The Hispanic population grew in almost every corner of the United States over the past decade, roughly equally in predominantly black and predominantly white neighborhoods. The typical African-American resides in a neighborhood that is 14 percent Hispanic, only slightly higher than the figure for the population as a whole. … Instead, the dominant trend in predominantly black neighborhoods nationwide has been population loss. Particularly in the formerly hyper-segregated cities of the Northeast and Midwest, ghetto neighborhoods have witnessed profound population declines, as former residents decamp for the suburbs or for the rapidly growing cities of the Sun Belt—where segregation is generally very low.

So desegregation is not caused by whites and Latinos moving into predominantly black neighborhoods. It’s due to black folks having access to jobs and credit and moving to predominantly non-black neighborhoods.

At least that’s my understanding of the Manhattan Institute’s report THE END OF THE SEGREGATED CENTURY: Racial Separation in America’s Neighborhoods, 1890-2010. [Via Ebony Magazine, which has been unexpectedly awesome lately.

Last fall, media critic and writer Douglas Rushkoff asked Are jobs obsolete?. I think he’s on to something.

We now have more human workers than jobs. Much of that is due to off-shoring and globalization. American workers are being replaced by non-American workers and at lower wages.

However, at least as much of this shift is due to dying industries and massive automation. The rise of e-mail means we have less postal mail. The rise of self-checkout and self-serve gadget vending machines means we need fewer cashiers and sales people. Manufacturing in China is cheaper right now but is any country’s manufacturing base really safe from robots?

Machine workers can replace people workers. So what does that mean for people?

I have more questions than answers.

Modifying labor laws to shorten the work week means that companies would have to hire two people to do the work that one person now does in 40 hours. Should we each give up some of our work hours so that others might earn?

While a shorter mandated work week would mean more people would have jobs, it could also mean smaller paychecks for everyone. But what if we also increased minimum wage to $15 or $20 per hour?

If we automate industry, and need fewer people to work, should corporations financially support workers they’ve displaced?

“If you don’t work, you don’t eat,” passes for political discourse in some corners of the United States. But if there is no work to be had, should people be homeless and starving? What responsibility do we collectively have to each other as citizens and people? And I haven’t even touched on healthcare and how it’s structured in the U.S.

Do we need to make fewer people? Probably so, if we lack the political will and moral/ethical center to ensure that the rise of machines does not mean the decline of people. But if we have fewer children as a country, and as a world, what economic and physical infrastructure changes do we need, and can we agree to make them?

Like I said: more questions than answers.

What do you think?

Also see: Are the American people obsolete?, a July, 2010 piece from Salon.com.

Whereas most entrepreneurs in Dalmo’s position develop a retching distaste for paying taxes, Dalmo doesn’t mind them much. “The tax system is good—it’s fair,” he tells me. “What we’re doing when we are paying taxes is buying a product. So the question isn’t how you pay for the product; it’s the quality of the product.” Dalmo likes the government’s services, and he believes that he is paying a fair price.

That’s from a January Inc magazine piece, In Norway, Start-ups Say Ja to Socialism.

This is what I like about Norway, Breivik aside: it’s an open, honest, fairly cosmopolitan, fairly egalitarian society. People pay a lot into the system and the system in turn offers all sorts of support. There’s true class mobility, in part because the gap between poorest and richest is much smaller compared to the United States.

In Norway, service industry workers are paid a living wage. Yes, this means in Oslo take-out Thai curry costs $20, and a 10″ pizza and beer costs $35. But it also means that service people can work one job waiting tables or cleaning hotel rooms instead of working two or three as in the U.S.

Norway’s generous social welfare program means the cost of failure is low. Until I married, I was deeply fearful of starting my own business because if I failed, it would mean starting over with even less and moving back in with my parents. Entrepreneurship only seems like an option only now because my husband’s salary can easily support us both.

But in Norway? There, people can take these chances because there’s a generous social safety net. Failing doesn’t mean you lose everything. It means you go get another job. Or some job training. Or start another business.

