main Street will tape on Sunday, August 24 at 4:00 p.m. MST in Denver. The town hall will be streamed live and can be viewed at www.livefrommainstreet.org.

The taping is open to the public: click here for more details; Click here to RSVP to this event.

See more tagged with: Apollo Alliance, Carla Din, Colorado, Democratic National Convention, DNC, James K. Galbraith, Live From Main Street, Oakleigh Thorne, renewable energy, The Predator State, Thorne Insititute, Tom Plant, Van Jones, Vestas and wind power

Live From Main Street
What Will the Green Economy Look Like?

We all say we want to go green, but do we all see the same kinds of change when we imagine an eco-friendly economy?

In Denver, Colo., Tom Plant, director of the Governor’s Energy Office, is practically giddy. It’s just days before the Democratic National Convention kicks off in Colorado’s biggest city, and a long-sought goal in Gov. Bill Ritter’s New Energy Economy program has just been met: Vestas, the Danish wind-turbine manufacturer, has announced its plan to open a new manufacturing plant just outside the city limits — its second in the state.

Plant reels off some numbers: 1,350 new jobs at the new Vestas plant; 650 employees already employed at another the Vesta plant that opened last March, and the prospect of an additional 400 workers at a plant expected to open two years from now. Colorado now generates more than a gigawatt of energy through renewable energy sources — three-quarters of that created in the 18 months since his boss took office.

And how many people does he expect to arrive with the convention?

“About a gazillion, I think,” Plant says, laughing. “Maybe two gazillion.”

A cleaner, greener future has long occupied the dreams of progressives. With an historic “change” election upon us and a crisis in fuel pricing and climate change, the moment appears at hand for the public to accept profound changes in our way of life and the very structure of our economy.

Economists and philosophers, community organizers and labor negotiators, all see in the current crisis an opportunity to create change that reaches beyond the immediate boon of a cleaner environment. Some look through the green crystal ball and see new opportunities for industry or a revitalized labor movement. Others see a new role for government as a change-maker, and still others see a quantum leap in the evolution of the human soul. As goals, they’re not necessarily mutually exclusive. But the paths imagined by green advocates don’t always converge. Already the sound of dissonance is audible between those who envision a completely new economic model, and those who seek to work with and clean up the old one.

Democratic Party officials surely had the “change” theme of this year’s presidential campaign in mind when they chose Colorado to host their convention. The Colorado legislature swung from its traditional red to blue when Ritter, the state’s first Democratic governor in 50 years to enjoy a legislative majority, rode into office in 2006, promising a new and vibrant state economy that capitalized on the crisis of global climate change.

Ritter’s New Energy Economy plan got a jump start before he was even elected, with the passage of a ballot measure in 2004 that called for the state’s utilities to bring the level of renewable energy sources in their portfolios up to 10 percent by the year 2015. Executives at Xcel Energy, the state’s largest utility, protested loudly, then went on to meet the standard eight years ahead of schedule. This year, Xcel’s lobbyists urged a doubling of the standard.

While Colorado’s mandate for renewable sources from its energy providers may have caught the attention of Vestas and other green technology companies, Plant sees something much bigger in their expansion. “When a company like Vestas locates 2,500 jobs in Colorado, it’s not to feed an entirely Colorado demand; I mean, they’re looking at the entire country,” Plant says.

Plant isn’t alone in seeing an opportunity to improve the economic fortunes of everyday Americans in the climate crisis.

Carla Din, Western field director of the Apollo Alliance, doesn’t think she’s asking for much: all she wants is a raft of green energy projects in California that build partnerships between organized labor, developers, environmentalists, social justice advocates and government. The Apollo Alliance seeks to build coalitions among interests that often conflict — such as labor and business — with a focus on meeting the needs of a green economy.

“We’re talking about retooling existing structures, but also about utilizing the workforce that has been in these areas … forever,” Din says.”For instance, the sheet metal workers, the plumbers and pipe-fitters… A lot of these workers are working in targeted industries that will need to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions for compliance with climate change laws.”

Legislatures in 25 states have passed laws like Colorado’s that require utilities to meet new standards for a minimum percentage of renewable energy sources in their portfolios. (California has the most comprehensive law, designed to reduce greenhouse emissions by 30 percent over the next 12 years.) The Apollo Alliance also advocates legislation that sets efficiency standards for the energy used by state government facilities and weds those requirements to fair labor standards for the workers who will do the required construction.

