Sunday, May 4, 2014

NYC Liberals Talk The Talk But Don't Walk The Walk

From The New York Times, NY Region, "Exposing the Hypocrisies of the New York Liberal" by Ginia Bellafante:
Today we find ourselves in the midst of a different, inverted paradox, one that makes it possible for whole news cycles to be given over to the luridly disgraceful words of someone like Donald Sterling while we are able comparatively to ignore a study like the one released in March, from U.C.L.A.’s Civil Rights Project, ranking New York as the state with the country’s most segregated schools. Greatly affecting that ranking, the study pointed out, were the demographics of public education in New York City where, despite the primacy of liberal values, the percentage of schools in which at least nine-tenths of the students were black or Hispanic rose sharply from 1989 to 2010.
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Beyond language, there are other necessary avenues for progressives’ self-examination. On April 30, James Parrott, chief economist of the Fiscal Policy Institute, testified before a City Council committee on the need for the city to be able to set its own minimum wage. Among the statistics he provided: While half of all workers in retail, leisure and hospitality are low-wage, the largest sector employing that cohort in New York City is the nonprofit world, specifically, he said, in education, health and social services. One in four low-wage workers is employed by this sector, whose agencies are often under contract with the city to provide child care services, youth programs and so on. Among social assistance sector workers, 42 percent make less than $14 an hour, while a quarter make less than $10. Sometimes benevolence must begin with your own bookkeeping.

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