Childrens' Defense Fund Report Documents America's "Cradle to Prison Pipeline"

America's Cradle to Prison Pipeline

This CDF report documents America's Cradle to Prison Pipeline, an urgent national crisis at the intersection of poverty and race that puts Black boys at a one in three lifetime risk of going to jail, and Latino boys at a one in six lifetime risk of the same fate. Tens of thousands of children and teens are sucked into the Pipeline each year.

The report includes:
an overview of the major factors behind the Pipeline through stories and statistics and longer term policy goals.
Time Magazine Steve Liss’s moving photographs that show the faces of children in the Pipeline.
Julia Cass and Connie Curry’s case studies describing how the Pipeline affects children on the ground in Mississippi and Ohio at one point in time.
calls for the hard work and persistence needed to build a transforming movement to finish the work begun by the Civil Rights Movement and Dr. King’s Poor People’s Campaign to put the social and economic foundations beneath all children and families.
descriptions of some promising approaches to help keep children out of the Pipeline and research tables and state-by-state data of key child indicators

READ THE FULL REPORT

http://www.childrensdefense.org/site/PageServer?pagename=c2pp_report2007#report

Executive Excess 2007 - United for a Fair Economy 14th Annual Survey of CEO Income

Executive Excess 2007

The Staggering Social cost of U.S. Business Leadership

United for a Fair Economy

Key Findings

1. CEOs v. Workers
The Pay Gap
• CEOs of large U.S. companies last year made as much money from just one day on the job as average workers made over the entire year. These top executives averaged $10.8 million in total compensation, over 364 times the pay of the average American worker, a calculation based on data from an Associated Press survey of 386 Fortune 500 companies.
• The private equity boom has pushed the pay ceiling for American business leaders considerably further into the economic stratosphere. The top 20 private equity and hedge fund managers, Forbes magazine estimates, pocketed an average $657.5 million, or 22,255 times the pay of an average U.S. worker.
• Workers at the bottom rung of the U.S. economy have just received the first federal minimum wage increase in a decade. But the new minimum wage of $5.85 still stands 7 percent below where the minimum wage stood a decade ago in real terms. CEO pay, over that same decade, has increased by roughly 45 percent.

The Pension and Perks Gap
• CEOs at major American corporations enjoyed, on average, $1.3 million in pension gains last year. By contrast, only 58.5 percent of American households led by a 45-to-54-year old even had a retirement account in 2004, the most recent year with data. Between 2001 and 2004, the retirement accounts of these average households gained only $3,775 in value per year.
• CEOs of S&P 500 companies, according to Corporate Library data, retire with an average $10.1 million in their Supplemental Executive Retirement Plan, just one type of special account large American companies routinely set up for their top executives. But most Americans now move into their retirement years with no pension protection whatsoever. In 2004, only 36.3 percent of American households headed by an individual 65 or older held any type of retirement account. The accounts that did exist, on a per household basis, averaged only $173,552 in value, a miniscule 1.7 percent of the dollars in the supplemental accounts set aside for America’s top CEOs.
• The top 386 CEOs took in perks worth an average $438,342 in 2006. These perks ranged from using private company jets for personal travel to reimbursements for country club fees, commuter expenses, and even the extra taxes due on bonus income. A minimum wage worker would need to work for 36 years to earn the equivalent of what CEOs averaged just in perks last year.

2. U.S. Business Leaders v. Other U.S. Leaders
• Compensation for American business leaders now wildly dwarfs the pay that goes to leaders in other sectors of American society. The 20 highest-paid individuals at publicly traded corporations last year took home, on average, $36.4 million. That’s 38 times more than the 20 highest-paid leaders in the nonprofit sector and 204 times more than the 20 highest-paid generals in the U.S. military.
• The 20 highest-paid figures in the private equity and hedge fund industry collected 3,315 times more in average annual compensation in 2006 than the top 20 officials of the federal government’s executive branch, a group that includes the President of the United States.
3. U.S. Business Leaders v. European Business Leaders
• American business executives appreciably out-earn their European counterparts. In 2006, the 20 highest-paid European managers made an average of $12.5 million, only one third as much as the 20 highest-earning U.S. executives took home last year.

Read the full report

http://www.faireconomy.org/files/pdf/ExecutiveExcess2007.pdf

Pew Charitable Trust Releases Report on Economic Mobility in the US

Economic Mobility:
Is the American Dream Alive and Well

This report also discusses the implications of new analysis showing that the strength of America’s rising economic tide has not benefited significant segments of our citizenry. Gone are the days when a stable, single income was enough to launch the next generation toward growing prosperity. In modern America, upward mobility is increasingly a family enterprise. And during a time of rapidly shifting household structure, this has significant repercussions for the economic mobility prospects of millions of Americans.

http://www.pewtrusts.org/uploadedFiles/wwwpewtrustsorg/Reports/Economic_Mobility/EMP_American_Dream_Report.pdf

New Study by ACORN Exposes Impact of Predatory Lending

Foreclosure Exposure: a study of racial and income disparities in home mortgage lending in 172 American cities

Over the last two years, Americans have increasingly recognized the harm done to homeowners (both families who refinance their homes and new buyers) and neighborhoods by the sharp increase of the issuance of subprime loans. Perhaps most damaging among subprime loan products are Adjustable Rate Mortgages (ARMs), exploding ARMs, no-document loans and other products that do not require lenders to take into account the loan’s long-term affordability for the borrower. ACORN’s report on the 2005 Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) data, “The Impending Rate Shock,” demonstrated that unaffordable loans disproportionately impact minority and low- and moderate- income families and neighborhoods. Now these high-cost loans – many of which are exploding ARMs – have led to the foreclosure crisis that we hear about daily.

http://acorn.org/index.php?id=9412&tx_ttnews[tt_news]=21657&tx_ttnews[backPid]=8360&cHash=9894822285

Everything you ever wanted to know about the mortgage meltdown but were afraid to ask.

The Conservative Origins of the Sub-Prime Mortgage Crisis

John Atlas and Peter Dreier December 18, 2007

Read the American Prospect magazine's online article about the subprime mortgage crisis to gain an understanding of the real facts behind the headlines. This article lays out how the crisis was allowed, even encouraged, and demystifies the concepts. A must read for anyone interested in learning the facts behind the news.

http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_conservative_origins_of_the_subprime_mortgage_crisis

Living Wage Calculator

Pennsylvania State University has developed a web-based living wage calculator that estimates the cost of living in communities and regions throughout the US. You can check by state, county or locality, to find out what the true living wage, not the minimum wage, is in your area. This is based upon a calculation of a wage that is required to meet minimum standards of living based upon the local cost of living. http://www.livingwage.geog.psu.edu/index.php

Presidential Candidates Ignore Issues of Urban Areas

Followers of the current presidential campaign, and viewers of the more then twenty presidential debates to date might get the idea that all Americans live in suburbs or pristine rural areas. When all eyes are on two rural, primarily Caucasian, rural states - Iowa and New Hampshire - to influence the outcome of the primary season and to begin whittling the crowded field down, one gets the feeling that the needs of the vast majority of Americans who live in metropolitan areas are being all but ignored. And they are. Affordable housing, mass transit, education and other concerns of metropolitan areas do have not made their way into the sound bites of presidential politics.

In an attempt to remedy that, the Drum Major Institute, a progressive think tank, has interviewed Mayors of cities across the country to hear in their own words, what the needs of their cities are.

You can view videos of these interviews at http://www.mayortv.com/

Let's get a presidential campaign going that represents all Americans, what a refreshing turn of events that would be.