Asked if the labor movement will need to reshape the industrial-era structure of its trades sector, characterized by individual unions for distinct specialties, Din bristles a bit. “I don’t necessarily think things have to be restructured; I think things have to be done strategically and efficiently with a lot of cross-pollination.”

But a revolution on the scale required to reshape the economy and save the planet just won’t happen without a fundamental change in the way people regard their place in the world, says Oakleigh Thorne II of the Thorne Ecological Institute, an education center he founded more than 50 years ago in Boulder, Colo. Applying the old economic principle of unbridled growth to green industries just won’t do, he says. Thorne argues that the same principles that govern ecological systems control economic systems, as well. “If you violate ecological principles you might be able to make a fast buck on the short term,” he says, “but long-term, you’ll have an economic disaster.”

Van Jones, president of Green For All in Oakland, Calif., wants nothing less from a new green economy than the alleviation of poverty — and a few other things. Voicing a more urgent imperative in the threat of global climate change, Jones, who will be featured as a panelist at The Media Consortium’s Live From Main Street program in Denver on Sunday, sees a world of possibilities in an economy gone green.

The revitalization of urban America could reach into the city’s core, says Jones, with green-collar jobs for those who today struggle to find good-paying work — not to mention the health benefits for residents who today choke with asthma on fumes and city soot. While Green For All advocates legislative remedies, that’s just where its efforts begin. If the kind of change he’s talking about is to be made, Jones says, the current economy will need some radical adjustments.

Next 1, 2

Printer-friendly version

See more tagged with: Apollo Alliance, Carla Din, Colorado, Democratic National Convention, DNC, James K. Galbraith, Live From Main Street, Oakleigh Thorne, renewable energy, The Predator State, Thorne Insititute, Tom Plant, Van Jones, Vestas and wind power

Live From Main Street
What Will the Green Economy Look Like? - Part 2

[Continued from previous page]

Models used by today’s economists, Jones explains, are based on notions developed in the 19th century. “Whether left or right,” Jones says, “[these models] had one almost unspoken assumption, which is that you’re going to have an awful lot of nature and very few people. So you find these weird terms, like ‘inexhaustible resources’… Now you’re living in a world where you have an awful lot of people and shockingly little nature left.”

You can’t tinker with the equation to fix the flaw in that model, he says. “If you … have to break up with oil and coal, you may as well break up with poverty and a bunch of other stuff, anyway,” insists Jones, whose book, The Green-Collar Economy, is due from HarperCollins in October.

Economist James K. Galbraith is frustrated by the lack of attention to the climate crisis by his colleagues. “Where is the economic school of thought that addresses the impact of climate change?” he asks. Except for the work of one or two economists, he says, “it doesn’t exist.” Galbraith, a professor at University of Texas (Austin), says solving the crisis will require a complete reordering of universities to foster collaboration across disciplines.

In his recently released book, The Predator State, Galbraith pleads a case for Democrats to abandon the so-called free market system, since Republicans have clearly done so over the last eight years, as demonstrated by a series of bailouts, manipulations and deficit spending. Galbraith suggests, the challenge of heading off the perils of global climate change offers a jumping-off point from which to launch a new, more beneficial economic system. “It’s a sensible application,” he says. That new system will feature of hybrid of government planning, regulated markets and institutions that foster innovation.

Like Jones, Galbraith sees in the current economic and ecological crises the potential to reinvent decaying societal structures and create entirely new ones. But when asked if it is time for a new New Deal, Galbraith offers a caution against “reaching back to a glorious moment and calling for the revival of an old solution.” One thing the next president and Congress should do, Galbraith says, is to create national-level institutions on the order of our great national laboratories, like the National Institutes of Health or NASA, designed to address the climate crisis.

Nothing less than the sort of effort the U.S. mounted when mobilizing for World War II will create the enterprise needed to address climate change and energy independence in ways that will restructure the economy for the better, Galbraith adds. Folded into that enterprise, he says, should be a goal for universal broadband access (”It’s carbon-neutral”) and a national infrastructure project that does not simply repair decaying structures, but completely redesigns roads, bridges and transportation in ways that are energy-efficient and create sustainable communities.