Young people can go to college for free. Healthcare is free. You’d have to really, really, seriously, and thoroughly fuck up to be destitute in Norway. In the U.S., lifting a too-heavy box can spell the end of everything.

But this may be the kicker: in the midst of the 2009 economic crisis, Norway’s economy grew by 3%.

Indeed it seems that high taxes, free public education, and a generous welfare state — socialism — makes for stable, successful countries and economies.

[Via Feministing]

Also see: 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang.

The prison terms were suspended — not commuted — on the condition that Gladys donate a kidney to Jamie, who is seriously ill with diabetes and high blood pressure and receives dialysis at least three times a week. Gladys had long expressed a desire to donate a kidney to her sister, but to make that a condition of her release was unnecessary, mean-spirited, inhumane and potentially coercive. It was a low thing to do.

From Bob Herbert’s New York Times column, For Two Sisters, the End of an Ordeal (log in required).

This.

It’s bad enough that they were sentenced to consecutive life sentences for their role in an armed robbery that yielded $11 (though the amount may have been as much as $200). I mean, since when do two first-time offenders get consecutive life sentences — not concurrent — for an armed robbery in which no one was hurt, and such a small amount of money was stolen? Since when do two first-time offenders get consecutive life sentences based on the testimony of their teenage accomplices — ones who were essentially threatened with rape and then received far lighter sentences in exchange for their testimony?

In Mississippi, armed robbery carries a sentence of three years to life in prison without parole. There was a lot of sentencing room available. And yet two first-time offenders get two consecutive life sentences based on the coerced testimony of teens.

Now one of the others convicted of this crime retracted his testimony in an affidavit. The sisters’ defense attorney was disbarred for conduct in an unrelated case. Even the prosecutor in the case thinks keeping them in prison is some B.S.

You would think this was a no-brainer for commuting a sentence. Again: first time offenders. Shaky testimony. Potentially incompetent defense. Harsher than necessary sentence. A governor who is rumored to be a 2010 GOP presidential candidate. A pardon might be too much — I mean never underestimate M-I-crooked-letter-crooked letter-I’s willingness and ability to f*ck over some Negroes — but a reduction in the sentence seems reasonable, fair, and just, right?

Apparently not to Governor Haley Barbour (R).

Barbour instead chose to suspend the sentence — that is, release the sisters from prison, but let their conviction and sentence stand. What’s worse, he has required Gladys Scott to donate a kidney to her ailing sister Jamie as a condition of their release.

Yes. Governor Barbour has required both of these sisters to undergo major surgery as a condition of their suspended sentence. Making major surgery a condition of release smacks of a time when black female bodies were subject to the whims of white owners (*cough*slavery*cough*), and later white men who just felt like it (*cough*Jim Crow*cough*).

The sense of privilege, entitlement and arrogance Barbour has displayed should outrage us all.

So as far as markets are concerned I’m a libertarian, but I have enough expertise in politics and history to understand that a free market ends up as monopoly unless you force them to be free.

One of a few quotes that jumped out at me in Andy Greenberg’s Forbes (long-ish) interview with WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange.

Also worth noting? Assange’s critique of the media describing him as a hacker: There’s a deliberate attempt to redefine what we’re doing not as publishing, which is protected in many countries, or the journalist activities, which is protected in other ways, as something which doesn’t have a protection, like computer hacking, and to therefore split us off from the rest of the press and from these legal protections.

Assange has an excellent point. After all, it’s much easier to go after one apparent rogue than it is to attack a corporation like Guardian News and Media Limited or New York Times Company, both of whom have published redacted versions of these cables.

But when it comes to abortion I am the one that wears the pants in the decision because in the end it would be me going through the procedure. Even though my husband’s opinion and beliefs matter to me, I, as the one carrying the baby have the final say about my body and our unborn child.

That’s Alisha Arnold, wife of Pete Arnold, the man behind the site BirthOrNot.com in HER blog post, I Believe In Choice.

