Blacks Voted at a Higher Rate than Whites in 2012 Election — A First, Census Bureau Reports – Voting – Newsroom – U.S. Census Bureau

The American electorate is changing and so are our voting patterns.

This is especially interesting since there appears to have been a voter suppression strategy promoted by some Republicans in various parts of the country.

“About two in three eligible blacks (66.2 percent) voted in the 2012 presidential election, higher than the 64.1 percent of non-Hispanic whites who did so, according to a U.S. Census Bureau report released today. This marks the first time that blacks have voted at a higher rate than whites since the Census Bureau started publishing statistics on voting by the eligible citizen population in 1996.

These findings come from The Diversifying Electorate — Voting Rates by Race and Hispanic Origin in 2012 (and Other Recent Elections), which provides analysis of the likelihood of voting by demographic factors, such as race, Hispanic origin, sex, age and geography (specifically, census divisions). The report draws upon data from the November 2012 Current Population Survey Voting and Registration Supplement and looks at presidential elections back to 1996. Using the race definitions from 1968 and the total voting-age population, whites voted at higher rates than blacks in every presidential election between 1968, when the Census Bureau began publishing voting data by race, and 1992.

Blacks were the only race or ethnic group to show a significant increase between the 2008 and 2012 elections in the likelihood of voting (from 64.7 percent to 66.2 percent). The 2012 increase in voting among blacks continues what has been a long-term trend: since 1996, turnout rates have risen 13 percentage points to the highest levels of any recent presidential election. In contrast, after reaching a high in 2004, non-Hispanic white voting rates have dropped in two consecutive elections. Between 2008 and 2012, rates for non-Hispanic whites dropped from 66.1 percent to 64.1 percent. As recently as 1996, blacks had turnout rates 8 percentage points lower than non-Hispanic whites.

Overall, the percentage of eligible citizens who voted declined from 63.6 percent in 2008 to 61.8 percent in 2012.

Both blacks and non-Hispanic whites had voting rates higher than Hispanics and Asians in the 2012 election (about 48 percent each).”

MORE via Blacks Voted at a Higher Rate than Whites in 2012 Election — A First, Census Bureau Reports – Voting – Newsroom – U.S. Census Bureau.

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Heritage Foundation Cuts Ties to Jason Richwine – from The Atlantic Wire

What do barbie dolls and the Heritage Foundation have in common?  Barbie dolls are to sexism as the heritage foundation is to racism —  they both used to be bastions of each ideology but today they appear increasingly useless and irrelevant.

The Atlantic Wire reports that the Heritage Foundation is running for cover as the facts come out about one Jason Richwine, a former Harvard student who wrote his Ph.D. thesis exploring the presumed intellectual inferiority of Hispanics in America.  The Heritage Foundation used the controversial Harvard former student to publish a recent report arguing about the so called costs of immigration for America.

The Heritage Foundation is a conservative think tank born in the aftermath of the Nixon era when America saw itself through the eyes of a popular media, government and academia largely of European ancestry and xenophobia towards all things not “White” or of European origin.  This world view was forged at a time when civil rights at home and Vietnam abroad crushed the former American dream which was forged in a 1950s America which was being torn asunder by hippie kids and non-White civil rights marchers.

Today the modern expression of these reactionary movements are anti immigration, states rights and anti affirmative action diatribes that fly in the face of the facts of an America that needs every once of talent and muscle from its growing “brown majority.”

Recent demographic reports show that Rodriguez is now the most numerous last name held by new born babies in our country.  Tomorrow is here and the Heritage Foundation seems to be trying to cover the overwhelming historical truth with an increasingly ineffective ideological argument about the size of a broken barbie doll umbrella.

 

“Jason Richwine, co-author of a controversial report from the Heritage Foundation that criticized the potential cost of immigration reform, has resigned from the organization. The resignation follows revelations that Richwine’s college dissertation argued that …”

via Heritage Foundation Cuts Ties to Jason Richwine – Philip Bump – The Atlantic Wire.

