Bank Tellers Unionize & Demand Santander to Stop its Predatory Practices of Ripping Off Blacks & Latinos

From [HERE] and [HERE] For the first time ever, bank tellers in the U.S. are organizing a union.

What’s more, they’re demanding that their employer, Santander Holdings, USA, stop its predatory practices and start serving its customers ethically. Too often Santander forces its workers to choose between ripping off their customers and losing their jobs.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) in February downgraded Santander’ Bank’s Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) rating to “needs to improve.” The OCC decided to lower the CRA rating further based on several deceptive or unfair billing practices, non-compliance related to motor vehicle loans, and deceptive overdraft practices.

The bank serves a number of states in the Northeast region and is headquartered in Boston.

Eleven US senators from the impacted states, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Sen. Ed Markey, sent a letter on March 2 to Comptroller Thomas J. Curry concerning Santander’s CRA commitments.

They noted a report by the Committee for Better Banks (CBB), analyzing Santander’s 2014-2015 performance, which concluded: “Santander struggled to meet its lending requirements to low-income and communities of color in ten metropolitan areas.”

Its loan denial rates overall for communities of color in 2015 were 0.5 percent above the industry average, according to that report. Denial for low-income communities were 19.6 percent, compared with the industry average of 15.9 percent. [MORE]

Santander made $5 billion in profits last year from subprime auto and consumer loans and averages $555 million in profits each month from a growing number of banks in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Texas and New England. It’s a subsidiary of Spain’s Banco Santander, the Euro Zone’s second-largest bank, with some 150,000 employees and with branches throughout Europe and South America. There are approximately 15,000 Santander workers in the U.S.

Although Santander rakes in billions, the median annual wage for bank tellers in the U.S. is about $26,400. One-third qualify for some sort of public assistance, such as food stamps or Medicaid.

And the salaries of higher level employees are often determined by whether they meet unrealistically high sales quotas, putting pressure on them to sell unwanted and sometimes expensive services to their customers.

The unionizing campaign by Santander workers is being led by the Committee for Better Banks (CBB) a coalition of bank workers and community and consumer advocates formed by the Communications Workers of America (CWA).

Over the past two months, Santander employees have demonstrated and taken over bank lobbies demanding that management not interfere with their union organizing drive.

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Racist [an upholder of the white supremacy dynamic] FoxNews Rewards Bill O’Reilly with New Contract

From [HERE] Fox News Channel has set a new contract with Bill O’Reilly, its most popular primetime personality, despite the swirl of sexual harassment allegations leveled at the longtime host of “The O’Reilly Factor,” according to a published report.

Word of O’Reilly’s new contract was reported by the Wall Street Journal on Saturday, the same day the New York Times offered a detailed report of sexual harassment claims against O’Reilly and settlements reached with five women totaling $13 million.

According to the Journal, O’Reilly personally paid out $10 million to settle those claims. O’Reilly has denied wrongdoing and said his high-profile in TV makes him a “target for those who would harm me and my employer.”

Reps for Fox News and O’Reilly declined to comment on the report of his new contract. In response to the New York Times story, Fox News parent company 21st Century Fox acknowledged in a statement that the company has discussed the harassment allegations with its star host. [MORE]

In a System of Racism/White Supremacy What Would It Take for Bill O’Reilly to Get Fired?

What is racism/white supremacy? From [MediaMatters] Over the past two years, Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly has drawn attention to President Barack Obama's clothing at a Muslim wedding and claimed Rep. Maxine Waters’  (D-CA) was wearing a “James Brown wig,” called “many” African-Americans “ill-educated” with “tattoos on their foreheads,” and praised the workplace conditions of the slaves who built the White House. A co-worker accused him of reducing her on-air time on his show after she turned down his repeated sexual advances. His yarns about heroically covering conflicts in the Falkland Islands, El Salvador, and Northern Ireland were exposed as fiction. His latest biography was rejected as "a disservice to history” written by "an opportunistic interloper" who "debases the historian's craft." This fall marks the 10th anniversary of O’Reilly’s shocked declaration that African-American patrons at a famous Harlem restaurant weren’t screaming expletives at the waitstaff.

Given this track record, what would it take for Fox News to fire Bill?

