White Folks is Discriminated Against Y’all!

In a victory of racist Fox News, the majority of white folks now see themselves as “victims” of racial oppression…

Even though only a small minority can provide any instance where they themselves have experienced discrimination, no matter how flimsy the accusation.

Of course, there is no statistical evidence to back this up in any credible study whatsoever.

More white-wing magic thinking.

The “Disadvantaged Majority”

Majority Of White Americans Believe White People Face Discrimination

But most said they haven’t personally experienced racial discrimination, according to a new poll.

A majority of white Americans believe whites face discrimination, according to a new poll, but most said they’ve never personally experienced it.

Fifty-five percent of whites agreed that “discrimination against white people exists in the U.S. today,” according to the poll, released Tuesday by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

“If you apply for a job, they seem to give the blacks the first crack at it,” Ohio resident Tim Hershman, 68, a poll respondent, told NPR. “If you want any help from the government, if you’re white, you don’t get it. If you’re black, you get it.”

“It’s been going on for decades, and it’s been getting worse for whites,” Hershman added.

When prodded, however, Hershman was unable to provide an example of discrimination against him.

The same was true for most white Americans polled: Only 19 percent said they’d personally faced discrimination applying for a job; 13 percent in being considered for work pay or promotion; and 11 percent in applying for college. 

The poll showed that most Americans, including blacks, Latinos and LGBTQ individuals, believe their own group faces discrimination.

Ninety-two percent of African Americans said discrimination against blacks exists in America today. More than half said they’d personally experienced discrimination when applying for jobs (56 percent), and being paid equally or considered for promotion (57 percent). About 60 percent said they or a family member had been “unfairly stopped or treated by the police because they are black.”

Claims of discrimination against whites may be proliferating since Donald Trump’s rise to the presidency. Trump has appeared to at least tacitly support white supremacists. In August, The New York Times reported that his administration was redirecting “resources of the Justice Department’s civil rights division toward investigating and suing universities over affirmative action admissions policies deemed to discriminate against white applicants.”

Trump supporters are more likely than average Americans to believe that whites face “a lot of discrimination,” and are less likely to think that blacks and other minorities are highly discriminated against, according to a 2016 HuffPost/YouGov survey.

Forty-five percent of Trump voters said white people in the U.S. “face a lot of discrimination,” compared with 24 percent of all Americans. Only 22 percent of Trump voters said the same about black Americans.

 

NAACP “Travel Advisory” on American Airlines?

I can think of some real reasons to be pissed off at American Airlines, such as the micro seat sizes and less than stellar flight lounges…

But discrimination?

I don’t think so. Those employees that provide piss poor service on American do so without regard to nationality, race, or religion. Take that from a guy who has flown millions of miles through the years.

Certainly not to say I have not experienced outstanding service and personnel on American. I have met and experienced some really first class treatment by some of the employees of American, as well as the occasional “Bad Egg”. Pretty much the same for all the major carriers, with Delta standing out in my personal experience as being the only major with consistently bad crews.Which is strange because years ago Delta used to be fantastic.

I never fly US Carriers overseas, because foreign carriers tend to have better seats, better food, and better flight crews…Which makes a hell of a difference if you are stuck in that steel tube of 10 or 12 hours or more. Some of the Asian Carriers are out of this world like Singapore.

Did not fly American for years because they hubbed in what I consider to be the worst designed airport in America – DFW. That changed when I worked in Haiti after the earthquake as there were only two US Airports doing flights to Haiti through Miami and 3 carriers. Probably flew about 60-70 flights, counting hops on American. While flying International through Miami (another really crappy airport design) is to be avoided if at all possible – it was the only choice. To my experience American service was consistent, and on at least one memorable occasion exceptional, when flights out of Miami were cancelled due to a fuel tank explosion and everyone was stranded. Bless the American Airlines person who found us a hotel room at 3AM, when hotel rooms were “as scarce as Hen’s teeth”.

NAACP warns travelers about American Airlines

The NAACP issued an unusual warning late Tuesday night.

The civil rights organization issued what it calls a National Travel Advisory for American Airlines after monitoring a pattern of what it calls “disturbing incidents” reported by African-American passengers on the airline.

The NAACP says it’s alerting black travelers to exercise caution because, “booking and boarding flights could cause them disrespectful, discriminatory or unsafe conditions.”

The organization cited four specific incidents in its warning, including one incident involving a woman who was allegedly removed from a flight to Miami because she complained about her seat.

American Airlines spokeswoman Shannon Gilson responded with the following statement.