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The New Sick Man of Europe: the European Union | Pew Global Attitudes Project

European hegemony may no longer be sustainable.  The European economic community is being held together by a fragile piece of paper called the Euro.  Aside from the currency, which a Pew Foundation survey reports is still favored by most European countries, there is little else Europeans agree about or even like about each other.  Perhaps the onslaught of diversity perceived by growing right wing groups is the only glue left to hold Europeans together.  The current economic crisis has seen much conflict and scapegoating regarding immigrants from mostly the African continent; but now Europeans seem to be turning against one another.

“The European Union is the new sick man of Europe. The effort over the past half century to create a more united Europe is now the principal casualty of the euro crisis. The European project now stands in disrepute across much of Europe.

Support for European economic integration – the 1957 raison d’etre for creating the European Economic Community, the European Union’s predecessor – is down over last year in five of the eight European Union countries surveyed by the Pew Research Center in 2013. Positive views of the European Union are at or near their low point in most EU nations, even among the young, the hope for the EU’s future. The favorability of the EU has fallen from a median of 60% in 2012 to 45% in 2013. And only in Germany does at least half the public back giving more power to Brussels to deal with the current economic crisis.

The sick man label – attributed originally to Russian Czar Nicholas I in his description of the Ottoman Empire in the mid-19th century – has more recently been applied at different times over the past decade and a half to Germany, Italy, Portugal, Greece and France. But this fascination with the crisis country of the moment has masked a broader phenomenon: the erosion of Europeans’ faith in the animating principles that have driven so much of what they have accomplished internally.”

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Most Muslims in Region Reject Violence Against Civilians – Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life

The Pew Forum on Religion continues to bring us facts and figures to enlighten our view of the religious world which is often clouded by a sensationalist media and the rose colored lenses of young ambitious journalists trying to move up the career ladder or older ones stuck in yesterday’s phobias and mired in a short and myopic view of a changing modern world where the acts of the few motivate and move the masses through the loud megaphone that is our entertainment driven media establishment…. Read the Pew article and tell us what you think…

“A new Pew Research Center survey report finds high levels of concern about religious extremism among Muslims in the North Caucasus area of Russia and the neighboring Central Asian countries of Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. The survey also finds that few Muslims across the region support the use of violence against civilians in the name of Islam, though there is somewhat more support for suicide bombing and similar violence among Muslims in Kyrgyzstan than in Russia or Kazakhstan.”

via Most Muslims in Region Reject Violence Against Civilians – Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

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Equating Islam with terrorism – chicagotribune.com

When the media feeds xenophobia, sensationalism, ethnocentrism and religious bigotry, the crazies and the extremists win.  The crazies and the extremists are such a minute minority but their acts are so big and their intentions are to cloud our judgement and make us crazy.  The media’s handling of these acts magnifies them and makes these pitiful bigots super heroes, if evil ones.  They become larger than life and feed our need to catch and conquer the proverbial boogyman.  Read the following article by a Chicago journalist for some clarity and what is happening to us every time we over state the role of religion in violent acts that are perpetrated by people who in the end are not very religious at all…

“Before we knew anything about the dead Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev, we knew that he “recently became a devout Muslim who prayed five times a day.” This piece of information was placed in the lead of an Associated Press article published as the police were still on the hunt for Tsarnaev’s younger brother and alleged accomplice, Dzhokhar.

As the day went on with increasing panic and an intensifying sense of terror emanating from television and computer screens across America, and news outlets scrambled to release sound bites and tweetable articles with any information they could scrounge up on …”

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Social policies: Time to scrap affirmative action | The Economist

Affirmative action rears its ugly head once again as the usually intellectually rigorous London Economist magazine publishes an article (link below) making an argument on the deleterious effects of affirmative action policies for beneficiaries, institutions and societies in general.