For his part, Jones sees more creative energy for reinventing the economy coming from the human heart and mind — what he calls “the revolution within” — than from existing institutions. “Why be stuck with these little single-issue not-for-profits and broken-up academic departments trying to solve this thing from inside of it?” he asks. Thinking about this crisis needs to be simplified, not made more complex, he explains. “You know, the reason that Green For All has the name it has is ’cause it’s what a child would say… You gotta get back to the complete innocence of childhood.”

Where Jones calls for a return to innocence, Thorne calls for simplification of our lives, a goal Galbraith also seeks through his economist’s lens, noting, for instance, the efficiency of shortening the food chain.

But Thorne’s philosophy, the “deep ecology” first proposed by the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess, hangs on more than simplicity; it urges humility in human interaction with the rest of creation. “This integral consciousness is the next step… Out of the consciousness will come the cultural change. Consciousness is always ahead of culture.”

Yet even within the green economy movement, consciousness has its limits. Where thinkers like Jones and Galbraith see a sort of creative destruction in allowing the structures of yesterday fall away to make room for the new, pragmatists like Din and Plant have high hopes for greening the industrial model. Conflicts inherent in these two visions could be the next big test of the progressive movement.

This article is part of The Media Consortium’s Live From Main Street series, and is published in conjunction with the next Live From Main Street program, “So You Say You Want Change? Exploring the Conflicts and Opportunities Ahead.” Hosted by Laura Flanders of GRITtv, the town hall will feature Van Jones of Green For All, who is interviewed in the article, and a number of other progressive leaders, including Rep. Donna Edwards, Polly Baca, David Sirota, Faye Wattleton, Andre Banks and Lee Camp of Laughing Liberally. This edition of Live From Main Street will tape on Sunday, August 24 at 4:00 p.m. MST in Denver. The town hall will be streamed live and can be viewed at www.livefrommainstreet.org.

The taping is open to the public: click here for more details; Click here to RSVP to this event.

Back 1, 2

Printer-friendly version

See more tagged with: Apollo Alliance, Carla Din, Colorado, Democratic National Convention, DNC, James K. Galbraith, Live From Main Street, Oakleigh Thorne, renewable energy, The Predator State, Thorne Insititute, Tom Plant, Van Jones, Vestas and wind power

Live From Main Street
The Housing Crisis: Not Just Subprime Anymore

Marking National Housing Crisis Investigation Week, The Media Consortium examines Miami as a case study at the leading edge of a market disaster. Tomorrow, the Consortium’s next in its series of Live From Main Street town hall programs will take place in Miami’s Lyric Theater: “Magic City, Hard Times: How is Miami Facing the Economic Crisis and Working Toward a Sustainable Future?”

If you had any doubt of a housing crisis in the U.S., listen to the word from the horse’s mouth. According to RealtyTrac, a California-based firm that monitors foreclosures for investors, the national foreclosure rate for June 2008 exceeded by more than 50 percent the rate for June of last year. A foreclosure notice was delivered last month to one in every 501 U.S. households, RealtyTrac reported.

Yet the crisis is deeper than those numbers suggest. While the burst of the housing-market bubble is nearly always pegged to the surge in risky subprime mortgages made to under-resourced borrowers over the course of the last decade, the bust is affecting people who never borrowed a dime.

Neither borrower nor lender — but huring

“[T]he misconception is that the [housing] crisis is just a crisis around people who took loans,” said Gihan Perera, executive director of the Miami Workers Center. “On one level, that is clearly…where the bomb directly hit, in that there are tons of people who are losing their homes through foreclosures…but the ripple effect of the entire credit crisis is actually much bigger than that.”

In Miami, for instance, the foreclosure epidemic encompasses not only single-family homes, Perera explained, but apartment buildings, as well. “So the banks then are either trying to get rid of those buildings, or hold on to them at the least cost until they can get rid of them,” leaving tenants in the lurch. And with a flood of people losing their homes now entering the rental market, said Perera, who will be featured as a panelist at Live From Main Street program, rents are climbing.

The RealtyTrac report released yesterday names Florida among the five states with the highest foreclosure rates.

The crisis is reaching well into the middle class. In Florida, it’s not just urban centers like Miami that are hard-hit, but recently-built, upper-middle class boom-built communities like Celebration in the Orlando area, according to an investigation by a local television news operation, 2 News of WESH-TV. In their Central Florida region, WESH reported, “the most homes in foreclosure are in zip codes that didn’t exist five years ago.” But, regardless of income, communities of color appear to be the hardest hit, especially by the high level of defaults on subprime loans, which charge higher rates of interest than do prime mortgages. Often the rate for the first year or two of the loan is low, but then hikes up substantially after that.

