Civil Rights
Report: Prosecutors Trained To Keep Juries White
Jun 3rd
A new report by the Equal Justice Initiative, an Alabama-based civil rights organization, revealed that 135 years after race-based jury selection was barred by federal courts, people of color are still illegally kept from serving on them.
The report examined jury selection in eight Southern states, including: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Tennessee. And while the results aren’t exactly surprising, they still read like a bad script from the Jim Crow era. Potential Black jurists were routinely dismissed by prosecutors for allegedly being too young, too old, single, married, divorced, because they had relatives who had attended historically Black colleges, or because some “looked liked drug dealers.”
At least those were the reasons most often given for their dismissals. Even though the 1986 Supreme Court decision Batson v. Kentucky outlawed racial discrimination during the initial phases of jury selection, EJI and several civil rights lawyers claim that it’s too easy for prosecutors and defense attorneys to think of race-neutral reasons to dismiss Black jurors. The report went so far as to say that prosecutors are “trained to exclude people on the basis of race and instructed how to conceal their racial bias.” One Mississippi prosecutor admitted that he had dismissed two Black jurors because he had been trained to do so in a course on jury selection.
In Houston County, Alabama, 80 percent of Blacks qualified for jury service have been struck by prosecutors in death penalty cases, according to the study.
In an example from a recent New York Times story, a juror studying to become a minister was dismissed because she wasn’t “the kind of juror we were looking for,” while a white man who was a minister was allowed to serve.
ColorLines writer Katti Gray recently drew a parallel between such blatant forms of racial discrimination and the enduring legacies of crime, punishment, and political disenfranchisement in Black communities. The report found that while all-white juries were sending Black defendants off to prison, they were less likely to spend time deliberating, more likely to make errors, and considered fewer perspectives than their racially diverse counterparts.
The results, according to EJI director Bryan Stevenson in Gray’s story, can be paralyzing:
“…we’re paying too little attention to the fact that 200,000 African Americans were in prison in 1972 and 2.3 million are there today. Five million more are on probation. And they have children, siblings, parents, spouses—so there’s 10 million to 15 million who are affected by mass incarceration. A lot of us just don’t want to talk about that.”
Lincoln Vows to Finally Pay Black Farmers for Bias
May 5th
By Jessica Strong
Arkansas Sen. Blanche Lincoln stepped into a 10-year-old debacle last week to help Black farmers finally get restitution for years of discrimination by the federal government. Lincoln, who chairs the Senate Agriculture Committee, called on Friday for a long-delayed settlement of the $1.25 billion “Pigford II” case, an historic lawsuit in which thousands of Black farmers charged the U.S. Department of Agriculture with lending bias. Lincoln said in a letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid that she hopes to finally resolve the case with funding from the supplemental appropriations bill for fiscal year 2011. “Every farmer in America should receive equal access and treatment in the delivery of USDA’s programs and services,” Lincoln said. “Congress should move swiftly to provide the funding necessary to fulfill the settlement agreement and close this chapter on discrimination within USDA.”
This isn’t the first settlement in the drawn-out civil rights battle of Black farmers. It is a continuation of the 1999 class-action lawsuit known as “Pigford I,” in which the Clinton administration agreed to pay a North Carolina farmer named Timothy Pigford and 16,000 other farmers $1 billion because of USDA lending discrimination. However, tens of thousands of farmers missed the deadline to file their claims, and were subsequently denied compensation. The current settlement, known as Pigford II, gives those farmers a second chance to file their claims.
The Obama administration announced in February that it would finally settle Pigford II and agreed to a March 31 deadline. But as the saying goes, a promise made is a debt unpaid.
Congress missed the payment deadline when it went on spring recess without approving the settlement’s funding. The parties have now agreed to a new May 31 deadline for resolving the case. Back in February, when the administration first announced the settlement, Congressional Black Caucus Chair Rep. Barbara Lee pointed out the consequences of the years of lending bias. “Over the past 20 years, the number of farms operated by Black farmers has declined by nearly 50 percent,” Lee said. “In part, this decrease was caused by a lack of access to loans and other assistance which were provided to other farmers.”