The reason O’Reilly has been untouchable is simple: He makes Fox News a lot of money. His show anchors Fox’s prime-time programming, bringing in the most viewers in cable news for 17 years, according to the network.

There is no heir apparent. It’s difficult to imagine an Eric Bolling or Greg Gutfeld filling O’Reilly’s seat. If the network loses him, it’s screwed. And so Fox excuses offenses that would get talent at other networks -- or lesser lights at Fox -- kicked to the curb.

Fox Does Damage Control For Fox’s Bigoted Commentary

Don Imus, Juan Williams, Lou Dobbs, Rush Limbaugh, Curt Schilling, Pat Buchanan, and Laura Schlessinger were pushed out of CBS and MSNBC, NPR, CNN, ESPN, MSNBC, and her radio show, respectively, for making the sort of racially charged remarks that are a regular staple of O'Reilly's programming.

Fox executives have a much higher tolerance for on-air bigotry (they hired Dobbs, Imus, and Williams after their scandals on other networks) but even they dropped E.D. Hill and Emily Austen after they made racially charged remarks.

The latest controversy over O’Reilly’s casually racist attack on Waters is instructive. Seeking to stem the onslaught of criticism, a statement was released under O’Reilly’s name that minimized his comments but included the phrase “I apologize.” The statement circulated widely and was described by some journalists as O’Reilly “express[ing] regret.” Hours later, speaking to his own audience, the Fox host laughed his way through a similar statement before attacking Waters’ patriotism and dog-whistling some comments about her support for the “entitlement system.”

Fox doesn’t appear to care about what O’Reilly says. It just does damage control.

When O’Reilly’s Fabrications Were Exposed, Fox Attacked His Critics

Journalists depend on the willingness of their audiences to believe them. That makes fabricating a story the profession’s greatest sin.

When questions were raised about tales Brian Williams had told about his reporting exploits, NBC News convened an internal investigation of Williams’ claims that eventually led to his removal as anchor of Nightly News. Over the years, The New York Times’ Jayson Blair, The Washington Post’s Janet Cooke, and The New Republic’s Stephen Glass have all lost their jobs when stories they reported were exposed as inventions.

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Bamma SNiggers Charles Barkley, Spike Lee, Ruin NCAA Tournament Cooning in Capitol One Commercials

SNigger ---a sold-out snitching-smiling Sambo-Negro. 2) a South-Bender offender. SNiggers smile for nothing except an empty mind while selling-out their own kind. They typically have an intellectual base yet are devoid of intelligence, thus promoting the on-going smiling face. They also often giggle and have a frivolous conception of society and scant knowledge of the vestiges of the trans-Atlantic slave trade that even brought their sorry-ass selves to shore. SNiggers are traitors and pawns of the downpressors. Watch the company you keep! [FUNKTIONARY]

Bambazooled Spike Posing With Fried Chicken. This disappointing MF has become a mf clown. Stop playing yourself sambo mf. With that chicken in his hand is he selling a credit card or white supremacy? Fuck Capitol One.

Black characters are rarely serious or TV appropriate, normal or acting as reasonable, rational adults on television. Constantly grinning, jumping up & down or acting like moronic teenagers non-stop.  Anon explains buffoonery is the bambazooled black masses rewarding black entertainers who degrade black people, only to wonder after the laughter is over, why so many non-blacks think black people deserve no respect. Stop supporting White Supremacy/racism. 

Host of NCAA Tournament University of Phoenix is best known for predatory enrollment practices & abysmal graduation & job placement rates

From [HERE] The NCAA is an organization full of hypocrisies. It rakes in billions of dollars, but says there’s no money to pay the student-athletes. It works overtime to appease high-dollar corporate sponsors, but won’t let a star basketball player accept any perks. It routinely looks the other way when it comes to abuse scandals, and marginalizes its female athletes, all while running commercials focused on safety and equality.

But this year at the men’s Final Four, the NCAA’s brazen disregard for its purported values will be even harder than normal to ignore — it will literally be all around them. The men’s 2017 semifinals and championship game are being held at the University of Phoenix Stadium.

