EthnicMajority

(Washington Post) The Washington-based National Association of Public Hospitals plans to announce Monday (July 19) the appointment of a George Washington University health policy professor as its chief executive. The association said it will name Bruce Siegel to the position, making him the first African American to head a hospital group. Siegel, who starts in October, is expected to deal extensively with the health-care overhaul law. He will replace Christine Capito Burch, who held the executive director position and is retiring.

(George Will, Washington Post) A Republican governor — a very Republican governor — has an idea for solving one of his party’s conundrums. The party should listen to Luis Fortuno, the Reaganite who resides in Puerto Rico’s executive mansion.

Conservatives need a strategy for addressing the immigration issue without alienating America’s largest and most rapidly growing minority. Conservatives believe the southern border must be secured before there can be “comprehensive” immigration reform that resolves the status of the 11 million illegal immigrants. But this policy risks making Republicans seem hostile to Hispanics.

Fortuno wants Republicans to couple insistence on border enforcement with support for Puerto Rican statehood. This, he says, would resonate deeply among Hispanics nationwide. His premise is that many factors — particularly, the Telemundo and Univision television channels — have created a common consciousness among Hispanics in America.

Full story…

(OpEd News) On July 13th, citizens from Chicago piled into a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) public hearing on the Comcast-NBC Universal merger to weigh in on the merger and give public comments that would become part of the FCC’s legal record for and against the merger. The legal record would be referred to when making a decision on whether to allow Comcast to merge with NBC or not.

The hearing was held at Thorne Auditorium on Northwestern University’s campus in Chicago. It was possibly the only public hearing the FCC will be holding on this merger in the country.

Each person in attendance had an opportunity to sign up and give two minutes of public testimony. About ninety people signed up. Most were from Chicago but some were from California and other parts of the country.

Those giving public testimony voiced their opinion on a media consolidation move that would put production and distribution into the hands of one company. This would make it a vertical merger. The merger would also mean that Comcast would control one in every five television viewing hours and could potentially push its competitors in the industry to raise prices on cable subscribers by charging them more for NBC content.

Full story…

(Kansas City Star) Calling education “the civil rights issue of our generation,” U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan on Wednesday issued a national challenge for whole communities to get involved in improving public education.

“The only way to achieve equality in society is to achieve it in the classroom,” Duncan told NAACP delegates meeting in Kansas City for the group’s annual convention.

“This is not just a moral obligation; it is our economic imperative,” he said. “Everyone has a responsibility. Everyone can step up. Education is our national mission. Education is our best hope.”

Full story…

(Los Angeles Times) The number of minority-owned businesses in the U.S. increased nearly 46% to 5.8 million from 2002 to 2007, according to data released Tuesday by the Census Bureau.

In the same time period, the total number of businesses increased 18% to 27.1 million.

The new data come from the Preliminary Estimates of Business Ownership by Gender, Ethnicity, Race and Veteran Status, culled from the census bureau’s 2007 survey of business owners.

The same report found that black-owned businesses rose 60.5%, Native American and Alaska Native-owned businesses climbed a combined 17.9% and the number of Hispanic businesses gained 43.6%.

Other highlights of the report:

• Of the nation’s 27.1 million businesses, roughly 5.8 million had paid employees. These businesses employed 118.7 million people, a 7.1% increase from 2002.

• Of the 5.8 million minority-owned businesses in 2007, an estimated 5 million had no paid employees.

• The number of women-owned businesses totaled 7.8 million in 2007, up 20.1% from 2002. Men-owned businesses totaled 13.9 million, up 5.5% from 2002.

• There were 1.9 million black-owned businesses in 2007, up 60.5%, with 37.6% of them in healthcare and social assistance, repair and maintenance, and personal and laundry services.

(CNN) The NAACP has passed a resolution that condemns what it feels is rampant racism in the Tea Party movement. Members passed the measure on Tuesday at the organization’s 101st annual convention in Kansas City, Missouri.

Tea Party activists have swiftly denounced the action as unfounded and unfair.

The resolution pits the nation’s oldest civil rights organization, with its storied history of wins on behalf of racial justice, against a grassroots conservative movement that has won some recent political races and is flexing its muscle in Republican circles.

“We take no issue with the Tea Party. We believe in freedom of assembly and people raising their voices in a democracy,” Ben Jealous, president and CEO of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said in a statement.

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(Fox News) Attorney General Eric Holder, just days after filing a federal lawsuit against Arizona’s immigration law, on Sunday floated the possibility of filing another court challenge on racial profiling grounds.

The lawsuit filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Arizona claimed the state was infringing on federal immigration responsibilities and urged the judge to prevent the law from going into effect at the end of July. Despite some officials’ claims that the law could lead to racial profiling, that concern was not cited as grounds for the suit.

However, Holder said on CBS’ “Face the Nation” that the federal government was leading with its “strongest” argument in the suit filed Tuesday and would not rule out a second suit months down the road — if the law ends up going into effect.

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(Voice of America) In an address to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), First Lady Michelle Obama has spoken about the campaign she launched earlier this year against childhood obesity.

Mrs. Obama’s “Let’s Move” campaign, which she launched this past February, aims to shine a constant spotlight on childhood obesity in the United States, and the millions of young people at risk of developing related serious health conditions.

According to government statistics, one in three children in the United States is overweight or obese, with black and Hispanic children facing the greatest risk of developing heart disease, diabetes and other illnesses related to obesity.

Addressing the nation’s largest and oldest civil rights organization at its 101st annual convention in Kansas City, in the central U.S. state of Missouri, Mrs. Obama said the African-American community in particular is suffering negative effects.

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(NY Daily News) “Discrimination is alive and well in America today,” Cuomo (above) said at a press conference Tuesday announcing lawsuits against landlords in Brooklyn and upstate Schenectady County.

(Full disclosure: My wife, Juanita Scarlett, works for the attorney general.)

“In life and society, you will never solve a problem you’re unwilling to admit,” Cuomo said. “We don’t want to admit that we discriminate.”

That’s putting it mildly. Few areas of city life are as shrouded in denial and hypocrisy as the welter of public and private mechanisms that keep New York divided.

Landlords, real estate agents and management companies still steer applicants into white, black or Latino enclaves – all in violation of the law.

Single women and young parents are often told that a building doesn’t want to rent to families with children. That’s illegal, too, under federal, state and local housing laws.

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(OpEd News) Congressman Bobby Rush (D-IL) put together a hearing on the possible merger of Comcast and NBC Universal on July 8th, which was held in Chicago at the Everett Dirksen Federal Building (the same building holding the US v. Blagojevich proceedings). The hearing, held by the Subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet (a subcommittee of the Committee on Energy & Commerce in the House of Representatives), invited “witnesses” to testify and provide insight into who might benefit from the merge if it went through.

The hearing held was not open to public comments. However, Rep. Rush, Rep. Rick Boucher (D-VA), Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) and Rep. Steve Buyer (R-IN) asked questions of all the invited witnesses after an hour of opening statements.

The witnesses present included: Samuel R. DeSimone, Jr., General Counsel, Earthlink, Inc; Will Griffin, President and Chief Executive Officer, Hip Hop on Demand, Jonathan Jackson, National Spokesman, Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, Inc.; Paula Madison, Executive Vice President, Chief Diversity Officer, NBC Universal; Joseph W. Waz, Jr., Senior Vice President, External Affairs and Public Policy Counsel, Comcast Corporation. (Ms. Shirley Franklin, Senior Adviser for the Alliance for Digital Equality was invited but did not attend the hearing).

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