John Boyd Jr., founder and president of the National Black Farmer’s Association, has been vocal in criticizing President Obama and the Democrats for having dropped the ball on one of the largest civil rights settlements in history. Obama promised to settle Pigford II during his campaign and, as a senator, co-sponsored a farm bill that would have allocated $100 million to Black farmers. The administration continues to publicly express its commitment to closing the case.
Meanwhile, Native American farmers, who also filed a discrimination lawsuit in 1999, are currently involved in a similar case known as Keepseagle. The settlement deadline was scheduled for April 21, but was extended an extra 30 days for extended negotiations—leaving them in same uncertain situation as Black farmers. Discrimination suits have also been filed by women and Latino farmers.
Jessica Strong is a communications intern at the Applied Research Center.
D.C. Voting Rights Go Back in the Dead Letter Bin
Apr 21st
The DC Voting Rights Bill that was expected to reach the House this week has been pulled from this session’s legislative calendar entirely, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer told The Washington Post yesterday.
Tensions between Congress and the District’s City Council have been rising ever since the Senate’s version of the DC Voting Rights Act passed with a dubious amendment that, if enacted, would override all of the city’s efforts to enforce gun control policies. After blockading the bill in the House for a year, D.C.’s nonvoting representative, Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, said in a statement last week that she and the City Council would reluctantly endorse the bill — conceding defeat to the gun lobby, Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats in order to finally secure a vote for DC’s residents. The District has been unrepresented in Congress since the city was established as a federal territory in 1801.
But Norton said she and Democratic leadership were “shocked” to learn the gun lobby now wants even stronger language in the House version of the bill. “The existing Senate gun bill eliminated important gun safety laws in the District, but the changes in the House gun bill would directly proliferate guns throughout the District,” Norton said in a statement yesterday.
Among the changes proposed by Reps. Mark Sounder (R-Ind.) and Travis Childers (D-Miss.) — changes Norton calls “NRA-drafted” — are measures that would greatly diminish the D.C. police chief’s right to deny concealed-carry licenses and that would potentially allow semiautomatic weapons in schools and other buildings that don’t have elaborate security measures, like metal detectors and biometric screening devices in place to identify those with criminal intent.
D.C. councilmembers were preparing to take up a resolution vowing not to adopt the gun-law changes if the bill passed. They weren’t alone in their distaste for the bill. While the NAACP, the AFL-CIO and the National Urban League supported Holmes’ strategy of getting legislation through the House and then changing the language, the gun amendment prompted the League of Women Voters and DC for Democracy to hold off on supporting the legislation.
Norton says she’s nonetheless hopeful that a DC Voting Rights Act will one day become law: “I am full of promising ideas about how to move forward not only on voting rights but on every right D.C. residents are entitled to as American citizens.” An optimistic thought, but with congressional redistricting based on results of the 2010 Census and upcoming midterm elections, the Democrats aren’t assured the majority in both Houses that they’re enjoying now. After years of political battles with no end in sight, it’s hard to say where it will go from here.
Photo credit: dbking.
Dorothy Height, Civil Rights Icon and Leader, Passes Away at 98
Apr 20th
Dorothy Height, the civil rights activist and pioneer, passed away early this morning at the age of 98. The AP is reporting that Height, who had been ill for several weeks at Howard University, died of natural causes.
Height served for 40 years as the president of the National Council of Negro Women, from 1957 to 1997, when she became the chair and president emerita of the organization. But her entire life, from her early years as a youth activist to her final days of life, were dedicated to a life of service to fight racism, enact and protect civil rights and institute lasting change.
Height was famously radicalized after being denied admission to Barnard College. She had been accepted to the school, but arrived after other Black students had enrolled. Barnard, which had a strict two person limit on the number of Black students who could attend, turned Height away. She went on to NYU, where she later also got her master’s degree.
Height officially began her civil rights activism in 1933 when she became a leader of the United Christian Youth Movement of North America, working to desegregate the military and speak out about lynchings. She went on to help Eleanor Roosevelt plan a World Youth Conference in 1938 and then ascended the leadership ranks of the YWCA, where she fought for the rights of Black domestic workers and was named the head of the YWCA’s Office of Racial Justice.
When she became the president of the NCNW, Height strengthened the organization’s infrastructure and tackled education, poverty, drug abuse and health care. She was one of the only women in the civil rights movement’s highest levels of leadership. Height received the President Medal of Freedom in 1994 from President Clinton.