Most of the time, when a stadium is named after a university, it’s because the stadium is located at that school. But that isn’t the case here. University of Phoenix is a for-profit college. It doesn’t have a traditional campus. It’s not an Arizona public school. It doesn’t have a football team or a basketball team or any team at all.

The University of Phoenix is the largest for-profit college in the country best known for predatory enrollment practices and abysmal graduation and job placement rates. It’s a school that’s shown time and time again that it cares more about the bottom line than the education of its students, as illustrated by the fact that the school paid $155 million for naming rights to the Arizona stadium back in 2006.

“We view the University of Phoenix as a company, not a college,” Maggie Thompson, the executive director of Generation Progress, a national organization that advocates for progressive policies that affect young people, told ThinkProgress.

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Loyal to Master Trump, shenanigger Omarosa Takes on Role as Official Step & Fetchit Activity Organizer for White House

shenanigger - a Negro (neo-lawn-jockey) who carries out Step-n-Fetchit type activites/actions (shenanigans) for the dominant immoral majority (the psychopathic white power semi-organism), i.e., the Rhodes, Rothschild, Anglo Saxon Zionist power clique, unknowlingly at the expense of him/herself and knowlingly at the expense (sell-out/buy-out) of his people and culture. (See: McNegro, Coin-Operated, The Moteasuh Tribe, Sambo & SNigger).  [FUNKTIONARY] 

From [HERE] Omarosa Manigault was incredulous.

As she was leaving a gathering of African American members of Congress in the Oval Office, a group of reporters cornered her. For months, the Trump administration had sent strong signals that it would increase support to historically black colleges and universities. But President Trump’s recent budget request contained no new cash for the schools. Also his executive order that moved a task force on HBCUs from the Education Department to the White House did not include any increase in funding. It was just a photo op. 

Michael Lomax, president of the United Negro College Fund (UNCF) said that that 55,000 HBCU students would be affected by the removal of the Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grants. Reductions to work-study programs and other federal spending could also affect an additional 26,000 students. [MORE]

The reporters wanted Manigault — a top White House aide and one of Trump’s most high-profile African American supporters — to explain what happened.

“Everything got cut, but did HBCUs get cut? No! . . . And I think that we should be applauded for that,” Manigault said last week in a video posted on Politic365.com. “Seriously. This is a lean budget. This is a very aggressive and lean budget, and yet, HBCUs were protected.

“Can a sister get props?”

That is the central question of Manigault’s brief tenure as assistant to the president, as she has worked to bridge a divide between black America and the man she has long supported.

Manigault, 43, is fiercely loyal to Donald Trump, whose decision to cast her as an alpha-female villain in the first season of “The Apprentice” more than a decade ago made her a reality television celebrity. Manigault also appears to have Trump’s ear, and some black political observers see her as an important ally in a White House that is overwhelmingly white and male.

But if her devotion explains how Manigault wound up in Trump’s White House as the highest-ranking African American in the West Wing, it is far less easy to explain exactly what she’s doing there. Some African American political insiders already have concluded that she is ineffective, and she is routinely derided on social media as simply providing cover for a president deeply unpopular with African Americans. Some black Republicans were particularly critical of the Trump administration’s handling of the HBCU initiative, which included a White House meeting with the school officials that some viewed as little more than a photo op for the president.

“She raised expectations too high, and now it’s turned into a negative,” said Raynard Jackson, a longtime Republican strategist. “This shows a lack of political understanding. This is Politics 101.”

Public support for Trump

Manigault was among the first black people with any name recognition to publicly support Trump’s presidential bid. She forcefully defended the New York businessman against criticism that he is racist and sexist. Manigault has granted some media interviews since arriving in Washington, but she canceled a meeting with The Washington Post and did not respond to requests for comment.

The White House also did not respond to questions about Manigault’s official responsibilities, which so far have publicly been centered on issues relating to black America. None of those events has gone especially well.

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Master Struck & Sleepy, Rep. Cedric Richmond told Racist Trump, the Black Caucus "Fights for Everybody"

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From [HERE] On March 22, 2017 the Black Caucus met with Trump. The system of White supremacy/racism and Trump's participation in it was not addressed.  Nor were any of its symptomatic problems such as police brutality or the theft of over one million Black & Latino votes that enabled criminal Trump to be elected in the first place. [MORE]

Among other things, Black Caucus Chairman Cedric Richmond told the racist president that the Black Caucus represents 78 million constituents and only 17 million people in their districts are Black.