Alisha Arnold continues: My fears, anxiety and worries about this pregnancy have been completely discounted in favor of discussing my husband’s opinions about unrelated topics like cars and global warming. Abortion is a serious issue and my opinion and position shouldn’t be ignored.

That, I think, is what’s most striking about this site, the associated fall-out, and our national debate about abortion: HER voice — both in the specific case of The Arnolds, and in the collective sense of every woman. We focus on the fetus, or the men — and it is almost always men — making the policies.

But we are remarkably good at not talking about the women whose lives and bodies would be upended by a pregnancy they can’t physically or financially afford to carry to term, and a baby they are not financially, physically, or emotionally prepared to raise.

Even though Pete Arnold has been outed as an anti-abortion troll (see the CNN piece), I think BirthOrNot.com is actually a brilliant pro-choice strategy. For me, the takeaway is this: If you don’t believe that abortion should be put to a vote on a web site, then why do you think it should be put to a vote on election day?

[Via Jezebel]

They don’t care that these mortgages wouldn’t have been available in the first place if the banks hadn’t found a way to sell oregano as weed to pension funds and insurance companies.

Matt Taibbi just made me snort laugh. I know someone who actually did cut his weed inventory with oregano to boost profits. The comparison is apt. That’s also why I never started smoking weed; you never knew what was in it.

Taibbi’s latest Rolling Stone piece Courts Helping Banks Screw Over Homeowners is a nice introduction to how this foreclosure crisis is playing out in Florida. He also gives some background about how we got here. Hint: it involved lots and lots of fraud on the part of mortgage lenders and ratings agencies.

We can slam borrowers all we want, but when most people buy a house, they are not considering the entirety of the marketplace. Few people outside of the finance and real estate industries actually pay attention to what happens in them. I probably pay more attention than your average low-wealth American not employed by the industry, and still had no idea just how f*cked the marketplace was. So imagine just how little most people knew when they bought. And that’s what’s particularly disappointing about the lack of a public outcry. As Taibbi put it:

They don’t care that the Countrywides of the world pushed borrowers who qualified for safer fixed-­income loans into far more dangerous adjustable-rate loans, because their brokers got bigger commissions for doing so. They don’t care that in the rush to produce loans, people were sold houses that turned out to have flood damage or worse, and they certainly don’t care that people were sold houses with inflated appraisals, which left them almost immediately underwater once housing prices started falling.

All my life I’ve heard Latin America described as a failed society (or collection of failed societies) because of its grotesque maldistribution of wealth. Peasants in rags beg for food outside the high walls of opulent villas, and so on. But according to the Central Intelligence Agency (whose patriotism I hesitate to question), income distribution in the United States is more unequal than in Guyana, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, and roughly on par with Uruguay, Argentina, and Ecuador.

From Introducing the Great Divergence, the first in Timothy Noah’s Slate series The United States of Inequality.

Actually the term “banana republic,” which Noah uses in his piece, doesn’t refer to income inequality alone. It refers to a certain banana growing company and its interventions in Latin American politics and land use battles.

Still, the United States is unique in its level of income inequality among industrialized nations. And that gap has real consequences for social mobility, social justice, and national stability.

It seems the Baracka Flocka Flames controversy has heated up since the October 26 publication of Prez N the Hood: A Hip-Hop Parody Stirs Up Issues in the New York Times (video below; article requires log-in).

America’s foremost old cranky black man, Stanley Crouch, had nothing nice to say about Baracka Flocka Flames in his recent column for TheRoot.com. He dismissed the video as ‘minstrelsy.’

That shouldn’t surprise you, of course. According to Crouch, anything hip-hop — even if it’s satirical or in parody form — is What’s Wrong With Negroes. Rather than rebut Crouch myself, I will point you to Bomani Jones’ post Stanley Crouch, I think I’m on to you….