Communities of color feel the pain

“All the estimates are that blacks and Hispanics will be hurt much more by the decline in housing fairly significantly,” said Algernon Austin, Ph.D., director of the Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy program at the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank. “United for a Fair Economy estimates that it will be, basically, one of the greatest losses of wealth for African-Americans and Latinos that we’ve seen in, you know, probably the last hundred years.”

For those who took the subprime loans, the crisis is particularly acute. The UFE report to which Austin refers asserts that “the subprime mortgage crisis will cause African-Americans to experience wealth losses of between $72 billion and $93 billion over its duration. For people of color in general, the racial bias of subprime mortgage lenders accounts for nearly double the wealth losses for people of color as for whites.”

The ten regions listed in the RealtyTrac report that show the highest levels of
foreclosures are in either California or Florida, states with large communities of color. In the 2000 census, Florida ranked number two among the fifty states for the size of its African-American population. At least 20 percent of its inhabitants describe themselves as Latino or Hispanic.

Women targeted by subprime lenders

Women are extremely hard-hit by the crisis, and discrimination may well be in play. In a 2006 study, the Consumer Federation of America looked at (PDF) who received high-interest subprime mortgages, finding that “women are more likely to receive subprime mortgages of all types regardless of income… For purchase mortgages, women earning double the median income are 46.4 percent more likely to receive subprime mortgages than men with similar incomes.”

Add race to gender, and you find that African-American women, who are more likely to head single-parent households than white women, are the suffering the worst of the mortgage meltdown — especially, perhaps, middle-class black women. According to the Consumer Federation study, “Upper-income African-American women are nearly five times more likely to receive subprime purchase mortgages than upper-income white men, and upper-income Latino women are nearly four times more likely to receive subprime loans than upper-income white men.”

Black women, as always, were the last people into the musical chair game,” said Perera, “and then the chair was swept [out from] under them.”

House of cards

Although the crisis now extends beyond subprime borrowers to people at all levels of investment in the housing market, it was the subprime frenzy that tipped the market, said Wilhemina Leigh, Ph.D., a senior researcher at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington, D.C. “Nobody was regulating the Wall Street investment banks” that bought up the the bad debt from the subprime mortgage brokers and packaged that debt in securities. “Consequently they bought whatever they felt like buying, whatever looked good. It was really like the wild, wild West…”

Add to that a lack of oversight of the subprime brokers themselves, and a crisis was born. “[J]ust given that there were large pockets of people of color who just didn’t understand how the process worked, they were a ready-made set of pawns to be used, and to be taken advantage of in many cases by brokers who moved into these areas that didn’t have banks or credit unions and set up their shops there. They were the only game in town, so if you wanted a mortgage and walked through their doors, no matter what type of credit score you might have had, even if you qualified for prime, you weren’t going to get that because the only thing these shops knew how to do was subprime mortgages.”

In areas like Miami, the proliferation of subprime mortgages helped fuel speculation and an unsupported real-estate boom.

Wall Street, developers get off easy

While Wall Street has taken a hit on the housing bust, it’s nothing compared to the price paid by Main Street “The way our laws are currently structured,” Leigh explained, “a person who buys a security that ’s backed by a pool of mortgages does not have any liability once the…underlying mortgages go belly-up.” Wall Street walks away, leaving Main Street holding the bag. Last November, in a report issued jointly by three nonprofits that advocate affordable housing, author Kevin Connor wrote, “The big five investment banks are projected to pay out $38 billion in bonuses this year (2007) — even more than last year.”

Even in the face of a full-blown housing disaster for working people in his city, said Perera of the Miami Workers Center, politicians are looking to keep developers in the black while cutting back on social services for everyday Miami-dwellers. He cites a $3 billion project handed to large developers to build a baseball stadium and a tunnel under the Port of Miami. “We couldn’t get a jobs program to dig ditches, and kind of help working-class people out, “said Perera. “We’re about to give $3 billion to developers to dig a tunnel.”