“The majority of the people that we represent are not African Americans although we represent 41 percent of all African Americans in this country. We fight for everybody,” he said. “We fight for poor rural people, we fight for poor White people; we fight for everybody who needs to get to a better station in life or who gets a raw deal from government. And to that extent I think that he heard things that he had not heard before and it was very important for us to have that meeting. We’ll see what happens from there.” [MORE]

In a system of collective white power, a system of vast unequal power wherein whites use their power to dominate & control non-whites, the leader of a Black legislative body says he wants to help everybody? Even within his own game of politics he misses! The GOP is a racial identity party for whites; it is entirely a white party. It is designed to appeal to white people as white people... not as union-members or as unemployed people or as home-owners... as white people. It is a crude racial-identity party and the numbers bear that out. [MORE] Richmond's thinking is an example of mentacide or what Dr. Blynd calls "niggatvity" resulting from relentless programming or brainwashing by racists. Having the lowest form of consciousness, Black people are the only people who think this way [lets help everybody] - in a system created by racists for their survival. This is also the fear of confronting white supremacy and lacking the courage to leave the dream to recognize what is right in front of you. 

The point here is not just to diss the CBC but to challenge the obtuse logic that the pursuit of political office & the ballot box without any ownership or control over any important resources or property will reverse Black people's powerless class status. Such thinking is programming psy-ops placed in the heads of Black poeple by racists. Black people have been told so many lies.

As explained by Amos Wilson, "the activities of Black politicians, given the current inadequacy of social organization and economic resources, harmfully distract the Black community's attention from recognizing and eradicating the true causes of its problems and the remediation of its powerlessness" - white supremacy/racism. Wilson, states;

"The American economic system, as is its system of government, its military and para-military system, as well as its religious and media systems - the key power systems of any modern society - are systems organized by, of and for white men vs. Black men. White people vs. Black people. And these systems are not the creation of Adam Smith's mythical "invisible hands" guiding self-interested, self-serving individuals into the coincidental building of an equilibrated market economy, free market and democratic government. These systems were and are constructed and operated by highly conscious and deliberate men, men well aware of what they are about and what it is they want to achieve - the Holy Grail or power and the perks of power. These organizations and systems can only be neutralized or defeated by counterpoised organizations and systems and the oppositional consciousness which informs them" [MORE].

People Living as Guinea Pigs @ St. Clair Correctional Facility: An Alabama Prison’s Unrelenting Descent Into Violence

Alabama's Foulest Family Destruction & Gender Annihilation Center. From [NyTimes] The door opened and there stood a man with knives in both hands. Michael McGregor recognized him immediately. Since Mr. McGregor had arrived at the prison the day before, the man had twice propositioned him for sex and asked if he wanted to buy a knife.

Mr. McGregor, 52, with a long but mostly nonviolent record — some bad checks, a stolen car, a couple of two-decade-old minor robberies — had been unnerved enough to request a move to a different part of the prison. No, he was told. Not right now.

He returned to his cell, shut the door behind him and tried to sleep.

Now here was the man beside him. The door locks at this prison, he later learned, were all but useless. The man, he would also learn, had been convicted of jail rape before.

“You know what time it is,” the man said.

Attacks, like the one on Mr. McGregor, which left him “pouring blood like a water hose,” have happened with grim regularity at St. Clair Correctional Facility, one of six maximum-security prisons in Alabama. In recent years, even by the standards of one of the nation’s most dysfunctional prison systems, St. Clair stood out for its violence.

“The frequency of assaults resulting in life-threatening injuries is quite simply among the highest I have observed in my 43-year career in corrections,” Steve J. Martin, who has examined hundreds of prisons nationwide as a corrections expert, wrote in a 2016 report prepared for a lawsuit over conditions at St. Clair. The prison reflected “a total breakdown of the necessary basic structures that are required to operate a prison safely,” he added in an interview.

