In May of 2009, Harvard University researchers Devah Pager, Bruce Western, and Naomie Sugie released the results of a large scale field experiment conducted in New York City about the effects of race and a prison record on a job applicant's prospects of employment.
The study first determined that a criminal record reduces an evenly matched candidate's chances of being called back for a second interview or hired for a job by as much as fifty percent. The second finding of the study was that the stigma attached created approximately double the penalty for blacks, a 60 percent less chance of of a callback or hiring for a black applicant, while a 30 percent less chance of a callback or hiring for white applicant.
The report from the study also showed another more disturbing fact, that while a black non-offender had an approximately 25 percent chance overall of receiving a callback or job offer, a white offender had a 22 percent chance of receiving a callback or job offer.
The results of the study can be seen here:
http://scholar.harvard.edu/...
The candidates in this study were all recent college graduates seeking entry level employment, which clearly exposes an enormous problem creating a significant economic drag on the United States. It also exposes an underlying economic problem in the country which fuels as much of the frustrations expressed by protestors of police actions in places like Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore Maryland as the problem of over policing and police brutality.
23 years ago yesterday Los Angeles, California erupted into riots and protests when officers were acquitted in the savage video taped beating of Rodney King. At the time, King who was arrested for Driving Under the Influence of Alcohol was also demonized because he was on parole for a prior robbery conviction. In the midst of the riots which resulted in 53 deaths King urged calm and a return to normalcy for the city which soon happened after the national guard was deployed throughout the city.
The problem of police brutality has not improved since the riots of 1992, and the economic problems which undergirded the racial element of the policing problem in America's inner cities has only gotten worse.
In 1990, fifty percent of clothing sold by US retailers carried the Made in the USA label. Today only 2% of clothing sold by US retailers carries the Made in the USA label. Of course the North American Free Trade Agreement, which was implemented and signed into law by Bill Clinton, despite the fact that he could have canceled it by executive order, along with the US participation in the World Trade Organization which the United States joined on January 1, 1995, also under the leadership of Bill Clinton, had a lot to do with the end of the American textile and clothing industry. In May of 1994, Bill Clinton reversed his campaign position on trade with China and granted that totalitarian regime Most Favored Nation trading status which significantly reduced the obstacles to importing good from China and ultimately flooded US retail shelves with inexpensive Chinese made goods. Unfortunately the American textile industry is not the only one to disappear as a result of Bill Clinton's disastrous trade policies, and unfortunately for many overseas workers, that trade policy did not come with protections for workers rights.
Yes, He is a Comedian, but Mr. Oliver generally gets his facts right, so if you need confirmation about 50% of clothing sold in the US in 1990 bearing the Made in the USA label while today, only 2 percent bears the label, here you go. You might also find it interesting that these trade policies are not creating a workers paradise for those replacing Americans in the textile industry.
https://www.youtube.com/...
The History of NAFTA:
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
Facts about WTO Membership:
https://www.wto.org/...
Clinton reversed Chinese Most Favored Nation trading status:
http://tech.mit.edu/...
At the time Clinton granted China Most Favored Nation trading status, some economists suggested that the Chinese market would create a substantial opportunity for US business as an export market, and US exports to China have grown from $8 Billion in 1994 to $120 billion in 2013. The Chinese market is the third largest for US exports behind Canada and Mexico, the participants in NAFTA. US trade with Canada and Mexico increased from $338 Billion before NAFTA to $1.2 Trillion today, but most importantly this new relationship has exacerbated a trade deficit for the United States.
Today the United States has a trade good deficit of more than $90 billion annually, with Canada and Mexico, accounting for 28% of the US trade deficit. The US does have a trade services surplus of about $28 billion dollars with Canada and Mexico, but the AFL-CIO estimates that NAFTA has cost the US economy approximately 700,000 manufacturing jobs.
In the final days of his Presidency in 2000 Bill Clinton granted China permanent normalized trade relations with the United States by making the Most Favored Nation trading status initial granted in 1994 permanent, which was a necessary prerequisite for China's entry into the World Trade Organization.
Unfortunately, while the US sells China about $120 billion worth of goods annually, China sells the United States about $420 billion in goods from China annually, leaving the country with a $300 billion trade deficit to that nation. Before most favored nation status was granted to China, most of those $420 billion in goods were manufactured in the United States, or by one of our allies competing with relatively similar protections for workers' rights, and similar environmental protections. The Chinese government exacerbates this problem by artificially lowering the price of Chinese good an additional 25% through currency manipulation.
Currency manipulation alone cost the US economy between 200,000 and 3,000,000 jobs during the first decade of this century, and the US-China trade relationship in general cost US manufacturing 6 million jobs and helped to cause the shuttering of 50,000 US factories in the decade following Clinton's implementation of these disastrous trade policies.
George W. Bush had every opportunity to use executive authority to undue these bad trade policies and certainly had enough members of his party in the House and Senate at the start of his term to reverse these trade policies if he had wanted to do so. The blame should not be placed solely at the feet of Bill Clinton, but the policies started on his watch. Much like the Cold War policies of Harry Truman resulted in the peaceful resolution of that standoff with Communism in Europe 40 years later during the first Bush Presidency, Bill Clinton bears a considerable portion of the blame for his abysmal trade policy.
Some further reading on the effects of currency manipulation and the China trade policy:
http://www.nytimes.com/...