“We are disappointed to hear about this travel advisory as our team members – a diverse community of gate agents, pilots, and flight attendants – are proud to serve customers of all backgrounds.  Every day American is committed to providing a positive, safe travel experience for everyone who flies with us.

 “We will invite representatives of the NAACP to meet with our team at our headquarters in Fort Worth, Texas.  We are committed to having a meaningful dialogue about our airline and are ready to both listen and engage.”

American Airlines Group is the largest U.S. commercial airline and one of the world’s biggest based on revenue passenger miles and available seat miles.

 

Should Minority Government Employees Sue the Chumph for Discrimination?

Interesting proposal here, just covering black government employees. I think is could also include minimally Hispanic workers.

Why Black Federal Workers Should Sue Donald Trump. Seriously.

The case law on “hostile work environment” defines unlawful harassment very broadly. If Trump were a private-sector CEO, someone would have sued already. Ergo…

Apart from an oddball collection of misfits that includes reality TV star Omarosa Manigault, former Wisconsin sheriff David Clarke, and neurosurgeon Dr. Ben Carson, Donald Trump, for most of his adult life, has displayed an open hostility and contempt toward African Americans.

From the time in the ’70s when Trump was sued by the Department of Justicefor refusing to rent property to black Americans and other minorities to his egregious call for New York to reinstate the death penalty for the so-called Central Park Five to his Obama birtherism right on up to last week’s shameful NFL/Stephen Curry Twitter tirade, he’s been pretty up front with us.

For Trump’s coterie of black “friends” who stand to benefit professionally and financially from their relationship with him, the president’s overt racism is something they can apparently overlook.

But what about the people who aren’t his friends? As president, Trump is the boss of approximately 2.1 million federal employees, 18.1 percent of whom are African Americans. To these 300,000 plus employees, the president’s bigotry is not only hurtful. It creates a hostile work environment.

Hear me out. Federal statutes that prohibit employment discrimination in the workplace define discrimination to include conduct that creates a work environment that is intimidating, hostile or offensive to reasonable people. Types of offensive conduct that has been found actionable by courts include offensive jokes, slurs, epithets, name calling, threats, intimidation, ridicule or mockery, and insults.

Additionally, courts have held that the harasser can be the victim’s supervisor or a supervisor in another area. The victim does not have to be the person harassed, but can be anyone affected by the offensive conduct. And the unlawful harassment may occur without economic injury to, or discharge of, the victim.

Under even the most restrictive reading of federal anti-discrimination laws, Trump’s rhetoric and antics arguably rise to the level of severe and pervasive harassment deemed unlawful by well-established federal case law.

So let’s look at some of Trump’s more recent hostile comments toward African Americans, during the campaign and since he’s been in office.

In September 2015, Trump slammed the Black Lives Matter movement on Fox’s The O’Reilly Factor, casting the group as rowdy agitators. “I think they’re trouble. I think they’re looking for trouble,” Trump told O’Reilly.

Two months later, after his supporters physically attacked a Black Lives Matter protestors at a campaign rally in Alabama, Trump suggested the following day that the attackers were justified. “Maybe [the protester] should have been roughed up,” Trump mused. “It was absolutely disgusting what he was doing.”

Then as president, at a press conference in August 2017, Trump responded to questions about the violence that occurred during protests in Charlottesville by suggesting a moral equivalency between anti-fascist demonstrators on the left, and Nazis and members of the Klan—a group notoriously hostile to African Americans.

“I do think there’s blame on both sides. You look at both sides,” Trump said. “You have some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people on both sides.”

Next, Trump suggested the removal of Confederate statues—monuments honoring men who fought to preserve slavery—were an attack on American culture. “Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments,” Trump said.

And just last week, at another rally in Alabama to support the failing campaign of Senator Luther Strange, Trump doubled down on his comments denouncing African American football players by suggesting an “us” against “them” divide.

“You know what’s hurting the game more than that?” Trump asked an overwhelming white audience. “When people like yourselves turn on television and you see those people taking the knee when they are playing our great national anthem.”

The president’s remarks are the gravamen of a hostile work environment as defined by relevant case law. His insults, threats and demeaning comments don’t just permeate the airwaves and social media sites. They infect the federal workplace and spread like a malignant cancer. These harassing statements dehumanize African Americans and create a two-tier workplace: one where black workers are deemed inferior to whites. They weaken morale and productivity; cause depression; and erode cohesiveness which is critical to all workplaces.