President Obama praised Height as the “godmother of the civil rights movement,” a woman who witnessed “every march and milestone along the way.”
Height, who even starred in an ad for the Census, exhorted people to remember their civic and social responsibilities: “You have the power to benefit your community for the next 10 years,” Height says. “It is your civic duty. Don’t let anybody or anything stop you.” She could have been talking about many other fights in our lives today.
Height will be honored always for her tenacity, perseverance, and lifelong commitment to fight for equality and justice.
“If the time is not ripe, we have to ripen the time,” she famously said, words that are as true today as they were when she first spoke them.
It’s Ballots for Bullets in D.C. This Week
Apr 19th
The taxpayers of the District of Columbia might be getting closer to representation in Congress this week—but not without caving in to the gun lobby, as both the New York Times and Washington Post pointed out in weekend editorials. The House is expected to vote this week on a bill that would give the District a voting House member, ending a long stalemate between voting rights advocates and the gun lobby.
Last year, when the Senate passed the D.C. Voting Rights Act of 2009, the pro-gun lobby, spearheaded by Sen. John Ensign of Nevada, successfully campaigned to add language to the bill that would legalize assault weapons in D.C., repeal the city’s firearms registration system and prevent the city council from passing any laws that “discourage” gun possession. The Ensign amendment was designed, in part, to stall the District’s voting-rights momentum by tying Democrats up in negotiations to eliminate the pro-gun riders — which is exactly what happened. D.C. has a Democratic majority and a population that’s over 60% people of color. Because it is not part of a state, its residents currently have only a non-voting representative in the House and no senator.
D.C.’s nonvoting representative, Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, announced Thursday that she and city leaders are ready to do whatever it takes to finally give the citizens of the nation’s capital a vote in Congress—even if it means capitulating to the demands of conservatives and Blue Dog Democrats and reluctantly passing the bill with the gun amendment attached. “I have given this fight all that I had. There is nothing left to do but make the hard decision,” Holmes Norton said.
The WaPo’s editorial on Sunday offered a scathing critique of that choice and of the whole sorry episode:
The bill, if it follows provisions approved by the Senate, would remove the District’s ban on military-style weapons, repeal the city’s firearm registration system, allow teenagers to possess semiautomatic assault rifles and undermine federal anti-gun trafficking laws. In a final insult, it would prohibit local officials from passing any law that could “discourage” gun possession. This is not — as its disgraced and morally craven author, Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.), claims — about restoring Second Amendment rights to the District; the Supreme Court’s Heller decision took care of that. This is about undermining a community’s reasonable authority, upheld in Heller, to regulate firearms.
Republicans alone are not to blame. Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) enabled — indeed, voted for — this dangerous gun measure. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Majority leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) couldn’t find a way or muster the will to get their members in line. President Obama had the gall Friday to issue a lame statement urging support for voting rights, after exerting no influence whatsoever to help the District avoid this appalling choice.
The Ensign amendment is not the last hurdle, however. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), who originally championed the bill in the Senate, has said he plans to filibuster it now. A compromise in the Senate version guaranteed Republican-leaning Utah a new representative, to strike a political balance. But Hatch doesn’t like that the bill creates an at-large seat in Utah; he wants a fourth district.
Photo credit: Bulldog23, Hoosier
Classroom to Courtroom: Lawsuit Tackles Rhode Island’s Court for ‘Wayward’ Students
originally posted by Michelle Chen for RaceWire [click here]
Mar 30th
Rhode Island wants its kids to stay in school. Or else. The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit on Monday charging that the state’s anti-truancy policy not only ignores children’s legitimate reasons for not attending school, but subjects them and their families to intimidation, humiliation, and severe legal penalties. The truancy courts, the suit contends, “threaten vulnerable children and their parents with baseless fines and imprisonment, remove children from the custody of their parents without legal justification and fail to keep adequate records of court hearings.”
In addition, the ACLU says “the court system disproportionately impacts children who have difficulty attending school or doing their schoolwork because of special education or medical needs.” In short, zero tolerance for truancy could come at the expense of children’s health.
You might think the state’s effort to promote full attendance is based on a belief that school helps them, you know, learn useful things and grow up to be productive adults. But according to the suit, somewhere in the implementation process, this goal was perverted into a policy of keeping children in class at all costs–even if it means driving children toward the criminal justice system.