The main problem with the article is that it sees people of color (or ethnic minorities) as both the “weak classes” and the beneficiaries of these policies.  The article writer fails to understand that a good number of people belonging to the so called “majority” or “white” as the article calls them, are also tremendously disadvantaged and cyclically in poverty by region and sometimes by religious group or region of the country (Catholics compared to Episcopalians and people from the Appalachia region compared to New Yorkers).

The overwhelming majority of people in America are so called “White.”   Poverty is not simply a skin color problem.  Affirmative action is not perfect and plenty of examples can be found of cases in which it is abused or inappropriately taken advantage of.  This does not mean that there’s no need to address historical differences between groups that have experienced circumstances which precluded their development in the educational and business fields, for example.

When  society invests in the children of the poor to ensure that future generations can continue to prosper and contribute to society in greater ways we all benefit.

When specific groups have been locked out for so long that lack of education, sophistication or opportunity defines their relationship to society, then society has a responsibility to address that condition.  Whether we see that “responsibility” as a moral or as a self interested proposition, does not really matter.  The fact is that when societies invest in their citizens they benefit all of society and improve their lot vis a vis other societies who experience the drag and social dislocation caused by an underclass.  The following article in the Economist fails to understand this simple logic.  Read it and tell us what you think?

“ABOVE the entrance to America’s Supreme Court four words are carved: “Equal justice under law”. The court is pondering whether affirmative action breaks that promise. The justices recently accepted a case concerning a vote in Michigan that banned it, and will …”

via Social policies: Time to scrap affirmative action | The Economist.

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Man accused in case of poison-laced letters has history of legal and other troubles – The Washington Post

Looking for evil in all the wrong places…

The media repeatedly expected them to be “dark Middle Eastern.” The Boston Bombers and the poisoned letter sender are not only “home grown” they all appear to be “home boys!”

“The Mississippi man charged with threatening the lives of President Obama, a U.S. senator and a Mississippi judge by mailing them poison-laced letters had grandiose ambitions as an Elvis impersonator, believed that government drones were ….”

via Man accused in case of poison-laced letters has history of legal and other troubles – The Washington Post.

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Malden woman attacked by man accusing Muslims of Marathon bombings – Metro – The Boston Globe

No one ever talks about it.  It is taboo.  Or perhaps, it is not important in our mostly Western European culture.

As we have developed a culture of fear, xenophobia, and antipathy towards foreigners, we have begun to kill our American Dream.  We dislike people who look poorly dressed, “dark,” or otherwise not like “us.”  We forget, or perhaps our history books don’t explain and our grandparents did not share, that most people who came through Elis Island came here with few  belongings, lived in very modest quarters and felt as isolated and alienated as today’s monolingual and “lost in America” recent immigrant population.

Mexicans, Haitians, Pakistanis, Egyptians, Puerto Ricans, many, many, groups are portrayed as “less than American” and continue to be seen as different from the mainstream ideal.  An ideal that may now be shattered after the savages who attacked innocent people in Boston.  The facts are developing at this time.  But the monsters in the two FBI photos are nothing like the “dark guy” ridiculously and irresponsibly described by CNN’s John King with Wolf Blitzer supporting.

“I want to be very careful about this, because people get very sensitive when you say these things,” King said Wednesday. “I was told by one of these sources who is a law enforcement official that this is a dark-skinned male.”

America is now more diverse than ever.  It’s mainstream leadership is woefully out of touch with the silent growing segment of the population that is destined to inherit our tomorrow.

