The Curry Report

March 6, 2011

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In This Issue

The Misinformation Campaign Against Public Employees

Teachers Wonder, Why the Scorn?

Libyan rebels accused of targeting blacks

Braun's defeat signals end of black power movement in Chicago

Predictably, conservatives distort Holder's testimony on New Black Panthers Case

Washington: the 'blackest name' in America

The Chance to Get History Right

Indomitable Russell Values One Accolade Above the Rest

The Ghosts of Mississippi

Love Isn't Color-Blind: White Online Daters Spurn Blacks

The Misinformation Campaign Against Public Employees

By George E. Curry

NNPA Columnist

After listening to the governor of Wisconsin and financially illiterate journalists, its easy to gain the impression that city, county, state and federal employees are overpaid slouches who benefit from hefty pension and generous retirement benefits funded by unsuspecting taxpayers.

Such a conclusion, however, is grossly inaccurate.

Many of the misperceptions about government workers stem from the heated debate in Wisconsin over whether the state should limit the collective bargaining power of state employees. One constant refrain is that public employees are overpaid.

According to an analysis of recent census data by the New York Times, public employees enjoy a pay advantage over those working in the private sector, but not because of the reasons cited by opponents of collective bargaining.

"The Times's analysis found that over all, median wages for state workers exceeded that of private sector workers in all but three states - Indiana, Missouri and New Hampshire," the newspaper reported.

"Those numbers, however, can be deceptive. State workers tend to be more highly educated than those in the private sector: More than half of state workers have college degrees, compared to just over one-quarter of those in the private sector. Researchers have also said that states tend to employ few high school dropouts."

In Wisconsin, the epicenter for the debate over public employees, government pay exceeds private sector pay by 22 percent. But more than 60 percent of state workers hold college degrees.

Public workers are paid 4 to 11 percent less than private-sector workers with similar education, job tenure, and other characteristics, according to the Center for State & Local Government Excellence.

The Center on Budget and Policy reports that teachers make up the largest share of local and state government workers, totalling 6.9 million, followed by protective services (law enforcement officers and fire fighters) with 2.5 million, higher education (2 million) and health (1.4 million).

Some experts project that pension shortfalls will reach as high as $3.2 trillion this fiscal year. However, Dean Baker of the Center for Economic Policy & Research, dismisses that likelihood.

"....It is worth noting that the size of the shortfall in many of these funds has likely already been reduced as a result of the fact that the stock market has continued to recover from its downturn in 2008 and 2009," he said.

Part of the debate over public employees is based on raw politics.

"In many states, Republicans who came to power in the November elections, often by defeating union-backed Democrats, are taking aim not only at union wages, but union power as they face budget gaps in the years ahead," the New York Times reported.

Wisconsin is one of those states.

"On paper, Wisconsin might seem an unlikely candidate for an assault on unions," a story in the February 18 New York Times observed. "Like many other states, it has grappled with large spending gaps during the economic downturn, but its projected deficits for the next two years are nowhere near the worst in the country - more like the middle of the pact. Its 7.5 percent unemployment rate is below the national average. Its pension fund is considered one of the healthiest in the nation, and it is not suffering from huge shortfalls that other states are facing."

Perhaps the most misleading aspect of the debate is that Wisconsin is giving state employees something that they have not earned.

David Cay Johnson destroys that myth in a column posted on www.tax.com.

"When it comes to improving public understanding of tax policy, nothing has been more troubling than the deeply flawed coverage of the Wisconsin state employees' fight over collective bargaining," he writes. "Economic nonsense is being reported as fact in most of the news reports on the Wisconsin dispute, the product of a breakdown of skepticism among journalists multiplied by their lack of understanding of basic economic principles."

He continued, "Gov. Scott Walker says he wants state workers covered by collective bargaining agreements to 'contribute more' to their pension and health insurance plans. Accepting Gov. Walker's assertions as fact, and failing to check, created the impression that somehow the workers are getting something extra, a gift from taxpayers. They are not.

"Out of every dollar that funds Wisconsin's pension and health insurance plans for state workers, 100 cents comes from the state workers. How can that be? Because the 'contributions' consist of money that employees chose as deferred wages - as pensions when they retire - rather than take immediately in cash. The same is true with the health care plan. If this were not so a serious crime would be taking place, the gift of public funds rather than payment for services."

Johnson provides this simple analysis: "...State workers are not being asked to simply 'contribute more' to Wisconsin's retirement system (or as the argument goes, 'pay their fair share' of retirement costs as do employees in Wisconsin's private sector who still have pensions and health insurance). They are being asked to accept a cut in their salaries so that the state of Wisconsin can use the money to fill the hole left by tax cuts and reduced audits of corporations in Wisconsin."

George E. Curry, former editor-in-chief of Emerge magazine and the NNPA News Service, is a keynote speaker, moderator, and media coach. He can be reached through his Web site, www.georgecurry.com You can also follow him at www.twitter.com/currygeorge.

Teachers Wonder, Why the Scorn?

By Trip Gabriel

March 2, 2011

The jabs Erin Parker has heard about her job have stunned her. Oh you pathetic teachers, read the online comments and placards of counterdemonstrators. You are glorified baby sitters who leave work at 3 p.m. You deserve minimum wage.

"You feel punched in the stomach," said Ms. Parker, a high school science teacher in Madison, Wis., where public employees' two-week occupation of the State Capitol has stalled but not deterred the governor's plan to try to strip them of bargaining rights.

Ms. Parker, a second-year teacher making $36,000, fears that under the proposed legislation class sizes would rise and higher contributions to her benefits would knock her out of the middle class.