One of the plaintiffs in the case, 14 year-old Heather A. of Woonsocket Middle School, is described as struggling with “learning difficulties that Woonsocket school officials have refused to address.” The school seems to more willing to punish her for institutional failures:
Because she often feels overwhelmed with class and homework, she frequently misses school. Instead of providing her with the support and services that she needs to succeed, Woonsocket school officials referred her to the Truancy Court on three separate occasions. To compel her to attend school, Truancy Court Magistrates repeatedly threatened to place her in foster care and to jail her mother who is currently battling stomach cancer.
The Rhode Island Truancy Court Program’s website outlines its procedure, something akin to probation for kids:
The truant officer presents the court with the student’s attendance history including tardiness. He or she gives the court a brief history of the student’s prior absenteeism and informs the court of any unexcused days missed in the current period….
The student’s guidance counselor presents the Truancy Court with the student’s academic record before its involvement and monitors the student’s academic and behavioral progress while involved with the program. The student is expected not only to attend school and be on time, but to also keep up with his or her work….
A student’s parent(s) are instructed to attend the first three court sessions. If the student attends school every day and is on time, the parent no longer has to attend court unless there is a problem.
But why stop at just making sure they never miss a minute of school? The program controls their activity outside of class as well:
Participants have a weekday curfew from Sunday through Thursday and a weekend curfew on Friday and Saturday. If a student is placed on home confinement, he or she cannot leave the house unless accompanied by a parent. A violation of home confinement or curfew could result in arrest or other sanctions from the Truancy Court. Only a note from a doctor, hospital, or the school nurse will excuse a child from school due to sickness. If a Truancy Court student or parent(s) does not want to abide by the Truancy Court criteria, the petition will be referred to a Family Court Associate Justice for trial.
Impacted parents and kids say this heavy enforcement system subjects children to legal strictures even when they have a valid medical or personal reason to miss school. Meanwhile, running students through this byzantine legal gauntlet–which mirrors other hardline, often discriminatory school discipline policies–may end up disrupting their education in far deeper ways than a lost day of school ever would. Under this program, the ACLU argues, “children have suffered anxiety, stress, humiliation and, in some cases, a deterioration of their grades and behavior.”
The official guiding logic behind this program is that “a reduction in truancy has been shown to decrease crime, teen pregnancy, and drug and alcohol use as well as to change attitudes to enhance school readiness.”
The fundamental disconnect here is that officials don’t seem to realize that reducing truancy in numerical terms won’t address the social factors that foster crime, teen pregnancy, and other destructive behavior. Certainly, chaining children to their desks would be an effective way of preventing them from skipping school, but probably not to the benefit of their educational experience (a process that is usually more effective when children actually want, and have a reason, to be in class, aside from the threat of getting themselves or their parents in trouble with the law).
The state reports that “Since its inception in 1999, there have been over 6,500 participants in the Truancy Court program,” and that “The program goal is for all participants to graduate from high school.” It’s nice that they are attempting to tie the program to a positive academic objective for these “wayward” youth. Are schools putting as much energy and resources into improving school completion rates–and more importantly, making school something that is worth completing? The ACLU’s complaint notes that “Rhode Island high school graduation rates stayed practically the same from 2003 to 2007, while the dropout rates increased from 4.0% to 5.8%.”
Research has shown that school “push-out” disproportionately impacts children of color, who are also especially vulnerable to the structural inequalities that leave their communities underserved and deprived of real opportunities for economic and social advancement. With the Dignity in Schools campaign, a coalition of activists is pressing the Obama administration to consider the dangerous consequences of “exclusionary discipline” policies that tend to criminalize, rather than support children in trouble. In the debate over school reform, officials are pitching an array of ideas for raising academic and institutional standards. But what does it say about our basic standards of decency when a public education system that is supposed to enrich children’s minds no longer allows them to actually be children.
Image:Truancy court scene in Dallas (Michael Mulvey / Dallas Morning News)
School Grounds as Battlefield: Political Lessons at an Arabic-themed School
originally posted by Michelle Chen for RaceWire [click here]
Mar 19th
In 2007, New York City public schools were poised to break new
cultural ground. The city established the Khalil Gibran
International Academy, a comprehensive public school specializing in
the Arabic language. The grade 6-12 school, the first of its kind, was
designed as a symbol of cross-cultural understanding in a city still
healing from the scars of September 11.