If you still think this is fanciful, consider what would be happening if Trump were the CEO of a corporation. Right now, lawyers would be advising shareholders to brace for a barrage of workplace discrimination suits as they prepared his separation papers in order to protect their employees and eliminate the hostility. Although Trump doesn’t answer to shareholders, he is not above the law.

Ordinarily these employees could seek relief from the civil rights division of the Department of Justice. In this instance, given that its head, Jeff Sessions, has been reluctant to criticize Trump and has a horrific record on civil rights matters, African Americans are in a hellacious bind.

Black federal employees may have no choice but to seek redress from the courts where they may find favor, at least from the handful of federal judges who rejected Trump’s discriminatory Muslim ban.

 

Google Worker – Women Biologically Unable to Advance in Tech

Silicon Valley has always been a boys club. Until recently it was almost exclusively a white boys club – principally changed by an inflow of Asian money.

This is the ugly underbelly of the tech industry out West…

The hysterical woman stereotype – a Hollywood basic for many years

Google worker says women don’t advance in tech because of biology

Silicon Valley faces another tempest over the status of women in the work place, this time at Google (GOOG).

The search giant’s new head of diversity has rejected an internal commentary from an employee who suggested women don’t get ahead in tech jobs because of biological differences.

Danielle Brown, who was named a vice president at the search giant only a few weeks ago, said Google is “unequivocal in our belief that diversity and inclusion are critical to our success,” according to a copy of her response obtained by technology news website Gizmodo.

The employee memo, titled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber,” begins by saying that only honest discussion will address a lack of equity.

But it also asserts that women “prefer jobs in social and artistic areas” while more men “may like coding because it requires systemizing,” fueling a smoldering debate about sexism in Silicon Valley.

“I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership,” the memo stated, according to Gizmodo. “Many of these differences are small and there’s significant overlap between men and women, so you can’t say anything about an individual given these population level distributions.”

The issue of gender has long roiled California’s technology sector. Earlier this year, the U.S. Department of Labor accused Google of underpaying female employees, saying it found “systemic compensation disparities against women” at the company.

In another controversy, a former female engineer’s claims of widespread sexual harassment at Uber in June led the ride-hailing firm to fire more than 20 employees.

In another incident, venture investor Dave McClure was forced to publicly apologize for making “inappropriate advances” toward several women in workplace situations.

 

Airbnb Teams With NAACP to Combat Rental Discrimination

Smart move by Airbnb. Hopeful; the NAACP can help in vexing this natty problem…

Airbnb certainly can’t look to the DOJ for help- Indeed, it is likely the current DOJ leadership will come down on the side of the bigots.

Airbnb teams up with the NAACP to fight racism on its platform

And improve outreach to black communities

Airbnb and the NAACP announced a partnership today to promote the rental service’s platform in communities of color. The move is a way to both boost the sharing economy as an income stream for black Americans and help increase the diversity of hosts to curb discrimination. Airbnb has grappled for years now with racism on its platform, with hosts discriminating against people of color and other minorities both in the US and abroad when deciding who they permit to rent their homes or apartments.

In many cases, racist hosts will deny rental applications from black users or claim the property is booked on the selected dates, only to turn around and rent the property to a white user or leave the dates unbooked. In response to an increasing number of cases documented on social media, Airbnb user Quirtina Crittenden coined the hashtag #airbnbwhileblack last year. It quickly went viral, prompting an outpouring of personal accounts that quickly turned into an public relations nightmare for Airbnb.

This new measure, along with the added assistance of the NAACP, is a signal that Airbnb is continuing to take its fight against racism seriously. “Our fastest-growing communities across major US cities are in communities of color and we’ve seen how home sharing is an economic lifeline for families,” Belinda Johnson, Airbnb’s chief business affairs officer, said in a statement. “This partnership will build on this incredible progress. The NAACP is unrivaled in its tireless work to expand economic opportunities for minority communities and we look forward to collaborating with their talented team.”

As part of the partnership, the NAACP will help Airbnb target communities that could benefit greatly for home-sharing services and the tourism and additional income they provide. Airbnb will also gift 20 percent of its earnings from rentals in these communities to the NAACP, which will return the favor by aiding the company in its workplace diversity efforts. “For too long, black people and other communities of color have faced barriers to access new technology and innovations,” Derrick Johnson, the interim president and CEO of the NAACP, said in a statement. “This groundbreaking partnership with Airbnb will help bring new jobs and economic opportunities to our communities.”