"I love teaching, but I have $26,000 of student debt," she said. "I'm 30 years old, and I can't save up enough for a down payment" for a house. Nor does she own a car. She is making plans to move to Colorado, where she could afford to keep teaching by living with her parents.

Around the country, many teachers see demands to cut their income, benefits and say in how schools are run through collective bargaining as attacks not just on their livelihoods, but on their value to society.

Libyan rebels accused of targeting blacks

Gaddagi

By David Zucchino

March 4, 2011

Reporting from Benghazi, Libya

About a dozen African men stood lined along a hallway of the courthouse in the eastern city of Benghazi. The men were suspected of being mercenaries fighting on behalf of Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi and had been rousted from their homes in the morning, turned in by residents responding to a rebel campaign urging them to report "suspicious people."

We are construction workers, one of the men said, pleading his innocence to a Times reporter visiting the courthouse, which now serves as the headquarters of the rebel government.

But the interview was abruptly ended and the group of Africans were led away to detention by Muhammed Bala, who described himself as a security officer for the rebel government.

"We're out looking for mercenaries every day," Bala said.

Across eastern Libya, rebel fighters and their supporters are detaining, intimidating and frequently beating African immigrants and black Libyans, accusing them of fighting as mercenaries on behalf of Kadafi, witnesses and human rights workers say.

Braun's defeat signals end of black power movement in Chicago

Carol Moseley Braun

By Mary Mitchell

February 23, 2011

Carol Moseley Braun's stunning defeat signals the end of the black political empowerment movement in Chicago.

And the end wasn't pretty.

Rahm Emanuel won big in predominantly black wards across the city, just as Mayor Daley did when a black candidate dared run against him. In fact, Braun, with 9 percent of the vote, fared worse against Emanuel than any black challenger did against Daley:

R. Eugene Pincham (25.1 percent) in 1991; Roland Burris (36.3 percent) in 1995; Bobby Rush (28.1 percent) in 1999; Paul Jakes (14 percent) in 2003, and Dorothy Brown (20.1 percent) in 2007.

But the strategy of bloc voting based on race changed dramatically when Barack Obama was elected president. Although Obama was loathe to talk about race, black people understood the significance of electing the first black man to the highest political office in the country.

Obama didn't have to say anything. He just had to be. And from that point on, race became a bad word in elections.

Although Braun accepted the consensus candidate mantle bestowed upon her by a coalition of black business and civic leaders, clergy and activists, the role never fit.

By Adam Serwer

March 2, 2011

Testifying before a House appropriations subcommittee two days ago, Attorney General Eric Holder told Texas GOP Rep. John Culberson he was offended by Culberson's suggestion that the New Black Panther voter intimidation case was comparable to the discrimination faced by blacks in the South during Jim Crow. In so doing, he used the phrase "my people."

As expected, conservatives grossly mischaracterized Holder's comments, suggesting that what Holder was actually saying was that civil rights laws don't protect white people

Washington: the 'blackest name' in America

By Jesse Washington

February 27, 2011

George Washington's name is inseparable from America, and not only from the nation's history. It identifies countless streets, buildings, mountains, bridges, monuments, cities - and people.

In a puzzling twist, most of these people are black. The 2000 U.S. Census counted 163,036 people with the surname Washington. Ninety percent of them were African-American, a far higher black percentage than for any other common name.

The Chance to Get History Right

Confederate flag

By Lee A. Daniels

February 26, 2011

There they go again ...

Determined not to let morality or the truth stand in the way of a Big Lie, the Sons of Confederate Veterans are continuing their celebration of the founding of the doomed, treasonous Confederacy 150 years ago. Last week in Montgomery, Alabama they staged a re-enactment of the inauguration of Jefferson Davis, the first and only president of the breakaway regime.

As usual with celebrations of the Confederacy, the event was steeped in half-truths, glib evasions and outright falsehoods whose purpose was to obscure the Confederacy's tawdry reality with a gauzy fake nostalgia.

By George Vecsey

© New York Times

February 12, 2011

Personal honors never meant much to Bill Russell, one of America's most successful athletes, with 2 college titles, 1 Olympic gold medal and 11 - count 'em, 11 - N.B.A. championships with the Boston Celtics.

He has never visited the Basketball Hall of Fame, where he was the first black N.B.A. player enshrined, in 1975. He has his reasons; he always does.

The Ghosts of Mississippi

By Vern Smith

March 4, 2011

Wharlest Jackson Jr. is a big man, well over six feet tall and 200 pounds. But to listen to him speak of his namesake, Wharlest Jackson Sr., is to witness the strapping adult reduced to the weeping eight-year-old boy who rode his bicycle to the scene of a powerful car bomb in the spring of 1967 in Natchez, Miss. and discovered that the victim was his own father.

"I still get emotional when I talk about it, the stress of it," he said. I spoke with the younger Jackson shortly after a screening in Natchez last week of filmmaker Keith Beauchamp's documentary about Jackson, "The Secrets of Natchez," the opening episode of "The Injustice Files," his new weekly series on the Investigative Discovery Channel about the still unsolved murders of the Civil Rights Era.

Jackson, a Korean war veteran and father of five children, was treasurer of the NAACP Natchez chapter. He had defied the unwritten tradition inside the Armstrong Tire Co. where he worked by taking a new job paying 17 cents a hour more in wages that had always been filled by white men.

By Bonnie Rochman

February 22, 2011

Interracial romance is nowhere near the eyebrow-raising phenomenon it used to be. In the past four decades, the pendulum of approval has swung from three-to-one opposed to three-to-one in favor. But though love may be blind, it's still not really color-blind. New stats from more than 1 million online daters show that whites mostly stick with whites and rarely respond to overtures from potential black love interests.