Now I am one who thinks Baracka Flocka Flames’ “Head of the State,” is f#cking hilarious, bordering on brilliant. Part of the humor for me is that I imagine the Obamas are Grade-A sh#t-talkers behind closed doors. You see glimpses of this sense of humor when President Obama speaks. You saw it when Michelle Obama was cracking on her husband’s dirty sock habits. So I can totally see Barack Obama making off color jokes along these lines for sheer sh#ts and giggles.* Plus, James Davis does a killer job of imitating Obama’s diction, making every utterance of “nigga,” downright funny. But that’s not the only humor I see inreason I love this piece.

“Head of the State,” for those who don’t closely follow hip-hop, is based on Waka Flocka Flame‘s “Hard in the Paint.”

Yeah.

Let’s just say that if Stanley Crouch titled his next column “Waka Flocka Flame is What’s Wrong With Negroes,” I will heartily co-sign. Waka Flocka Flame not only has a stupid-a## name, but he has also said he’s in it for the money, not the craft. And if we’re talking about topical content, <ebonics>this n*gga just stay ig’nant</ebonics>. This video, as Jones points out, fits much more closely with Crouch’s idea of minstrelsy, or the performance of stereotype for commercial gain.

“Head of the State” plays off the imagery and lyrics of “Hard in the Paint,” and by doing so, I think it becomes a multi-layered, satirical critique of class and race stereotypes and hip-hop video tropes.

Let’s think about this: Barack Obama was largely raised in Kansas. He not only attended college, but has degrees from Columbia University and Harvard Law — two Ivy League universities. Michelle Obama is similarly educated. So the idea of BHO unironically thug posing and rapping about his “main bitch,” and having his “own SK” is absurd. It is completely, utterly, and absolutely absurd.

And that absurdity makes “Head of the State” uncomfortable for the thinking viewer.

My second and third reactions were “Wow, this is rife with stereotypes, innit?” and “Sh*t, the tea baggers will have a field day with this.” And I suspect much of the criticism of “Head of the State,” from Crouch and others is related to W.W.W.P.T. — “What Will White People Think?” As Jones wrote, the truth is that, for better or worse, the mass media is America’s only introduction to black people.

But if you believe it’s plausible that a middle-class raised, currently upper-class, highly-educated black man, particularly the president of the United States would be chilling on the front steps of an abandoned house in a dangerous neighborhood, smoking Newports and dancing with a bottle of Smirnoff while surrounded by persons of questionable repute, I must ask who clings more tightly to the black-man-as-thug stereotype — you or Baracka Flocka?

And that’s why I love this “Head of the State,” video. It sticks a finger square in the eye of fake thug rappers who pimp gangster imagery for profit. And it sticks a finger in the eye of those who see Ivy League educated black people in the White House and manage to reduce them — and by extension all of us — to a narrow, negative stereotype.

Related:

Jay Smooth’s Raw Footage “I Forgot He Was Black.”

*Okay, raise your hand if an inappropriate HNIC joke has crossed your mind January 20, 2009.

But the Great Recession was different: It was triggered by a financial meltdown brought on by excessive lending, reckless risk taking, the implosion of an unregulated shadow banking system that assumed that short-term money would always be available — and ignorant and careless borrowing by people and institutions.

The key paragraph from Who can magically fix the economy? No one in Fortune.

This is why I am not upset with Obama for his handling of the economy. Bankers, financiers, crazy asset value-to-price ratios, and debt is what brought us here. Resetting asset valuations and becoming debt-free is what will get us out.

In a consumer spending-driven economy, I think there are only two ways to get out quickly. You either need to:

• Create jobs; or
• Forgive credit card debts and write down mortgage principal so that people have more room in their budgets to spend and invest, even if they have less income.

Notice my emphasis on or. But since neither of those things are going to happen,* we’ll have to:

• Wait until people pay debts down or off;
• Wait until those folks’ credit clears up and they become a low-risk borrower; and
• Wait until banks are steady enough to lend again while also hoping that everyone else is both patient enough and able to ride out their underwater mortgages, pay their credit card debts, and keep their businesses afloat.