It was also the opportunity of a lifetime for Debbie Almontaser, a
Yemeni-American New Yorker, longtime educator and activist, who was chosen to head the new school. But that dream was soon extinguished by those who believe the city has
no business engaging Arab culture through the classroom.
Before the school even opened its doors,a right-wing cabal launched a smear campaign against Almontaser and
the city’s Arab and Muslim communities (see Seth Wessler’s previous coverage). In the end, the school survived,
but Almontaser was ousted in a storm of anti-Muslim screeds from the
conservative media and blogosphere.
But last week, the federal Equal Employment Opportunity
Commission vindicated Almontaser, ruling that the New York City
Department of Education’s treatment of Almontaser was discriminatory
“on account of her race, religion and national origin.”
Linking labor
ethics and civil rights, the
panel declared:
[The Department of Education] succumbed to the very bias that the
creation of the school was intended to dispel, and a small segment of
the public succeeded in imposing its prejudices on DOE as an employer.
The ruling, while not binding, underscores the racial and ethnic
tensions percolating throughout New York City, as well as the threatened
rights of educators in marginalized communities.
In the
months leading up to the school’s opening, a local coalition that
called itself “Stop the Madrassa” went full-throttle to paint Almontaser as a Muslim extremist, suggesting
the school would serve as a a junior terror training camp in the
middle of Brooklyn. (They seemed to gloss over the background of the school’s namesake,
a Lebanese-American Christian writer known for his culturally
transcendent works.)
The final blow came when Almontaser was cornered by a reporter for
the Murdoch-owned New York Post. He questioned her about a
T-shirt displaying the word “Intifada”—which was supposedly tied to
Almontaser because the activist group that designed it, Arab Women Active in the Arts
and Media (AWAAM), shared office space with an organization
affiliated with her.
Almontaser then did the unthinkable. She acted like an educator and
gave an honest answer, providing a nuanced definition of “intifada” and
its connotations of Palestinian struggle, while insisting that she
herself had nothing to do with the T-shirts.
Nevertheless, the rabid opposition (tied to a nationwide network
of right-wing idealogues) pounced on the statement. Within days,
Almontaser was ousted and replaced with a less controversial
administrator. The Commission’s report and Almontaser both concluded
that Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration forced her resignation.
The ouster exposes the kind of subtle disenfranchisement that
teachers may experience in the city’s mayor-controlled school bureaucracy.
Though Almontaser’s ordeal centered on employment equity, her
defenders did not include the teacher’s union (then-chief of the local
United Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, in fact openly
condemned Almontaser’s supposed validation of the word “intifada”). But
various local officials and
community groups have stepped up, including the Center for
Immigrant Families and Greater New York Labor-Religion Coalition.
Undaunted by the hateful spew, AWAAM led the effort, campaining online and in the streets, petitioning the Mayor’s office, and supporting a lawsuit demanding that the city put
Almontaser back in the principal’s office.
The fervor faded after the Mayor’s Office made it clear it wouldn’t rescind its original decision. But the
EEOC’s ruling could reinvigorate the communities that came together in
support of Almontaser. Almontaser recently told Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! that she still
hopes for reconciliation:
It’s my life’s dream, Amy, to have the opportunity to lead a
school
that I created, with the help of others, to establish an institution
that would set precedents in helping building bridges of understanding
and certainly creating young people who will be global thinkers and,
you know, competing in the twenty-first century workforce. And so, I’m
still committed to that dream.
The future of Almontaser and the school are uncertain. Khalil Gibran
has struggled with personnel disputes, and its leadership remains in
limbo with the recent departure of its principal.
The Khalil Gibran controversy resurfaces in the midst of mounting
tensions over cultural diversity in education: the system is fraught
with questions over civil rights in Obama’s school reform initiative, flaring racial hostility at the University of
California, a right-wing takeover of Texas textbooks, and the
controversy over education access for immigrant youth.
All these issues reflect a country that is constantly confronting,
blurring and redefining cultural borders. The trajectory of
Almontaser’s career highlights the role that educators play in the
movement for multicultural, multilingual schools, yet it exposes their
vulnerability as workers in an increasingly politicized public sector.