For Airbnb, the existence of racism on its platform is both a PR disaster and a severe economic risk. Last year, the company narrowly avoided a potentially damaging racial discrimination case brought by Greg Selden. Selden, a black man, duped a racist host into accepting an application from a fake account with a white person’s photo after denying his original application, and he sued Airbnb claiming it violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

FOR AIRBNB, RACISM IS A HUGE MORAL AND ECONOMIC THREAT TO ITS BUSINESS

Thanks to a specific clause in its Terms of Service agreement, Airbnb was able to move that case to individual arbitration and avoid a class action suit. Nonetheless, the company released a new non-discrimination policy it calls “The Airbnb Community Commitment” back in October of last year that it makes hosts agree to, and it’s also ramped up efforts to weed out racist hosts and build better protections for users.

Despite those efforts, instances of flagrant racism continue to flare up on Airbnb and make international headlines. Earlier this month, a 26-year-old law clerk named Dyne Suh documented, in a video posted to YouTube, her interactions with host Tami Barker of Big Bear, California. Barker, upon learning that Suh was Asian-American, sent a series of racism-fueled texts saying she was canceling Suh’s reservation because of her ethnicity.

Airbnb promptly banned Barker, refunded Suh, and covered the cost of replacement accommodations, while the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH) stepped in to fine Barker $5,000 and order that she take an Asian-American studies class. The DFEH now has the ability to investigate Airbnb hosts in California with more than three listings for racial discrimination following a landmark agreement with Airbnb in April.

Still, Airbnb can’t possibly regulate the behavior of every one of its hosts every hour of the day. A better solution, it appears, is to simply cater to communities where this discrimination doesn’t occur, and to increase the diversity of hosts to ensure more minorities feel comfortable using Airbnb when they travel.

 

Chumph Airbnb host To Cough Up $5,000 for Trump Laced Tirade in Refusing to Rent to “Asians”

Ouch! This one is going to leave a mark…

You average Trumpazoid on Airbnb.

Trump-loving Airbnb host ordered to pay $5,000 for telling woman she wouldn’t rent to Asians

Tami Barker, an Airbnb host who invoked President Donald Trump’s name when she told a woman that she was cancelling her reservation because she was Asian, has been ordered to pay thousands of dollars in damages for racial discrimination.

The Guardian reports that the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH) ordered Barker to pay out $5,000 to Dyne Suh, a 26-year-old Asian-American law student whose reservation at Barker’s cabin got cancelled earlier this year.

“In addition to paying monetary damages and taking a college-level course in Asian American studies, Barker must agree to comply with anti-discrimination laws, make a personal apology to Suh, participate in a community education panel and volunteer with a civil rights organization,” the Guardian reports.

In messages sent to Suh after cancelling her reservation, Barker wrote that “I wouldn’t rent it to u if u were the last person on earth” and “One word says it all. Asian.” She also explained that “it’s why we have Trump… and I will not allow this country to be told what to do by foreigners.”

Suh, who has lived in the United States for the past 23 years, posted an emotional video earlier this year shortly after her Airbnb reservation got cancelled in which she lamented that many people treated her like “trash” due to her race, despite the fact that she has lived in the United States most of her life.

 

Ageism – The Silent Destruction of the Middle Class

Great video and book –

Elizabeth White has been on the edge of the financial cliff for years, but you’d never know it from outside appearances. “Everybody is pretending,” she says. In her self-published book “Fifty-Five, Unemployed, and Faking Normal” she painfully chronicles the crash of a flourishing career and upper-middle class lifestyle.

Elizabeth in this case is fighting two monsters ageism and racial discrimination.

 

 

Miami, Philadelphia Sue Wells Fargo for Redlining Discriminatory Lending

The largest portion of most Americans wealth is their home. There is a huge “wealth gap” between white Americans and black. No small part of this wealth gap is due to predatory lending, and racial discrimination in loan origination. By refusing loans to black folks and other minorities in certain geographic areas, the bank assures that they can only buy less desirable, and thus less likely to rise in value properties.  So Joe the white guy gets a loan in a fast growing section of the city where property values are rising at 20% a year. Theodore, the black homeowner is limited to buying properties in older sections which are only rising in value a 1-3% a year. Joe winds up with a lot more money in 10 years – because the bank won’t loan to Theodore and defacto segregates the city.

Philadelphia sues Wells Fargo for allegedly discriminating against minority borrowers

The city of Philadelphia sued Wells Fargo on Monday for allegedly discriminating against minority home buyers.

The complaint filed in a federal court in Pennsylvania alleges that Wells Fargo violated the Fair Housing Act of 1968 by “steering” minority borrowers into mortgages that were more expensive and riskier than those offered to white borrowers, according to court documents.