In October, the Justice Department announced an investigation into all of the male prisons in Alabama, an extraordinarily broad inquiry, focusing on reports of rampant violence and sexual abuse at the hands of both inmates and staff members. The prisons here are operating at around 172 percent of capacity. This is actually a significant improvement after sentencing reforms, but it has been offset by a sharp plunge in the number of corrections officers.

“We’re already the most overcrowded,” Jeff Dunn, the Alabama corrections commissioner, said at a recent legislative committee hearing. “It won’t be long until we’re the most understaffed and most violent.”

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Arkansas Death Row Inmates (55% Black) Sue Governor (white) to Halt Executions [State Approved Murder for Revenge]

From [HERE] Nine Arkansas death row inmates, including eight scheduled for lethal injections next month, jointly filed suit [complaint, PDF] against Governor Asa Hutchinson [official website] [in photo above] and Department of Correction Director Wendy Kelly [official website] [also white] on Monday to stop the executions. The suit is in response to an Arkansas Supreme Court [official website] decision earlier this month that stated there was no stay in place [JURIST report] preventing the eight executions ordered by Hutchinson to be carried out in April over a period of 10 days [AP report]. The attorneys for the inmates stated that the compressed schedule [ArkansasOnline report] is in violation of the inmates' Eighth Amendment [text] rights and that the state prison policies denied effective representation of counsel.

The Arkansas death row population is 55% African American. [MORE] Blacks make up 15% of the state's population. 

Arkansas judge rules executions can proceed. Also Pulaski County Circuit Judge Wendell Griffen on Tuesday dismissed [opinion] a complaint from eight individuals scheduled for executions in Arkansas next month. Griffen granted the state's motion to dismiss the amended complaint, finding that he had no jurisdiction over the matter after the state's Supreme Court reversed his previous ruling [JURIST report]. Griffen wrote:

As such, it is more than troubling, and more than shameful. It amounts to theft of the rights guaranteed by the Constitution of this state and the Constitution of the United States to a trial. To think that the highest court in Arkansas would compel every other court in Arkansas to steal the last right condemned persons have to challenge the constitutionality of their execution illustrates the travesty of justice, and the damnable unfairness, this Court is powerless to prevent. [MORE]

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Supreme Court blocks Texas' Scheduled Murder [death penalty] of Mentally Disabled Black Man

From [HERE] The US Supreme Court [official website] ruled [opinion, PDF] Tuesday in Moore v. Texas that the factors considered by Texas in determining a Black defendant was not intellectually disabled do not comport with the Eighth Amendment [text] or court precedent. The case arose when Petitioner Bobby James Moore fatally shot a store clerk during a botched robbery when he was 20 years old, and was subsequently convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death. On a habeas challenge, a state court determined that Moore was intellectually challenged, and the death penalty would be cruel and unusual punishment. In making this determination, the court consulted current medical diagnostic standards published by the American Psychiatric Association [official website]. However, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals [official website] declined to adopt [opinion, PDF] the habeas court's determination. That court used different standards to find that Moore did not have intellectual deficits, and even if he did, there were alternate causes for such deficits such as drug use and academic failure. The Supreme Court noted that it was wrong for the lower court to disregard current medical diagnostic standards and deviate from clinical standards. Additionally, because mental health professionals recognize that traumatic experiences are risk factors for intellectual disability, the lower court should not have required Moore to show that his intellectual and adaptive deficits were related. In 2014, the court ruled in Hall v. Florida [Oyez backgrounders] that intellectual disability should be "informed by the medical community's diagnostic framework," and the Texas court's decision was in conflict with Hall.

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Court Approves $97 Million Settlement To Replace Flint's Water Lines

From [HERE] and [HERE]  In a victory for Flint residents, the state of Michigan has agreed to spend up to $97 million for new water lines in the city of Flint, which has been struggling with a crisis over lead in its water for the past three years.

A federal judge at the U.S. District Court for Michigan's eastern district approved the agreement Tuesday. Within three years, authorities must examine water service lines for at least 18,000 households and replace those made of lead and galvanized steel.

The state is required to allocate $87 million for the pipe replacement, according to the terms of the deal. The money will come from both state and federal funds. The state will also reserve an additional $10 million in case the job requires it.

