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NEW YORK – A new report reveals that African Americans remain disproportionately excluded from corporate and nonprofit board membership in New York City: Of the 697 directors that sit on the boards of the city’s 25 largest employers, only 5.7 percent are black. The study, by John Morning and national policy center Demos, also surveyed black participation on the boards of 14 premiere cultural institutions in New York City, finding that only 33 of the total 581 directors were African American.
Though President Obama used the event to declare that “women are not a voting bloc,” it’s clear that the White House had the election in mind when it released a new report Friday on women and girls.
When the banking system reached the precipice of a total collapse in 2008, the U.S. government bailed it out with direct cash infusions as well as a system rigged to allow the banks to “earn” their way out of the mess. They were allowed to borrow for nothing and the Fed jacked up returns on invested reserves.
Here we go again. Another round of the game we call Congressional Creep. After months of haggling and debate, Congress finally passes reform legislation to fix a serious rupture in the body politic, and the president signs it into law. But the fight’s just begun, because the special interests immediately set out to win back what they lost when the reform became law.
Corporate accountability campaigns are gaining steam and already racking up victories.This week has seen several stunning victories for direct citizen action. On Wednesday, Coca-cola renounced its membership on the private enterprise board of ALEC, stating that:
Lucky enough to attend college, I sat in a first-year seminar meant to expose students to a variety of both subject matter and viewpoints. To this day I tell people about two books from that course that changed my life. One of those books was the very first overtly feminist book I ever read, Arlie Hochschild’s The Second Shift. This book transformed how I talked about the world and, thus, how I perceived it and engaged it. I became a feminist because caring was a kind of work which was ubiquitous, undervalued, and gendered and, as such, a matter of justice.