The lawsuit says that Wells Fargo is among the major banks with a “history of redlining” in Philadelphia, a practice traced back to the 1930s that involves denying credit to borrowers in certain communities because of their race or ethnicity.

The complaint says that between 2004 and 2014, African American borrowers were twice as likely to receive high-cost loans when compared to white borrowers with similar credit backgrounds. Latino borrowers were 1.7 times as likely to receive costly loans when compared to white borrowers, the lawsuit claims.

“The city’s unsubstantiated accusations against Wells Fargo do not reflect how we operate in Philadelphia and all of the communities we serve,” Wells Fargo spokesman Tom Goyda said in a statement. “Wells Fargo has been a part of the Philadelphia community for more than 140 years and we will vigorously defend our record as a fair and responsible lender.”

The filing comes as the bank is still recovering from a sales scandal in which bank employees opened millions of unauthorized accounts in customers’ names. The complaint draws parallels between the alleged predatory lending and the problematic sales targets by saying there was a lack of “internal controls” that could have prevented both issues.

Many borrowers were also rejected later when they applied for credit that would have allowed them to refinance those more expensive loans, according to the complaint. As a result, minority borrowers faced higher rates of foreclosure — a pattern that also hurt the city by leading to lower property taxes and more frequent incidents of vandalism and crime, the lawsuit claims.

Monday’s lawsuit comes just two weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that cities have standing to sue banks for predatory lending practices, on the grounds that the cities can also incur financial damages, such as reduced tax revenue.

In that case Miami sued Bank of America and Wells Fargo, arguing that discriminatory lending practices led to higher rates of default for minority borrowers. Miami, which was represented by the same lawyers handling the Philadelphia case, claimed that the banks in turn caused financial harm to the city by leading to lower property taxes and requiring the city to provide services to struggling borrowers.

While the Philadelphia investigation has been underway for more than a year, the city waited until after the Supreme Court ruling to ensure that it would have legal standing to sue, said Benjamin Field, deputy city solicitor for Philadelphia, in an interview.

News of the Philadelphia lawsuit against Wells Fargo was first reported by Reuters.

 

ANOTHER Fox News Lawsuit Grows – Racial Harassment of Black Employees

What has been obvious to a lot of observers for a long time, with the Faux News Network constant stream of on-air racism and vitriol is that it had serious problems, Not just with its on-air personalities, buy down in the very structure of the company.

Bigots hire bigots…and sexual molester stick together.

Bill O’Reilly Is Gone, But Fox News’s Legal Nightmare Continues

The Murdochs hoped firing Bill O’Reilly would signal a changing culture at Fox News. “We want to underscore our consistent commitment to fostering a work environment built on the values of trust and respect,” Rupert and his sons, James and Lachlan, wrote in a memo to Fox News employees on Wednesday. But the dismissal of Fox News’s highest rated host isn’t going to end the crisis at the network. The toxic culture, fostered for 20 years by former CEO Roger Ailes, is proving far more difficult to remedy.

Next week, according to sources, seven black Fox News employees plan to join a racial discrimination suit filed last month by two colleagues. The original lawsuit alleged that Fox News’s longtime comptroller, Judy Slater, subjected members of Fox’s payroll staff to racial insults for years. (Fox News fired Slater in February after those employees began litigation against the network.)

Lawyers representing the payroll employees are demanding that Fox’s accounting director, Tammy Efinger, also be removed from supervising an employee because she allegedly participated in Slater’s racist behavior. In a letter to the network’s lawyers obtained by New York, the attorneys state: “Not once did Ms. Efinger step in or attempt to interfere with Ms. Slater’s outrageous conduct.” The letter adds, instead, “Ms. Efinger chose to laugh or giggle following Ms. Slater’s vitriol.”

The letter also includes new allegations of racism in Fox News’s accounting department. According to the plaintiffs’ attorneys, Slater demanded that black employees hold “arm wrestling matches’” with white female employees in her office, just down the hall from Ailes’s office on the 2nd floor of Fox headquarters. “Forcing a black woman employee to ‘fight’ for the amusement and pleasure of her white superiors is horrifying. This highly offensive and humiliating act is reminiscent of Jim Crow era battle royals,” the letter says, referring to the practice of paying black men to fight blindfolded at carnivals for white spectators’ entertainment. The lawyers argue that Efinger bragged about wanting to “fight” a black employee.

The new claims, if true, reveal not just the failures of the legal and HR departments to deal with problematic managers but also just how deep the culture of discrimination and harassment may have run during Ailes’s reign.

Reached for comment, an attorney representing the employees, Jeanne Christensen, said, “There will be more complaints forthcoming in the next few days.”