"This is the first little battle won in this huge overall war," plaintiff and Flint resident Melissa Mays told All Things Considered. "For the first time, we've been able to have a federal court enforce the state to do the right thing, which is to replace the pipes that their agencies and their administration broke. And now people can start to see progress."

The water problem began when Flint switched to a new water source in 2014 in order to save money, but failed to implement corrosion controls. This damaged the pipes and caused lead to leach into the city's water system.

"More than 700 water lines already have been replaced and work is ongoing, but the agreement would rid Flint's roughly 100,000 residents of uncertainty over how to pay for the enormous task," The Associated Press reported.

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Feds Downgrade Wells Fargo Due to Lending Discrimination Against Blacks & Latinos - Charged Higher Fees Than Whites

From [HERE] and [HERE] Evidence of racially discriminatory lending practices, a scandal involving millions of accounts unauthorized by customers and other improper procedures have hit Wells Fargo (WFC) bank with a lower regulatory rating.

In the latest blow to Wells Fargo’s efforts to rebuild its reputation after months of turmoil, the bank on Tuesday received a failing score on community lending from its federal regulator. The report is [HERE] 

Wells Fargo was given a “needs to improve” rating on its latest evaluation under the Community Reinvestment Act, a 1977 law intended to promote lending in low-income neighborhoods.

Drawing on both public material and confidential information obtained during its review, the bank’s regulator, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, said it had uncovered “an extensive and pervasive pattern and practice of discriminatory and illegal credit practices across multiple lines of business within the bank, resulting in significant harm to large numbers of consumers.”

The regulatory action came on the same day that the bank agreed to pay $110 million to settle a class-action lawsuit over its creation of unauthorized customer accounts. The bank has been under fire since its admission in September that over the course of several years, employees trying to meet aggressive sales quotas opened as many two million fraudulent accounts.

The proposed settlement will cover all those who claim that Wells Fargo opened or applied for an account in their name without their consent, from 2009 to the present.

Under its agreements with regulators, the bank has already refunded $3.2 million to customers who were charged fees on unauthorized accounts. The $110 million will be used for additional remediation measures, Wells Fargo said.

Wells Fargo has pushed many customers seeking redress for sham accounts out of the court system and into arbitration. Wells Fargo said it had agreed to resolve those cases outside arbitration, as part of this proposed settlement, “in order to move forward and avoid continuing litigation.”

The comptroller’s office criticized Wells Fargo’s creation of unauthorized accounts in its report, but it also pointed to at least nine other examples of what it called “egregious” violations by Wells Fargo that harmed borrowers.

In particular, the agency said it had reason to believe that from 2004 to 2008, independent mortgage brokers working with Wells Fargo discriminated against black and Hispanic borrowers, charging them higher fees than white customers paid. In 2012, the bank agreed to pay $175 million to settle the accusations without admitting any wrongdoing. The agency also cited multiple settlements Wells Fargo had paid for violating rules on lending to members of the military.

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Uber Just Wants the Best White Minds in its Workplace - Workforce Only 8% Black and 5% Latino

From [Bloomberg] and [MORE] After weeks of scandal, Uber released its first report Tuesday detailing the gender breakdown and racial makeup of its employees. Though welcomed by diversity advocates, the revelations weren’t that surprising: Within engineering, only 15 percent are women and 6 percent are black, Latino or multiracial, which makes Uber not that different from other tech companies, where those groups make up a tiny fraction of the technical workforce.

Uber’s racial makeup is similar to the rest of the Valley. People of white or Asian descent make up 94 percent of Uber’s technical staff in the U.S. Among all of its American workers, 8.8 percent are black and 5.6 percent are Hispanic. Slightly more than half of Uber’s employees are outside the U.S.[MORE]

[which is fascinating because 90% of the world is non-white! As Dr. Bobby Wright observed, 'everywhere one finds Whites and Blacks in close proximity to each other, whether it is Ferguson, Mo. or Zimbabwe, the whites are in control. Yet Blacks rarely question this extraordinary universal phenomenon which defies every known statistical law of probability.' [MORE] The white "race" has structured and manipulated their own thought processes and conceptual patterns, as well as those of the entire non-white world majority, so that the real numerical minority (whites) illusionally feels and represents itself as the world's majority, while the true numerical majority (non-whites) illusionally feels and views itself as the minority.[MORE] Don't see that? Just cut on the TV and watch for an hour; white folks everywhere, non-stop. As Dr. Wilson observed, a goal of the media is to make white dominance and control over everything seem natural. [MORE]

Travis Kalanick, Uber’s co-founder and chief executive officer, 40, has said he wants to find the “best minds” and resisted the idea of prioritizing based on race or gender. Kalanick is white - in video above he argues with his non-white driver, who is not considered an employee but an "independent contractor." 