Notice my emphasis on and. In a best-case scenario, I think we will be in this ultra-low growth pattern for 8-12 more years. See: Japan.

Get used to it.

* Analysts keep insisting there’s a “moral hazard” in forgiving debts or in principal write-downs. And I might agree if we were talking about a single borrower. But we’re talking about an entire economy that was killed by an asset bubble. Many people are so far underwater that it will take more time to get even on their mortgage than it will for their credit to recover from a foreclosure or short sale. Let’s look at this another way: is it moral that we ask people to jeopardize their ability to build a nest-egg because they’ll have negative equity for the next 25 years? Would you take that risk?

Washington is absolutely committed to the proposition that 9/11 came out of the blue. There’s no historical context. Because if you insist that there ought to be some historical explanation for 9/11 — which is different from saying that there is a justification for 9/11; there cannot be a justification — and you look for the historical roots of that heinous act, then you necessarily confront questions about U.S. policy in the Islamic world.

That’s one of a few things that jumped out at me from an interview with retired colonel and military historian Andrew Bacevich in Guernica.

Bacevich is the author of Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War.

Contrary to the popular narrative, most foreclosures were not on sprawling “McMansions” but rather on modest properties that were typically valued significantly below area median values at origination.

One of the key findings from Dreams Deferred: Impacts and Characteristics of the California Foreclosure Crisis, a report by the Center for Responsible Lending. You can also download the full report [PDF] or download the executive summary [PDF].

Another quote from the report, which explains why homeownership is so important:

Homeownership has been the primary source of economic mobility and financial security in this country, as home equity is often tapped to start a new business, pay for higher education and secure retirement.

Say you bought a house for $350,000 in July 2006 — those were the days of 100% financing, so you borrowed $350,000 on a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage at 6.8%. The house is now worth $280,000, but your mortgage balance is $334,000. The current rate for a 30-year fixed-rate loan, if you could get one, is 4.7%.

Under Gumbinger’s plan, you’d get a new $280,000 mortgage at 4.7%, and the government would guarantee the other $54,000, on which you’d pay 4.7% interest to the current mortgage holder. This would reduce your payments by $6,700 a year, or roughly 25%. Your mortgage holder wouldn’t have to take a write-down, because the shortfall would be guaranteed by Uncle Sam. You get lower payments, preserve your credit rating, and save your pride by not becoming a deadbeat.

We should listen to this proposal. As it stands, responsible homeowners now have to choose between:

• Not being able to sell at any point in the next decade or two without damaging their credit.
• Strategically defaulting or walking away.
• Staying put in a city that may have limited job growth and a diminished quality of life because of the housing crisis; or one that leaves those homeowners disconnected from extended family.

None of those options are particularly fair to those homeowners whose only real failing was borrowing 100% of the purchase price in a market whose prices were driven higher by investors, speculators, flippers, and bankers. And it gives those people underwater borrowers who are current on their mortgages an incentive to stay put and ride out the storm.

The delinquency rate on investment homes where the original mortgage was more than $1 million is now 23 percent. For cheaper investment homes, it is about 10 percent.

That’s from yesterday’s New York Times piece, Biggest Defaulters on Mortgages Are the Rich.

Makes sense, actually. Rich people can avoid the fallout of foreclosure more easily than middle-class folks can. Be locked out for seven years? Be sued by your lender? Not really an issue if your mortgage isn’t backed by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac — and most mortgages over $500,000 are not (assuming you live in a state with anti-deficiency statutes).

The open standards won because any kid could download the rules of the game, understand how they work, and make a contribution. — It taught us that we can make government heel.

That’s a quote from Carl Malamud, of Public.Resource.org in Washington’s I.T. Guy in The American Prospect.

Nancy Scola does a wonderful job of profiling Malamud, who is the man behind the SEC’s EDGAR system, among other services.

Malamud stands at the nexus of technology and government in a way that few others do.