A Fox News spokesperson said: “We can’t comment on a lawsuit that we haven’t seen yet.”

 

Yet Another Lawsuit for Faux News for Racist Discrimination

The hits just keep on coming…Pretty much what happens every single day when dealing with the white-wing,

Another Black Employee Sues Fox News for Racial Discrimination

A third employee has sued Fox News alleging racial discrimination. Monica Douglas, a payroll staffer and an African-American, said in the suit that the network’s longtime and recently fired comptroller Judith Slater repeatedly hurled racial slurs at her. The lawsuit alleges that Slater showed “an unwillingness to even be near black people,” and told Douglas that she should not complain to HR because “I am HR.” Slater was fired last month for what was described as “abhorrent behavior.” At the time, Fox said it took action to terminate Slater “within two weeks after this being brought to our attention.” But Douglas’ court filing pushes back on that assertion. She claims she first brought the alleged misconduct to the attention of the network’s general counsel, Dianne Brandi, in 2014.

 

Chumph Enabled Bigotry – Restaurant Owner Won’t Serve Black Patrons

Not sure what planet this bozo lives on – but the courts are still largely intact, and he is facing a huge fine…

Perhaps he needs to lose his Liquor License? Where I am from, you have to obey laws and serve everyone to keep a license. Suggest that first, a complaint to the Liquor Board is in order.

Restaurant owner boots customer for being black: ‘Trump’s president now so I can say what I want’

A Pennsylvania restaurant owner allegedly suggested Donald Trump’s election had given him the right to kick out black customers — and he reportedly used a racial slur to underline his point.

Rickey Lee Bugg Jr., a player on the Lebanon Valley College men’s basketball team, was eating early Sunday morning at Just Wing It in Annville when the owner approached him and some friends, reported Penn Live.

Bugg said he and some friends were the only customers in the restaurant at 1:30 a.m., and he said they were sitting quietly and watching television.

The owner told Bugg to leave, the student said.

“I own three restaurants and I don’t need you n*****s’ money,” the owner said, according to Bugg.

Bugg asked a waitress for their money back, and she agreed — but the owner confronted the students again as they were leaving.

The student admits he flipped some chairs in frustration at that point, and he told the owner, “That’s not the way to treat people.”

The owner, however, justified his behavior, Bugg said.

“Trump’s president now so I can say what I want,” the owner said, according to Bugg. “You n*****s need to get out.”

The students left to find some friends for support and returned to the restaurant to find the owner had called police on them.

Bugg said officers told him that the manager was “known for doing stuff like this.”

Police are continuing to investigate the incident, and the owner has declined the newspaper’s requests for comment.

A Dairy Queen was closed earlier this month after a franchise owner called a customer a racial slur.

 

DOJ Sues JP Morgan for Racial Discrimination

In yet another case that likely will met its end under a Chumph racist administration looking to legalize the practice of Mortgage redlining against Minorities…

The DOJ filed suit today against JP Morgan for its role in charging Minority buyers higher rates then equally credited whites.

The suit claim that the bank charged African-American and Hispanic borrowers more than white borrowers with the same credit profile.

The United States on Wednesday sued JPMorgan Chase & Co, accusing the bank of discriminating against minority borrowers by charging them higher rates and fees on home mortgage loans between 2006 and at least 2009.

Filed in a Manhattan federal court, the government’s complaint accused the bank of violating the U.S. Fair Housing Act and the Equal Credit Opportunity Act by charging thousands of African-American and Hispanic borrowers more for home loans than white borrowers with the same credit profile.

JPMorgan Chase and U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The alleged discrimination involved so-called wholesale loans that were made through mortgagebrokers the bank used to originate loans, the complaint said. Chase allowed brokers to change rates charged for loans from those initially set based on objective credit-related factors, the complaint said.

Chase did not require mortgage brokers to document the reasons for changing rates and failed to address racial discrimination, encouraging it to continue, the complaint said.

 

Black White Wealth Gap in DC…Likely to Get Worse Under the Chumph

Black workers are more likely to be employed in the public sector than are either their white or Hispanic counterparts. In 2011, nearly 20 percent of employed Blacks worked for state, local, or federal government compared to 14.2 percent of Whites and 10.4 percent of Hispanics.

Blacks are 30 percent more likely than nonblacks to work in the public sector, according to the University of California, Berkeley’s Center for Labor Research and Education. And roughly 21 percent of black workers are public employees, compared with 16.3 percent of nonblacks.

So when Putin’s bitch says he is going to “reduce government” who exactly gets hurt here?