See more tagged with: housing discrimination and mortgage crisis

Bullets Can’t Stop Beutler From Cracking Wise

Funny thing about being a journalist: your job is to write about people and mayhem and trauma, but let any of those touch you directly, and it becomes a different game. With that caveat, allow me to recount my brief visit today with my colleague, Brian Beutler, whose sign-off is a familiar one on this site, and has come to define the reporting of The Media Consortium’s syndicated reporting project.

I was just about to leave the house this morning to meet with Brian when I got word through a mutual colleague of ours that he had been shot in Washington, D.C., in an aborted mugging.

I found him at Washington Hospital Center, where his good friend, Matt Franklin, sat vigil through the night as Brian underwent major surgery. By the time I got there, Brian was in recovery, and Matt and I were shown to his bedside.

Perhaps foremost among the topics about which Brian writes in his coverage of national security and civil liberties issues is FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the Bush administration’s circumvention of the original 1978 legislation, and subsequent legislative attempts to widen the powers of the executive branch to spy on U.S. citizens. The entity of choice for such spying by the Bush administration has been the National Security Agency.

This morning, Brian and I had planned to go over the story he had just delivered about efforts by Sen. Russell Feingold to stop the latest version of FISA legislation from getting through the Senate. As his editor, I had promised our members that we would deliver the piece today.

When I stepped up to Brian’s hospital bed, he smiled through the clear, plastic mask covering his mouth, and said in a quiet, hoarse voice, “Sorry. I left you high and dry.”

What could I do but laugh?

After some housekeeping conversation about his level of comfort (not great, as you might imagine), he piped up, “I have a theory about the shooting.” He smiled, impishly.

“Oh, yeah?” I said.

“It was the NSA,” he said, with a deadpan look.

(Actually, it was two teenage boys who thought they wanted Brian’s cell phone.)

Matt laughed.

The good word is that Brian is expected to make a full recovery. Please be patient as we await his return to his beat. Nobody covers FISA and the rest of his beat quite like Brian Beutler. I know that his passion for his work will bring him back to the Hill in good time.

–Adele M. Stan

See more tagged with: Brian Beutler, media consortium and syndicated reporting project

The Friendship Offensive

Peace activists on Capitol Hill hope to stave off war with Iran through cross-cultural contact between ordinary citizens. Leaders of the Congressional Progressive Caucus show their support.

As George W. Bush focused his final presidential visit to Europe on Iran’s nuclear program, members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus joined a group of peace activists on Capitol Hill at an event designed to foster dialogue between everyday Iranians and Americans.

On Tuesday afternoon, the activist groups Enough Fear and Campaign for a New American Policy on Iran set up a phone bank outside the Cannon House office building, inviting activists, reporters, and passersby to speak with people in Iran. Leaders of the two groups seek to build lasting person-to-person ties between Iranians and Americans in the hope of building sentiment against a military confrontation between the two nations.

“The main idea is that if more people in this country have friends in Iran the two countries are less likely to go to war,” explained Nick Jehlen, co-founder of Enough Fear. “It’s as simple as that.” The event, called “Time to Talk to Iran,” was Jehlen’s brainchild.

Jehlen invited every member of Congress to attend this week’s event, but only five, all from the House of Representatives, participated: Lynne Woolsey and Barbara Lee, both California Democrats, joined Marcy Kaptur, D-Ohio, and Sheila Jackson-Lee, D-Texas. All are members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, which Woolsey and Lee co-chair. Ron Paul, the Republican presidential contender from Texas, crossed the aisle to appear with the congresswomen.

Barbara Lee has long advocated person-to-person contact as the solution to the current stand-off with Iranian leaders over their nuclear program, which President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice contend is a precursor to weapons development. In January, Lee, who also sits on the foreign affairs committee, introduced the Iran Diplomatic Accountability Act of 2008, which, she told the gathering, “directs the president to appoint a high-level envoy empowered to seek to conduct direct, unconditional, bilateral negotiations with Iran for the purpose of easing tensions and normalizing relations between the United States and Iran.” Her legislation has idled in committee for the last six months with 14 cosponsors. Proposals in both houses of Congress intended to block the administration from using force against Iran have similarly stalled.

The Washington, D.C., event marked the third staging of a “Time To Talk” phone bank. The first took place in Boston in November 2007, and the second in New York in January. “Having congresspeople here [at a ‘Time to Talk’ event] is really an aberration for us,” Jehlen explained. “If we can facilitate dialogue between members of the American and Iranian governments in the future, we’d like to.”