While more than 50,000 factories closed in the United States during the last decade, some people theorize this is because of increased efficiencies in American manufacturing, more than the outsourcing of US manufacturing. Of course these people then explain that it is because component manufacturing is often occurring overseas. Component manufacturing that used to occur in the United States.
You can read more about that here:
http://news.thomasnet.com/...
But what does the decline of the US manufacturing base have to do with the exacerbated problems of policing in America's inner cities.
6 million manufacturing jobs have been lost. That means a lot of high quality jobs that meant a path into the middle class for workers regardless of their skin color have vanished. It means about 8 other jobs that each of those workers would have created as their paychecks recycled their way through their communities have been lost as well.
When you consider the effects of race on hiring practices discussed earlier, it becomes obvious why the sentiments regarding policing in America's inner cities is only the tip of the iceberg of what is happening in Baltimore.
The causal links between disaffected, unemployed youth in the Middle East and North Africa that lead to the Arab Spring, and which many cite as an underlying cause for international terrorism is hardly something for debate, yet somehow disaffected, unemployed youth in America becoming disgruntled and demanding serious systemic change in both policing policies which effect their communities and economic policies which impact those policing policies is labeled as absurd.
Note a recent Foreign Policy piece on the causal links in North Africa between economics and jidhadism:
http://foreignpolicy.com/...
Of course the problem is made worse because of issues pointed out by a decorated DEA officer in the video linked below:
https://www.youtube.com/...
The lead drug enforcement agency in the country as a matter of policy was not targeting the communities with the highest level of drug use for investigations and raids, but the economically disadvantaged and politically disaffected communities in America's inner cities, specifically because the wealthy white voters in the suburbs would use their political connections to end the DEA if enforcement was effecting those communities.
The focus of police powers on the economically disadvantaged communities and in particular communities with less access to political leaders and the power brokers of American society is precisely why the police have been able to overstep the bounds of decency and get away with the tactics which are now being questioned in Baltimore.
The communities which lost ground economically were the first to be targeted for aggressive policing with drug policy.
Of course if you consider the findings that this article began with, and throw in the fact that good jobs disappeared from the community altogether for people, the odds of leaving poverty by pursuing the right path, i.e. going to school, being a good citizen, and finding a good job, leave many in debt with student loans they are unable to pay because they are unable to find work, while the people in their age cohort who live outside the law dealing drugs have a better chance of climbing the economic ladder, provided they are not arrested.
Of course the threat of arrest is very real in the black community at any given time, but insult is added to injury for those young black men who are trying to do the right thing, yet remain unable to find a job when policies such as stop and frisk remain a regular part of police procedure.
In New York City, since 2002 New Yorkers have been subjected to stop and frisk searches more than 5 million times. Of those searched, nearly ninety percent have been completely innocent. More than fifty percent of those New Yorkers stopped were black. Only approximately eleven percent of those stopped were white. Given the demographic makeup of the population of the city, this means almost every young black man in the city has been stopped and frisked at some point and about 9 out of 10 times, there was absolutely no reason to bother these citizens.
http://www.nyclu.org/...
Between the tactics of federal police, and the tactics of local law enforcement it is obvious that police resources and attention have been disproportionately trained on the black community. Of course the question becomes why?
Again, Bill Clinton had a hand in bad policy.
During Clinton's presidency while US manufacturing was leaving for overseas, a portion of US manufacturing was moving behind prison walls. If you want to know what percentage of the US War Machine's material is manufactured behind prison walls this article is edifying.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/...
While the prison factories are generating windfall profits for some American corporations as part of the new Jim Crow and the new slave system, Prisons are also creating about 800,000 jobs directly for guards. These jobs help prop up poor white rural communities which like their inner city counterparts have lost manufacturing jobs.
Some information on the numbers:
http://www.cnbc.com/...
An analysis of new prison construction, in particular in my home state of New York by the Atlantic shows how prisons have benefited poor rural communities.
http://www.theatlantic.com/...
Essentially the drug laws have been a method of removing the unemployed black youth from the streets during America's recent deindustrialization, while providing America's poor white rural population with jobs to replace the jobs lost at the factories.
Bill Clinton was not solely to blame for America's prison industrial complex, but his actions in office helped to accelerate the growth of the United States prison population.
To this day, Bill Clinton is proud of the fact that he helped to add 100,000 more police to suppress already oppressed communities in America's inner cities because he mistakenly believes it was a significant contributor to the decline in the crime rate.
Of course Freakonomics suggest there may have been other causes which significantly contributed to the decline in the crime rate of the 1990s that had nothing to do with additional police on the streets, such as the legalization of abortion, and the reduced population of unwanted children reaching adulthood twenty years after Roe v. Wade, but Bill Clinton still proudly boasts about reducing crime by adding more police to the streets.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
My analysis of the lip service Secretary Clinton is paying to wealth inequality and issues such a police brutality remind me of her husband's positions on trade with China which were completely reversed after he was elected.
Of course, Secretary Clinton has some sins of her own to answer for, such as reversing herself on the bankruptcy reforms which helped the big banks at the expense of consumers that will be difficult to explain if challengers call her out.
http://www.nationaljournal.com/...
I just wonder if anyone will ever do a serious analysis of how much Walmart as a retailer benefited from the Clinton trade policies which undermined their competitors who sold higher quality American goods at higher prices like Sears, JC Penney, Montgomery Ward and point out that Hillary Clinton was a Walmart Board Member. I also wonder what percentage of the family's estimated $100 million fortune is related to Walmart stock.