George W. Bush (AKA the Bushit) “privatized” significant swaths of the Federal Government by outsourcing jobs to the private sector resulting in “whitening” Government.

More than a third (36.2%) of the Military are Minorities. Depending how you count (multiracial, other, etc) something between 17 and 20% of the US Military is black.

Partially as a result, the “wealth gap” between black and white is very bad in Washington, DC.

In D.C., White Families Are on Average 81 Times Richer Than Black Ones

Other major cities aren’t much better

The wealth discrepancy between blacks and whites is one of the most stark examples of inequality in America. White American families have, on average, around $142,000 in savings and assets, minus debt. Black families’, meanwhile, amounted to only $11,000, according to a 2014 Pew Research study. The gulf between black and white wealth is the worst it has been since the 1980s. Put differently, an average white family has 13 times the wealth of an average black family.

But as though the median numbers for the country as a whole weren’t bad enough, things look much worse in America’s cities, according to a new paperfrom the Urban institute—even cities such as D.C. where the prevalence of public-sector jobs, a large black population, and a high share of black business owners might make it seem like a place that black families could thrive. But in Washington D.C., the median white family has a staggering 81 times as much wealth as the median black family.

D.C. is not an outlier: In general, urban areas have much more severe racial inequalities, in part because of the concentration of white wealthy people, and the fact that their wealth has not “trickled down” to poor and middle-class black families. According to a 2015  National Asset Scorecard for Communities of Colors, D.C.’s racial wealth gap falls just behind Los Angeles’s, where median wealth for whites was closer to 89 times as much as blacks’. In Miami it was 30 times as high; in Tulsa, 18 times.

Darrick Hamilton, a professor at the New School and one of the authors of the Urban Institute’s study—along with fellow economists Kilolo Kijakazi, Rachel Marie Brooks Atkins, Mark Paul, Anne Price, and William A. Darity Jr.—says that while many ethnic groups might do poorly in one city and thrive in another, that’s not the case for black Americans. “No matter what the geographical context is, black Americans are a low-wealth group,” he told me. “I think the disparities are going to be dramatic wherever we look.”

Hamilton says that while the statistics about magnitude are useful for distilling the gap in balance sheets, they do little to capture what the wealth gap means for black families. In practice, less wealth means diminished access to the education and opportunities that help many Americans reach the middle class. Less wealth decreases opportunities for savings, homeownership, and economic security. And limited wealth accumulation also means that parents and grandparents have little to pass along to the next generation—from paying for school to helping with down payments—which dampens opportunities for intergenerational mobility.

D.C.’s wealth inequality stems from a combination of factors. According to the study, homeownership plays a significant role: Whites living in the District are much more likely than blacks to own homes—something that’s true around the country. In the District, whites with less than a high school education were more likely to own their homes than blacks at any education level, even those with college degrees. And for those who do own their own place, home values for black owners were around $250,000, about 30 percent less than the average value for white owners. Blacks in the District have a much higher unemployment rate, lower education rates, and are much more likely to have received a subprime mortgage.

The District’s racial wealth divide has old and deep origins in centuries of racist policies. The authors highlight a few in particular: the “black codes” of the 1840s, which prevented black people from owning successful stores or working in certain professions; the return of land in the District to the South in the 1870s, which decreased opportunities for ownership among newly freed blacks;  the demolition of Barry Farms—a black enclave founded by freed blacks—in the 1940s to make way for public housing and highway projects; the wave of “urban renewal” projects that swept out black businesses and residents in the 1960s and 70s. The effects of these policies have never been adequately dealt with. “Black people in D.C. have faced more than two centuries of deliberately constructed barriers to wealth building, and some of the highest barriers were embedded by design in law,” the study says….More…

 

The New Jim Crow – Louisiana Makes It Illegal for Immigrants to Marry

If you are wondering about the sort of America the alt-right and Trumpazoids would put in place – look no further than Louisiana’s new Jim Crow Marriage law.

Louisiana isn’t letting immigrants get married

New Iberia, La.

For an illustration of how cruel the country’s latest wave of nativism has grown, look to Louisiana.

Here, a little-noticed new state law has effectively made it illegal for thousands of refugees to get married.

It all started last year. Having lost the fight over gay marriage, the state’s religious right decided that the sacred institution of wedlock was once again under attack — this time, by devious immigrants. Undocumented workers and even terrorists had newly discovered they could exploit Louisiana’s marriage laws to gain citizenship, legislators claimed, leading to a supposed epidemic of “marriage fraud.”