At each event, a bank of four or five old-fashioned red desk phones takes center stage, though the phones are actually fed through hand-held wireless devices. The set-up is designed to resemble the crisis lines that connected officials in Washington with their Moscow counterparts during tense moments in the Cold War. About 50 people — including students and Code Pink activists — braved wilting heat and humidity to participate Tuesday’s event. Many relied on interpreters, young volunteers fluent in both English and Farsi, who joined them on the line.

The conversations tended to be brief, and were often beset by technical problems. But they were substantive, too. Friendly chats quickly developed from exchanges of simple pleasantries (How’s the weather? What do you do?) into earnest discussions about the deteriorating political situation between the two countries.

The organizers put me on the line with Morteza Rassul-Shirazi, a 60-year-old engineer in Tehran who agreed to speak on the record with an American reporter. The connection was poor (the line dropped twice), but Shirazi, along with many of his peers, he said, is concerned that U.S.-Iran hostilities could mushroom into a violent conflict. “We should not talk about war at all,” he told me. “Instead, we should try to show Americans that we are peaceful people.” Rassul-Shirazi and his friends and family in Tehran are understandably nervous. Visiting with European leaders this week, Bush sent mixed signals, focusing his early remarks on rallying European support for sanctions on Iran if it did not agree to stop enriching uranium, leading some to speculated that he was backing off from earlier saber-rattling. Then, before he left the continent, he added, “All options are on the table.”

These latest remarks capped off several weeks of escalating anti-Iran rhetoric from the administration. In a last week’s meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert at the White House, Bush said, “It is very important for the world to take the Iranian threat seriously.” Speaking this week in Europe, Secretary Rice accused the Iranian regime of evading international oversight, saying,”I think that no one is of a mind to allow them to stall very much longer.”

A December National Intelligence Estimate found that the Iranian government suspended its nuclear weapons program in 2003. Iran does, however, continue to pursue a uranium enrichment program, which its leaders contend is for use in peaceful projects, such as energy production.

No Tags

Live from Main Street/Minneapolis - Today!
Watch Laura Flanders, Amy Goodman and More, Here

At 3:00 EDT, tune in here for live streaming of The Media Consortium’s debut town-hall program,
Live From Main Street, moderated by GritTV’s Laura Flanders and KFAI/Insight News’s Al McFarlane, and featuring:

· Amy Goodman, host of Democracy Now!
· John Nichols, Washington correspondent for The Nation
· Malkia Cyril, director of the Center for Media Justice
· Colleen Rowley, FBI whistleblower/2006 congressional candidate
· Joel Kramer, founder of the Minneapolis Post
· Paul Schmelzer, managing editor of Minnesota Monitor
· Marlina Gonzalez, program director of the Unconvention/Intermedia Arts

…and more of your Twin Cities favorites!

Inspired by the work of everyday activists, Live From Main Street’s premiere
town hall will explore what it takes to get heard in the era of big media
and diminished civil liberties.

Live Webcast by The Uptake

No Tags

The Clinton Global Initiative

There’s a pretty fundamental problem with the Clinton Global Initiative from the perspective of junior and mid-level journalists: We weren’t guests.

Oh, sure, we were there, corralled into the Lower Lobby of the Time Square Sheraton that hosted the initiative. We were provided coffee and sandwiches and, for about one hour at a time, twice a day, we were offered a chance to sit on the sidelines of a public panel. But for the rest of the time, we were–for all intents and purposes–confined to a basement allowed only to watch the four ongoing, simultaneous sessions (on global health, climate change, education, and poverty alleviation) via closed-circuit television. We were forbidden from attending those sessions in person and from snooping about like paparazzi to interview the sorts of people we’d never otherwise have access to.
Read the full report…

See more tagged with: Bill Clinton and Climate Change

Ambassador Crocker’s Kooky Economics

The long-anticipated joint congressional testimony of Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker is now history, and the event’s few fireworks have by now been widely documented. Of them, perhaps the most noted was the men’s relative dispositions—one cavalier, the other more so.

The conventional wisdom had been to expect kinder depictions of broad progress from the general than from the ambassador. What we saw instead was precisely the opposite. Both men were optimistic—more so than Democrats, moderate Republicans, and many other critics thought reasonable. But it was Crocker, not Petraeus, who painted over his mission’s most pressing concerns.
Read the full report…

See more tagged with: ambassador crocker, general petraeus and iraq