Not so long ago, Memphis, a city where a majority of the residents are black, was a symbol of a South where racial history no longer tightly constrained the choices of a rising black working and middle class. Now this city epitomizes something more grim: How rising unemployment and growing foreclosures in the recession have combined to destroy black wealth and income and erase two decades of slow progress.
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The median income of black homeowners in Memphis rose steadily until five or six years ago. Now it has receded to a level below that of 1990 — and roughly half that of white Memphis homeowners, according to an analysis conducted by Queens College Sociology Department for The New York Times.
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...black unemployment here, mirroring national trends, has risen to 16.9 percent from 9 percent two years ago; it stands at 5.3 percent for whites....
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For every dollar of wealth owned by a white family, a black or Latino family owns just 16 cents, according to a recent Federal Reserve study.
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The Economic Policy Institute’s forthcoming “The State of Working America” analyzed the recession-driven drop in wealth. As of December 2009, median white wealth dipped 34 percent, to $94,600; median black wealth dropped 77 percent, to $2,100. So the chasm widens, and Memphis is left to deal with the consequences.
“People assumed they could boost revenues by kicking people out and raising rents.”What happened to the kind of social responsibility exhibited by Met Life?
MetLife built Parkmerced, Stuyvesant Town, Riverton and a handful of other large complexes in the 1940s amid a national housing crisis in a remarkable effort to provide homes for returning veterans. At Stuyvesant Town, for instance, the company received special property tax exemptions in return for agreeing to build the complex, maintaining relatively low rents and limiting its annual profit to 6 percent.
On receiving the results of the investigation, General McChrystal recommended a battery of additional training exercises for servicemen and women coming to Afghanistan, and additional training for those already here. In addition to reprimanding the four officers and admonishing the other two, General McChrystal asked Air Force commanders to open an investigation into the Predator operators.
President Obama, who visited the Gulf Coast on Friday, spoke broadly about the government’s response to the environmental disaster, saying that “not every judgment we make will be right the first time out.”
He also added, seemingly capturing the mood of engineers working to plug the well: “There are going to be a lot of judgment calls here. There are not going to be silver bullets or perfect answers.”
...spending long hours in a Kettering University basement lab researching....
"...Mom Someone Else Would Like To Fuck and Dan Quayle impressionist...."
A bill that aims to ban ethnic studies in Arizona schools was signed into law Tuesday by Gov. Jan Brewer, cheering critics who called such classes divisive and alarming others who said it's yet another law targeting Latinos in the state.
Schwartz, a professor at the University of Washington and author of 16 books on
relationships, said it was notable how even respondents in their 70s and 80s
stressed that sex was important to their quality of life.
Happy May Day! I found myself in Madrid for this year's celebration and joined an impressive array of pro-union and labor rights activists in that part of our world! ole!
Out of the limelight, her voice a bit deeper, she still performed at the occasional fund-raiser. “Everyone with an organization who wants to put over brotherhood and peace,” she said, “they just call old Sue.”
... one of the lessons of the current mess in the Gulf is that when you try to make policy based on the politics as opposed to the merits, you always, always, always get bit in the ass.