The response? Make it more difficult for immigrants to get married, of course.

So, as of this year, any foreign-born person wanting to get married in Louisiana must produce both an unexpired visa (even though a federal court has ruled that marriage licenses cannot be denied based on immigration status), as well as, somewhat inexplicably, a birth certificate.

No birth certificate, no marriage, no excuses.

The law has indeed placed marriage off-limits to immigrants in the country illegally, as intended. But it’s hurt plenty of legal immigrants, too. Louisiana is home to thousands of refugees, predominantly Vietnamese and Laotians who received asylum in the 1970s and 1980s after fleeing war and communism in their homelands.

Today these Louisianans often have green cards and even U.S. citizenship, but no access to their original birth documents, if such documents even exist.

The law received little attention when it went into effect in January. Which means people such as Out Xanamane often learn about it only when they get turned away at the courthouse.

Xanamane was born in a village near Savannakhet, Laos, in 1975, the year the country fell to communism. Born at home, he never received a birth certificate.

He remembers little of his early childhood, except that there were bombs and land mines everywhere. In the decade before his birth, the U.S. military dropped 2 million tons of explosives on the tiny nation, making the country one of the most heavily bombed per capita in history.

Xanamane’s family arrived in Louisiana in 1986, after spending time in refugee camps in Thailand and the Philippines. He has lived in the United States ever since and is now a U.S. permanent resident in the process of applying for citizenship.

It wasn’t until he got sick this summer that his lack of birth certificate was ever an issue.

In July, he was diagnosed with liver cancer, the same illness that claimed his brother’s life two years ago. The diagnosis meant a lot of changes for his family, the most pressing of which was he really, really needed the state to recognize his marriage.

Xanamane and his significant other, U.S.-born citizen Marilyn Cheng, were married in a Buddhist temple in 1997. But like many in the local Laotian community, they never sought an official marriage license, and never felt they needed to. They have called each other “husband” and “wife” for two decades, have four children and assumed they probably had a common-law marriage at the very least.

They didn’t; Louisiana doesn’t recognize common-law marriage.

The couple discovered this when Cheng’s employer, under whose health-insurance plan Xanamane was covered for the past two years, abruptly asked for a copy of their marriage license after bills for his cancer treatments came in. Suddenly all the marriage-related legal protections they’d taken for granted — health coverage, hospital visitation rights, Social Security survivor benefits — vanished.

Within days they went to the courthouse, armed with Xanamane’s green card, refugee documents and driver’s license. Twice they were turned away.

“They told me I have to go back to Laos and get my birth certificate,” said Xanamane, who has never returned to his country of birth. “But there isn’t any birth certificate there, either.”… Read the rest Here…

 

United Nations – The US Owes Reparations

The UN is on a roll this week… The “Racial Terrorism” part is ongoing.

How about some legislation which covers the ground in terms of the Justice System mentioned by Hillary Clinton in the debate last night…

As well as some anti-discrimination laws with teeth.

United Nations: US owes blacks reparations over slavery and ‘racial terrorism’

The United States should give African Americans reparations for slavery, UN experts said Tuesday, warning that the country had not yet confronted its legacy of “racial terrorism.”

Amid a presidential election campaign in which racial rhetoric has played a central role, the UN working group on people of African descent warned that blacks in the US were facing a “human rights crisis.”

This has largely been fuelled by impunity for police officers who have killed a series of black men — many of them unarmed — across the country in recent months, the working group’s report said.

Those killings “and the trauma they create are reminiscent of the past racial terror of lynchings,” said the report, which was presented to the United Nations Human Rights Council on Monday.

Addressing the deeper causes of America’s racial tensions, the experts voiced concern over the unresolved “legacy of colonial history, enslavement, racial subordination and segregation, racial terrorism and racial inequality.”

“There has been no real commitment to reparations and to truth and reconciliation for people of African descent,” the report said.

Working group chairman Ricardo A. Sunga told reporters that the panel believed several models of reparations could work in the US context, including “elements of apology” and a form of “debt relief” to the descendants of enslaved people.

Asked about the campaign and accusations that Republican nominee Donald Trump has made racially inflammatory remarks, Sunga voiced alarm over “hate speech…xenophobia (and) Afrophobia.”

“We are very troubled that these are on the rise,” he added, without naming Trump specifically but calling on officials and “even candidates” to watch their words.

Trump and his camp have denied all racism charges.

In the campaign’s first debate on Monday, Democratic challenger Hillary Clinton accused Trump of launching his campaign on the “racist lie” that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States.

The UN working group visited the several US states in January before producing their final report.