The Sun of Inland Empire and San Bernadino
by Blanca Hernandez and Michelle Romero

Just days after Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law Assembly Bill 131, known as the California Dream Act, Assemblyman Tim Donnelly, R-Hesperia, filed a referendum to overturn the law. If you’re asked to sign a petition to place this measure on the ballot, you might want to think carefully about its implications before you do.

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San Francisco Chronicle
by: Bruce Mirken

CEOs of wealthy Silicon Valley companies and other hugely profitable businesses that have avoided billions in federal taxes by hiding profits in offshore tax havens now want us to reward this tax evasion by cutting their tax rate by more than 85 percent (“Lower the tax on foreign earnings,” Open Forum, Dec. 22).

Really? Is this some sort of sick joke?

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Huffington Post
by: Preeti Vissa

I’m about to become a mom. If all goes as expected, I’ll be bringing a baby boy into the world sometime in the first week of January. To say it’s an overwhelming experience is both completely obvious and a pretty severe understatement.

In practical terms, it probably means I’ll be posting here a bit less often, as I’ll be taking some time off from my work at The Greenlining Institute. But I’ll still be sounding off from time to time — albeit on a schedule dictated by the newest and undoubtedly most vocal member of my family.

And there’s nothing like impending motherhood to get you thinking about what kind of world your child is coming into — and what sort of world you wish for. I don’t think I’m being naïve to hope for a world in which he can pursue his dreams and has a fair shot at going wherever his imagination, talents and dedication can take him.

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Salon.com
By David Sirota

Black Americans have worse health and lower incomes. Why do so many white people refuse to believe it?

In the annals of contemporary American history, the power of white denialism and the “post-racial” fallacy is not to be underestimated. As race scholar Tim Wise has recounted, in the early 1960s, most white Americans told Gallup pollsters that African-Americans had equal economic and educational opportunities to get ahead.

Those were the results, mind you, at the height of the Jim Crow era, when discrimination and white-on-black racial violence were out in the open and, in many cases, celebrated. So it’s no surprise that with that kind of overt bigotry now underground, white denialism of persistent institutional racism is alive and well, according to new national survey data analyzed by the Greenlining Institute.
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Contact: Bruce Mirken, Greenlining Institute Media Relations Coordinator, 510-926-4022; 415-846-7758 (cell)

Greenlining Institute Asks: Will the Zynga “Grinch” Steal San Francisco’s Christmas After Whopping Tax Breaks?

SAN FRANCISCO – After receiving millions in tax breaks from the city of San Francisco and on the eve of the largest Internet company stock offering since Google, Zynga hasn’t followed through on its promise to invest its wealth back into San Francisco’s communities, The Greenlining Institute said today.  Over the summer Greenlining shined a light on high-tech tax avoidance in its report, Corporate America Untaxed: Tax Avoidance on the Rise.
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CNN
By Stephanie Siek

A study that examines three years of opinion survey data says that black and white Americans are still miles apart regarding their perceptions of equality or inequality among blacks and whites. It identifies racial bias among whites as a potential reason for that difference in perception.

“Post-Racial? Americans and Race in the Age of Obama,” released Monday by the nonprofit Greenlining Institute, found a link between white survey respondents’ perception of blacks and whether they believed discriminition to be a major problem in today’s society.
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California Progress Report
By: Daniel Byrd, Ph.D. and Bruce Mirken

After Barack Obama’s election as president, a number of pundits rushed to declare that America had entered a “post-racial” era, and issues of race could go on the historical scrap heap next to the Cold War and typewriters. They were, it turns out, spectacularly wrong.
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S.F. Chronicle
by: Joe Garofoli

Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School is just a few blocks from the former Occupy Oakland encampment in Frank Ogawa Plaza and not far from the starting point for Monday’s Occupy demonstration at the Port of Oakland.

But to King parents like Charlene Adams, the Occupy movement couldn’t be farther away from her West Oakland neighborhood. And the reasons behind that distance help explain a disconnect between the larger Occupy Wall Street movement and the African American community.
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Contact: Bruce Mirken, Greenlining Institute Media Relations Coordinator, 510-926-4022; 415-846-7758 (cell);

Misperceptions About Economics, Health, Discrimination May Skew Politics, Fuel Conflicts

BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA – A new analysis of some of the most definitive survey data available, to be released Dec. 12, finds a huge gulf in perceptions between black and white Americans on a wide range of issues, a gulf that may be contributing to America’s increasingly divisive politics.

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Contact: Bruce Mirken, Greenlining Institute Media Relations Coordinator, 510-926-4022; 415-846-7758 (cell)

Advocates Call Filibuster Unjustified, Bad For Consumers

WASHINGTON – The Greenlining Institute, the group that sounded the alarm about the subprime meltdown years before it became a crisis, today renewed its call for the Senate to approve Richard Cordray as head of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. An attempt to bring the nomination to a vote could happen as soon as Thursday.
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