Teachers have a mandate to act as civil servants, but they often lack the freedom to act as agents of change in
their communities.
Back in 2007, Sara Said, a Yemeni-American college student whose
younger brother was enrolled at Khalil Gibran, spoke out alongside
other local activists at a rally in support of the school:
One of the most important things education should do is just
really
teach a student how to question things… The students need to question
society and not accept society as it is, because if we continue
accepting it, this is what is going to happen, like letting a newspaper
or a few individuals run our country.
Whatever happens to the students and staff of the Khalil Gibran
Academy, Almontaser’s struggle has already given New York a tough
lesson on the meaning of a worldly education.
For more on the Khalil Gibran International Academy campaign, go
to Communities in
Support of KGIA.
Cross-posted at Working
In These Times. Image courtesy AWAAM
One in Four Black Men in Kentucky Can’t Vote, But DRA Could Change That
originally posted by Julianne Hing for RaceWire [click here]
Mar 18th
Those are the stats from the Kentucky Commission on Human Rights, which released its report on the state of Black folks there last month. Kentucky’s got the special distinction as being one of two states that bars people with past felony convictions from voting for their entire lives.
That could change though, if the Democracy Restoration Act passes. The bill would restore the right to vote in federal elections to four million people around the country who’ve served their time, been released and now live–and likely pay taxes–in our communities. On Tuesday, the House Subcommittee on Committee, Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties convened a hearing to listen to testimony on the bill.
If passed, DRA would join the larger state-based movement in the last ten years to restore folks with prior convictions the right to vote. Since 1997, twenty states have made adjustments to laws to allow at least some portion of the formerly incarcerated the right to vote in state elections. Kentucky’s actually got a state version of DRA in committee right now, awaiting passage by its Senate before it goes to a public vote.
Ex-felon voter disenfranchisement is a voter suppression tactic left over from the Jim Crow-era, a classic example of discriminatory laws that don’t mention race but have a disproportionate impact on people of color. Literacy tests, anyone? Poll taxes? We don’t stand for that these days, yet voter disenfranchisement of people with felony convictions still stands on the books.
According to the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU School of Law, 50,000 of Kentucky’s two hundred thousand Black residents were unable to vote in 2004 because of voter disenfranchisement. Nationwide, it’s estimated that 13 percent of all Black men in this country are forbidden to vote. Some democracy, huh?
But talk of voter disenfranchisement must be considered alongside a conversation of the deeper, broader issues embedded in the criminal justice system. You know, the criminal justice system that convicts and imprisons Blacks and Latinos at higher rates than white people, that doles out harsher sentences to Black folks than white folks for similar crimes, that executes people of color at higher rates than white people. The two go hand-in-hand.
The Democracy Restoration Act is a no-brainer. Stay with us as we follow this bill.
What the Broadband Debate Says About Race
originally posted by Jamilah King for RaceWire [click here]
Mar 17th
The FCC officially released its long-awaited National Broadband Plan (PDF) today, and so far the 360-page report has gotten a lukewarm reception. “More of a national broadband to-do list,” wrote Nancy Scola on Tapped, referring to the plan’s general lack of practical strategies.
But there’s another part of the battle brewing, one that pits longtime civil rights groups against a relatively new generation of bloggers and online activists of color, aka the netroots. While everyone agrees that communities of color need wider access to broadband Internet, there are different approaches on how to make that happen.
Currently, the United States is behind many similarly resourced countries, like Japan and Germany, in developing a national broadband plan. A national survey released by the FCC in February showed that nearly a third of the country doesn’t have regular broadband access -that’s roughly 93 million people. And poor folks of color generally fare among the worst: 40 percent of households of color subscribe to broadband, compared to 55 percent of white households. According to commission’s own findings, 36 percent of people haven’t adopted broadband because it’s too expensive.
Despite the discrepancy in access, the Internet has still played the role of a sort of great equalizer. It’s what brought us activist efforts like MoveOn, Color of Change, and Presente. It was key in mobilizing a national grassroots effort to elect a President. It’s also brought us rappers like Drake and Souljaboy. Each of these efforts was premised on the fact that most anyone can start their own website (or send a petition or mixtape) and feel assured that it’ll load and be just as accessible as the New York Times, or any other site on the web. That’s net neutrality.