The Boston Globe reported a story that confirms the damage mainstream media does to our fabric when they echo the fears and phobias suffered by less educated Americans…  By less educated we don’t mean did not go to College–we mean people who were raised and educated by parents and schools that failed.  Some of these people have high degrees and are millionaires who lead our nightly broadcasts…

“Every day, Heba Abolaban of Malden checks on her family in war-strafed Syria, where water, bread and electricity are in short supply. She was far more worried about them than about herself on Wednesday morning when she put her baby daughter in a stroller and headed into the sunshine to a play group with a friend.But as they strolled down Commercial Street, an angry-faced man charged toward the petite woman, his hand balled into a fist. He punched her hard in the shoulder and screamed curses inches from her face. Then he pointed at her and …”

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Immigration reform: Getting there | The Economist

The most powerful force behind immigrant reform is Hispanic Americans who are here legally or were born here and can all vote…  This group is greatly impacted by actions against immigrants which they see closely connected with their own identity and perhaps their political interests.

Whatever happens through the mechanics of Congress it remains clear that Hispanic public opinion, ever growing and important, is clear on the side of welcoming Hispanic immigrants no matter how they got here, who want to work towards the American dream.

The London Economist lays out the political machinations on the Hill and asserts that the Hispanic vote is a force to be reckoned with.

“EVERY major policy issue has been resolved,” declared Charles Schumer, one of eight senators seeking to draft a bipartisan bill to reform America’s immigration system. The “Gang of Eight”, he continued, would unveil their proposal in days; it would putter through the

via Immigration reform: Getting there | The Economist.

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G.O.P. Opposition to Immigration Law Is Falling Away – NYTimes.com

Latino population growth, touted by some and warned by others for decades now, is finally a tangible reality.  The impact of demographic change and the potential that it is having on workforce, consumer and political markets is the subject of much conversation these days and it is finally breaking the xenophobic fever of some in the Republican establishment, traditionally more liberal, and even on the fringe…

“Republican opposition to legalizing the status of millions of illegal immigrants is crumbling in the nation’s capital as leading lawmakers in the party scramble to halt eroding support among Hispanic voters — a shift that is …”

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Second-Generation Americans | Pew Social & Demographic Trends

You know what they say about statistics.  When aggregating and analyzing statistics and what they tell us about social trends, we must be careful because the devil is always in the details…. It depends what we are comparing to what…  Of course that second generation is doing well compared to their struggling first generation, “off the boat” parents–but there is some truth that coming to America can still be somewhat of a dream.. You be the judge.  Read the Pew Foundation’s work on Second-Generations …

“Second-generation Americans—the 20 million adult U.S.-born children of immigrants—are substantially better off than immigrants themselves on key measures of socioeconomic attainment, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data. They have higher incomes; more are college graduates and homeowners; and fewer live in poverty. In all of these measures, their characteristics resemble those of the full U.S. adult population.

Hispanics and Asian Americans make up about seven-in-ten of today’s adult immigrants and about half of today’s adult second generation. Pew Research surveys find that the second generations of both groups are much more likely than the immigrants to speak English; to have friends and spouses outside their ethnic or racial group, to say their group gets along well with others, and to think of themselves as a “typical American.””

MORE via Second-Generation Americans | Pew Social & Demographic Trends.

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Presidential voting: Moving the goalposts | The Economist

Modern politics, buoyed by the mainstream media, social media and cultural wars is proving to  be quite a challenge to the preservation of good old fashion things like “equal representation,” “equal rights,” “fairness,” and civic engagement.  Elections seem to be getting nastier, or at least the sides are getting increasingly divided along class and racial lines.  This is anathema to any conception of an America that is for and by the people and a beacon to a world that is also increasingly diverse.

 

The demographic quagmire that is increasingly apparent regarding who is eligible to vote and who is needed for victories on each side of the two party system, is proving problematic for those who take a business approach to electioneering–take no prisoners style marketing, control voter turnout and get your candidate elected.

The London Economist takes its Euro-Centric view of the American political landscape which is always worth looking at:

“IN NEARLY every political race in a democracy, the rules are simple: the candidate that gets the most votes wins. The American presidency is a notable exception: four times in the past 200 years the loser of the popular vote has taken the oath of office. For three of those four cases blame the Electoral …”

via Presidential voting: Moving the goalposts | The Economist.

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