Uber also released retention data-- the percentage of each demographic group that stays at the company each year -- reveals more about the hospitality of the workplace culture than the percentage of white and Asian men there overall. Most companies, including Uber and its peers in Silicon Valley, track it. They just don’t make it public.

Retention data is a proxy for job satisfaction, and tech companies won’t be able to build the diverse workforces they claim to be working toward unless they can hold onto the small fraction of female and minority employees they successfully recruit. Since 2014, demographics at Apple Inc., Facebook Inc., Google, Twitter Inc. and others have stayed roughly the same: Women make up about 17 percent of technical workers; only about 6 percent are black or Latino.

eBay Wants Your Money But Won't Hire You: Report Shows Workforce is 2% Black, 4% Latino

From [HERE] eBay issued its 2016 Diversity and Inclusion Report yesterday, their first since the company spun off Paypal in 2015. 

The numbers are consistent with what we've seen from other large, global tech companies. No Blacks or Latinos allowed - but their money is good. Their total workforce is 52% white, 40% Asian, 4% Hispanic/Latinx, 2% black and 1% other or mixed race respectively. /react-text

And they’ve clearly got work to do.

Fortune recently obtained eBay's 2004, 2009, 2012 and 2013 diversity stats through a Freedom of Information Act request. And two more recent diversity reports, 2014 and 2015, were available online. 

They show that the company used to be more racially diverse, with black, Hispanic/Latinx, mixed race and other categories accounting for 15% of the workforce as recently as 2015.

The change happened fast. The report released yesterday shows those groups now account for 7% of the workforce.

The overall workforce stats in 2015 were as follows: 61% white, 24% Asian, 8% black, 5% Hispanic/Latinx, and 2% other and mixed race. [MORE]

Media Must Choose: If Trump's Not A Liar, He's Delusional or both

Media Matters

While President Donald Trump continues to rip apart the seams of honest discourse with his ceaseless collection of lies and falsehoods, some journalists remain reluctant to call him a liar. By resisting, the Beltway press continues to shy away from its primary task: truth telling.

Additionally, by avoiding the “liar” label, journalists really leave themselves with only one other option in terms of describing Trump’s erratic behavior: “delusional.”

The latest attempt to provide this odd cover for Trump came from Time Managing Editor Nancy Gibbs. Writing a preface to the magazine’s recent Trump-inspired cover story -- “Is Truth Dead?” -- Gibbs addressed the looming crisis in confidence by noting, “Like many newsrooms, we at TIME have wrestled with when to say someone is lying.”

Gibbs stressed that the magazine is hesitant to use the term in conjunction with Trump because it’s hard to deduce the president’s motivations when he spreads falsehoods. Meaning, journalists need evidence that Trump purposefully misleads people with his comments and allegations.

This continues the media’s unnecessary debate over whether it’s OK to call Trump a liar. “I’d be careful about using the word ‘lie,’” Wall Street Journal Editor-in-Chief Gerard Baker cautioned in January. “‘Lie’ implies much more than just saying something that’s false. It implies a deliberate intent to mislead.”

But then Gibbs added an additional layer to the argument when she wrote of Trump’s lies, “What does he actually believe? Does it count as lying if he believes what he says?”

Appearing on CNN’s Reliable Sources, Gibbs expounded (emphasis added):

But to say that they are lying requires an additional level of knowledge that's very difficult to have of what their intention was. And the reason I think it's important is because in the case of President Trump -- and this came through with our interview with him over and over again -- some of the things that he says that have been disputed and completely disproven, it seems very clear he continues to believe.

And so there's these sort of -- there's almost the philosophical, theological question of, if you believe what you're saying, even if it's not true, is that still a lie? I will leave that to the academics.

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