So if that’s how it’s been working, why try to fix what’s not broken? Why add formal regulations guaranteeing the even flow of content? Because industry analysts believe we’re not far from the day when big telecom companies start making profit-based decisions about what content moves where and how. Plus, the fact that they’re openly opposed to any sort of regulation is a subtle hint that we should be worried.
In 2009, 72 democratic members of Congress wrote a letter to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski urging the committee to consider the “full range of
consequences that government action may have on network investment.”
Then, last fall, 20 national civil rights organizations signed on to a letter asking the FCC to think twice about imposing net neutrality regulations on big telecom companies, saying:
“The Commission needs to ensure that net neutrality would not delay bridging the digital divide by altering consumer prices and discouraging broadband adoption and deployment.”
Which brings us to the FCC’s broadband plan released yesterday. The plan didn’t directly address the civil rights groups’ concerns. But it did suggest expanding the Lifeline and Link-Up programs, which currently provides affordable telephone service to low income customers, to include broadband support. There was also mention of using advertising revenue to offer a free- or low-cost broadband service tier, but no details on how to ensure its reliability. And on a promising note, there’s also talk of creating a Digital Literacy Corps, which would encourage tech-savvy young folks to get out into their communities and show why — and how — broadband is even worth the bother.
So now the big question is: are the civil rights groups’ concerns valid? We’ll be here to answer that.
Parsing the Details of Dodd’s Not-Independent Consumer Watchdog
originally posted by Kai Wright for RaceWire [click here]
Mar 15th
Sen. Chris Dodd came out swinging today to defend his revamped proposal for fixing the financial regulatory system, and he’s won cautious support from some key reformers. Bailout watchdog Elizabeth Warren, who has been the most vocal Beltway advocate of an independent agency to protect consumers, called the bill an “important step” and no Democratic members of Dodd’s Banking Committee have rejected it. Check out the bill’s summary here.
The primary complaint, however, remains Dodd’s choice to house a new Consumer Financial Protection Agency inside the Federal Reserve rather than make it a stand-alone regulator. It’ll be a bureau, not an agency. Dodd strongly defended the move, arguing that creating a bureau inside the Fed strengthens rather than weakens the effort. As Huffington Post reports, Dodd’s main point is budgetary: The bureau would be funded through the Fed’s money and thus shielded from the political whims of congressional appropriation. “Look at Equal Employment Opportunity Office, what happens when you starve a budget,” Dodd told HuffPo. “You can have all the wonderful laws on the books; if you don’t have a budget that allows you to operate, you die.”
Fair enough. And the director will be presidentially appointed for five year terms. But critics point to a provision that allows an oversight board to rein in the bureau if it treads too heavily on the “safety and soundness” of the banking sector. Who sits on that board? The existing regulators, who failed to stop the subprime predation and risky lending that started all of this.
The new bureau would also have to confer with existing regulators before making rules and would have to publish those regulators’ feedback. Of course, the whole point of a consumer protection agency is that existing regulators have an outsized interest in the health of the banks, not their customers and certainly not the financial wellbeing of our neighborhoods.
As the National Community Reinvestment Coalition points out, all of this sets up a tall job for the new bureau’s chief. “Does anybody believe that the director of the CFPA will be ‘independent’ with Secretary Geithner and Chairman Bernanke breathing down their neck?” asked NCRC head John Taylor, who’s been another vocal advocate for an independent agency. “The moment you don’t have a strong director, this agency will be forever changed,” adds NCRC’s David Berenbaum. “It’s like the Civil Rights Commission. It used to be very effective.”
Berenbaum also notes that Dodd’s legislation doesn’t appear to explicitly put the Community Reinvestment Act under the new watchdog’s purview. The CRA is the federal answer to redlining — it forces banks to lend in any community from which it takes deposits. That’s one area Dems could improve upon the bill. Another is to peel back the regulator-stacked oversight board’s veto power.
Two important positives in Dodd’s bill, however. He appears to have closed the carve outs in the House bill that put nonbank lenders, like auto dealers and payday joints, beyond the new regulator’s reach. And states have clear authority to take their own action on behalf of consumers, which is something banks have lobbied heavily to prevent.
Cross-posted at The Nation.